Bathsheba

Good Times with Great Men leads to Kitty Liver Quiver.

Readership: All
Theme: Validation
Length: 1,500 words
Reading Time: 8 minutes

Intro

studentray57 wrote,

Hey Jack!

The pastor of the church I attend preached on 2 Samuel 11, David and Bathsheba. He placed all of the blame on King David based on God’s rebuke through Nathan. He made “mention” of “other opinions” regarding Bathsheba, but dispelled them. I would really like to read your take on 2 Samuel 11!

Most sermons get the part about David’s sin and Nathan’s rebuke correct.  What they’re deafly afraid to address is whether or not Bathsheba had any moral agency in the matter.

So in this analysis, I’ll focus on Bathsheba from a Red Pill perspective.

The Scripture Passage

Here’s the passage from 2 Samuel 11.

² Now at evening time David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the king’s house, and from the roof he saw a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful in appearance.  ³ So David sent servants and inquired about the woman.  And someone said, “Is this not Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?”  ⁴ Then David sent messengers and had her brought, and when she came to him, he slept with her; and when she had purified herself from her uncleanness, she returned to her house.  ⁵ But the woman conceived; so she sent word and informed David, and said, “I am pregnant.”

2 Samuel 11:2-5 (NASB)

The word for woman used here is ’iš·šāh, the meaning of which we discussed recently.  It means a sexually activated woman, i.e. a wife or married woman, or else an adulteress if not.

In verse 4, the ritual purification after sexual intercourse is to bathe in water and then “remain unclean until evening” (Leviticus 15:18), ‘evening’ taken to mean 6:00 p.m. or sunset.

Jack’s Take on Bathsheba

First of all, at the beginning of the story, Bathsheba was married to a soldier (Uriah) who was away fighting in a war.  Women married to soldiers have a very high frequency of infidelity, especially if she’s young, and/or he’s gone for months or years at a time.  Women married to military men back in Biblical times were probably not much different from those living today.  Even if Bathsheba wasn’t already given over to this temptation, she definitely succumbed to it with King David.

Secondly, a woman bathing on the rooftop may or may not have been out of the ordinary, but it is telling that when people were asked, they knew exactly who that woman was.

In verse 3, the phrase, “Is this not Bathsheba…?” could be interpreted colloquially as, “Surely it could only be Bathsheba.” (See hă·lō·w.)  This interpretation suggests that Bathsheba had a reputation for being a casual exhibitionist, and doing so on the rooftop of her own home granted her a degree of plausible deniability.

Third, receiving a personal invitation to hang out with a king had to be intensely validating for any woman.  She definitely would not refuse the invitation, even if she knew what it would lead to (maybe especially so). Maybe … this was her prime motive for stripping nude on the rooftop in full view of the royal palace. Who knows?

Fourth, she willingly did the deed.  She didn’t say no.  She didn’t turn down the invitation. She didn’t refuse King David’s advances.  Otherwise the passage would say David r@ped her. The text doesn’t say who did the seducing, but it’s possible that she seduced him.  I could believe she might have been thinking, somewhere along the way, something along the lines of, “This time, I’ve hit the jackpot! My husband will (eventually) die in battle, and then I’ll be a concubine or a wife of the king!”  That is exactly what happened.

And just like it is today, all the blame is placed on the man.

Imagining Their Encounter

Coming from the Bible, we have the notion that their affair was a very serious matter.  It was a serious sin, of course, but I mean the way it occurred probably wasn’t like what most modern gynocentric Westerners might imagine (i.e. Patriarchal hegemony, or R@pe).

We do not know if David had the full premeditated intention of having sexual relations with Bathsheba when he invited her to the palace. But in general, a man would. Men desire the company of beautiful women, and there’s always the possibility of sex in the back of men’s minds — IF the lady is willing. This is especially true for powerful men, such as King David.

It is uncertain how much secrecy David could have employed in inviting Bathsheba to the palace, but I’ll guess not much. After all, he asked his servants to summon her, and servants talk about everything that goes on.

Under these assumptions, I can imagine two possible scenarios. (Artistic works of David and Bathsheba depict both of these types of situations, shown in the images below.)

