David Asked God for a Test and Bathsheba Was the Answer

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The Name Missing From the List

David had counted the names in the blessing and his was not among them.

"Master of the world, why do they say the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and never the God of David?"

"Those three were tested by me," God said. "You have not been."

"Then examine me. Try me."

"I will. And I will give you something I did not give them. I am telling you in advance. You are going to fall, and it will be through a woman."

"You will not stand," God told him.

"I will stand," David said.

The Bird and the Wicker Screen

The bird landed where he could see it from the palace roof, and David reached for something to throw.

It was Ha-Satan (the Accuser) wearing feathers, sent to run the test that had been requested, and the dart went wide. It skidded off the bird and struck a wicker screen on the roof across from him. The screen came apart and fell, and behind it was a woman combing out her hair.

Her name was Bathsheba. He sent men for her, knowing she was married to Uriah the Hittite and knowing exactly where Uriah was, camped outside Rabbah with Joab and the army. She came, and she went home, and word came back to the palace that she was pregnant. Under the law of her fathers, a woman in that position was put to death.

David started shouting then. "Hold me up and I will be saved."

"Did I not tell you," God said, "that you would not stand?"

The Man Who Would Not Go Home

Uriah carried Joab's armor, so recalling him from the siege raised no questions. He came up to Jerusalem, and the king asked how the army was, and Uriah said it was all going the way they wanted. Then David cut portions off his own supper, handed them across, and told him to go home to his wife and get some rest.

Uriah slept at the palace gate with the other armor-bearers.

In the morning the king asked him why a man who had been away that long had not gone to his own house. "The Ark is in a tent," Uriah said. "The army and the general are sleeping on the ground in enemy country. I am not going to go lie down in my house and eat and drink and sleep with my wife."

So the king kept him one more night and put wine in front of him until he could barely stand, and Uriah walked out and lay down at the gate again.

The next morning David wrote to Joab, sealed the letter with his own seal, and handed it to Uriah to carry down to the camp.

Joab read it and set Uriah at the point of the wall where the defenders were worst, and gave him some of the best men in the army for company, and told those men privately that when the gates opened they were to pull back. The Ammonites opened the gates and came out hard. The company turned and went. Uriah was ashamed to run from a wall he had been put in front of, so he stood, and killed a number of them, and then they closed around him and he went down.

The Only Word the King Was Waiting For

Joab briefed the messenger carefully. Tell him the assault on the wall was driven back with losses. If he loses his temper about it, then add that Uriah is dead too.

The king lost his temper exactly on schedule. You never go near a wall, he said. You undermine it, you use machines, you take the city slowly. Has none of you heard about Abimelech at Thebez, who rushed a tower and had a millstone dropped on his head by an old woman on the roof?

Then the messenger told him Uriah was dead, and the king's voice changed.

These things happen in war, he said. One day it goes against you, the next day against them. Tell Joab to keep at the siege and take the city.

Some months later Nathan stood in front of him with a case about a rich man with flocks and herds and a poor man with one ewe lamb that ate off his plate and slept in his arms like a daughter, and about the guest who arrived, and whose lamb went into the pot. David gave his answer without hesitating. The man deserved to die, and he would pay four times over. Then Nathan said the name.

He Asked for It Not to Be Written Down

What David wanted afterward was not a lighter sentence. It was an edit.

"Let my transgression not be written down after me."

"Is it not enough for you," God said, "that they will not be able to say I let him off because I loved him?" And he gave him the reason as a story about a debtor. A man owed the king twenty measures of wheat a year and everyone in the town looked at the size of it and decided the king must have quietly cancelled the debt and written him a release. Then the king sent for payment. The man had nothing. So the king came into his house himself, took the sons and the daughters out of it, and stood them up for sale in the market where everyone could watch, and the whole town understood at last that nothing had ever been forgiven.

So every punishment that came to David came in public, and it came doubled. Four for the ewe, and one of the sages worked the number and made it sixteen.

For twenty-two years he wept an hour a day and ate his bread with ashes in it. For six months of that he had a skin disease, and the Divine Presence went out of him, and the seventy-one judges who had spent their lives sitting close to the king kept their distance. Nobody came up the steps.

The books do not agree about the length of his reign. One says forty years, seven in Hebron and thirty-three in Jerusalem. The other says he ruled in Hebron seven years and six months. Six months sit in the gap between those two accounts, and that is where they are kept.