David, Bathsheba, and Sin of the Heart

     As I was musing in the shower, (a dangerous pastime, I know) I got to thinking somehow about David, Bathsheba, ancient Israeli housing arrangements and the nature of sin.  My habit of creating complicated trains of thought when I am not writing them down forced me to open the laptop while the toddler was being relatively good.  (I can still clean up all the game pieces she has on the floor later)

    To start with, when does sin begin? David, the man after God's own heart becomes a murderer over the course of this story, which he was not when it began. (Unless you count some raiding in his early life)

    "Great" sins can usually be traced down a line of differing iniquities, ultimately beginning with pride.  Sin, I believe in every case, begins with thinking subconsciously or not, that we are right in something in which God is wrong.  This is original sin.  Eve doubted God first, and disobeyed because of this kind of pride.  Adam chose to follow suit because he chose to do what God commanded against.  Original sin begins with putting God aside.  We all have original sin in our hearts.

    So then we come down the years to David, bearing the same mark of original pride as Adam, Eve, you, and me.  David, to start out with was probably bored.  As a mighty kicker of butt, he was cooped up at home in Jerusalem while his army fought without him.  (I believe this was after he was officially told "you're not allowed to risk your life anymore, Joab's got it, sorry.")  Thus, instead of kicking butt, he remains twiddling his thumbs.

Someone's model of ancient houses

    So it is that he goes to the roof, and sees Bathsheba.  There has been a number of ideas as to why she was visible.  Of course, it is always understood that David, on a palace roof, was higher.  I can't dig into the Hebrew myself to see if it actually means that she was herself on her roof, or simply that David was looking from his.  It is possible that as a member of David's guard, Uriah was in position to have an, or multiple upper rooms, which could qualify as on the roof, and thus mean that Bathsheba was not bathing on an open roof visible to everyone, but it has also been supplied that it was rather the house court that the open roof.  In the ancient world of the Near East, people tended to build rooms about the center court of a house, instead of onto the existing structure, leaving the family yard within the house and so private, and people would bathe in this space.  When I am able, more detail on the layout of these ancient houses, and how they connect with the second coming would be an interesting topic.  From above, David would have a view which would allow him to see what went on which those passing by did not have.  Thus, at first, both adulterers are innocent.  David goes to his roof, Bathsheba goes to the tub.

    As I was initially musing I had thought that what became murder began with something smaller and rather normal.  A second look.  David could have looked away, but she was beautiful, and beauty is hard to turn from as a man.  Nearly every man on the street knows this far better than I do, and perhaps even trying to talk about it on my part is ridiculous.  But there is a draw to woman's beauty like a indomitable magnet.  For some it is a struggle, and for those who do struggle, they know the power of it more than those who have never tried.  It is easy for me to set out blasé statements about morality of the eyes, when I simply cannot feel the power of that form of desire.  Yet, we ask, where did David's sin begin?

    The first sight cannot be helped, but the second look begins trouble.  And a sight of the kind of beauty as hers was not easy to look away from.  And here David fell.

    But it was not the second look that started the chain of sin and iniquity that led to death, of a faithful warrior, an infant, and the breaking of a kingdom.  First, David had to put God aside.  We cannot sin and be in communion with God at the same time.  It is easy for those with different temptations to push David's sin into a category of awful things we would never do when we forget what the first sin really was.  The same sin that I commit every day, every hour.  Before David had Uriah murdered, before he committed adultery, before he took the second look, he put God aside.  We duck out of what we think of as his presence, though he still remains, patient, if grieved, or angry, so often without even knowing we have done so, in order to do what we think better than what he has given.  We become Adam and Eve hiding because they realize now that they had left God's light when at the time they thought first of themselves.  Original sin is pride, selfishness, placing ourself in the in the position of God.  The ultimate, original idolatry.

    This is the reason that David later says "Against you, and you alone I have sinned and done what is evil in your sight."  No matter whom we hurt in our sin the first person we ever, ever strike is God.  For every wound, every grief, every loss as a fruit of sin, God has suffered first.  And I cannot even bear my own sufferings without him.

    This is what should strike home deeply to all those of us who pride ourselves on not being sordid adulterer-murderers.  The sins that follow the First Sin, the first sin of our hearts, and the first sin of all sins committed, they are varied and ugly, but the sin, the root, the seed itself is what we all share.  When I turn to bitterness, or fail to serve another with joy, it is first the First Sin.  When I neglect what I should do because I have become so self-focused as to think my pleasure is more important than service, it is from the First Sin.  When my heart makes it's morality my own desire, rather than the glory and hope that is the service of God, this is the First Sin.  When David looked again, and looked again, and betrayed Uriah, Bathsheba, himself, succumbed to a murderous heart, lost a dynasty for his children, and watched his baby die, it began with the First Sin.

    And for a time, God watched David stew after that first sin.  When Nathan the prophet finally comes to him with the call from God, how long had David been living in a spiritual crevice, knowing, or not knowing that he was hiding from God?

    

    Insincere repentance is one of the ugliest "decent" sight to be seen.  The false tears I have seen rankle me today.  Yet when David repents, he repentance is total, beautiful, and has blessed generations of sinners for three-thousand years.  He makes no excuses, but calls for help.  There is no reference to "will the grave praise you?" or however that goes, simply, "cleanse me".

    (I wonder if when he refers to "the bones you have broken may rejoice" he is referencing the shepherd's technique of breaking a wandering lamb's leg to keep it close until it becomes used to nearness with the shepherd, that it might, though temporary suffering, not suffer a woeful fate in tearing animal's maw.  Sometimes, God breaks our legs, and we don't think to thank him.)

    Then, after all this, he speaks of praise, first saying that God desires the sacrifice of broken heart, rather than an offering on an alter.  David understands what Jesus later makes very clear when he speaks of sins of the heart coming first.  Jesus, as he said, never abolished the law, he made it harder, or showed how hard it had been all along.  And only the mercy of God, then not yet made clear, but already saving, brings us to his arms.  David, in knowing this, was the man after God's own heart.  It is after this that David speaks of offerings, and God being pleased with them.  He knew repentance, and he knew that external service comes from that which is within first.

    And Bathsheba?  Her character is unknown in detail at the time of her liaison.  But after, she becomes the mother of Solomon, mother of the line of Judah, author of Proverbs 31, where she warned the king not to "give his strength to women".  She became far reaching ancestress of Joseph son of Jesse (Although there is a first or second century document suggesting that Joseph was a product of two different Leverate marriages, making him legally a descendant of the kingly line, but biologically a son of David by different children, thus giving him, and his legal, though not biological son Jesus a claim to the throne while avoiding a claim on the curse of Jeconiah--one of my favorite forgotten Biblical details, along with Zerubbabel the Son of Shealtiel, and all the signet ring language)  Don't you love parenthetical statements?

    

   So we find that our First Sin is the soul of every sin.  That putting God aside is death.  And that God is the maker of all beauty, even in the rubble of our failure.