1. Premeditated Sin and Private

It is possible that David snuck her in through the back door, so to speak, and took her directly to his private chambers, with only a small number of servants knowing about it. He probably talked and played with her for a while to warm her up, and then banged her silly. She bathed and then hung out there until nightfall, at which time she departed out the back door and returned to her home.

2. Unmeditated Sin and Public

In this case, Bathsheba was probably at the palace, dining, drinking, and participating in the royal social activities for most of the day (we can be certain that wine was served at the banquets), and then having sex at some point during the latter half of the day, and then she went home after 6:00. Party Hearty Dude!

In this scenario, I imagine that David and Bathsheba had a Meet Cute. They probably hit it off very well, and their smooth relationship sped to coitus.  Of course, we know that women, when intoxicated by wine and under the influence of the Tingle Tantrums, are almost totally responsible for that.

It certainly wasn’t like David announced his intentions of having an affair to all his royal entourage and guests, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, please excuse me for the next 2 hours while I take Uriah’s wife to the royal bedchambers and F_ck her lilly silly.”  Definitely not.  In this context, their intercourse may very well have been a very playful, half-drunk quickie at a moment when no one was looking.

That’s how affairs begin — lots of people mixing and drinking, enjoying high times together, and then, “Oops!  We went a little too far there.”  This is why women always say, “It just happened!  I don’t know how I could have done that.”  When women say this, they’re being partly truthful (i.e. The Electro-Tingle disables a woman’s moral agency, self-awareness, and self-control), but mostly naïve.  After all, girls just wanna have fun with highfalutin men.  That’s just how they are.

Did Bathsheba have Agency?

Now we come to the real question that reveals all.

As told in 1 Kings 1:11-2:46, Bathsheba displayed skillful diplomatic powers that secured Solomon’s succession to the throne, rather than David’s older surviving sons by other wives, based on promises David made to her. It is therefore clear that she did, in fact, possess significant agency.  What is unclear is whether she was capable of such agency years earlier when she collected King David’s seed in the palace on that fateful day.

My bet is that she did have such degree of agency.  I’d even believe that Uriah and David were NOT the only men she “knew”, in the Biblical sense.  After all, she’s an adulterer, and fooling around is what adulterers love to do.  That’s what makes them adulterers.

Conclusions

In conclusion, who Bathsheba was didn’t really matter.  She was just a commoner married to a soldier.

Her story only matters because of four reasons…

1. She was a meretricious sex symbol who attracted the attention of the King of Israel and had an affair with him.
2. She persuaded a sitting king, intentionally or unintentionally, to eliminate her husband and take her as his wife.
3. David and Bathsheba’s illicit affair and the consequences thereof plunged the House of David into anguish, chaos, rebellion, and war for several generations.  It could be argued that this was the pivotal event that led to the downfall of Israel centuries later.
4. She became an ancestor of Jesus Christ.

It’s all the classic Red Pill tropes rolled into one true story.

• Women’s preferred habit of nakedness.
• Women’s propensity for advertising their reproductive portal.
• Women’s innate attraction to PSALM qualities in men (pun absolutely intended). 
• Hypergamy
• All women crave attention and validation.
• The glory and power of a woman’s beauty.
• “P_ssy makes men weak.”
• “Let’s you and him fight.”
• “Women wait at the finish line and choose the winners.”
• “Winner takes all.”
• Women’s love for Drama.
• The Ordinance of FEAR.
• The fear fantasy of being widowed.
• Women’s innate proclivity to seduce high SMV men and engage in illicit sex.
• Women’s fantasy of leaving their first husband for a second chance at marriage.

And probably others I haven’t thought of.

That’s absolutely epic nuclear Validation, all because of her beauty and her willingness to betray her husband and shag the king.

And most AWALT.

Related

• Σ Frame: Models of Courtship and Marital Structure (2018/10/3)
• Σ Frame: How do Women Glorify God? (2020/10/7)
• Σ Frame: The Meet Cute Experience as a Selection Model (2022/2/18)
• Σ Frame: Women are the Gatekeepers of Sex : A Red Pill Truth, but is it Biblical? (2024/9/27)