David, Bathsheba and Nathan

The story opens during the war with Ammon. In the spring David sent Joab and the army to ravage Ammon and besiege Rabbah, and stayed in Jerusalem (2 Samuel 11:1). One evening, from the roof of his house, he saw a woman bathing. He was told that she was Bathsheba, daughter of Eliam and wife of Uriah the Hittite. He sent for her and lay with her, and she sent him word that she was pregnant (2 Samuel 11:2–5).

David recalled Uriah from the siege and told him to go down to his house. Uriah would not eat, drink and lie with his wife while the ark and the army were camped in the field. He slept at the door of the king’s house, and again did not go home when David made him drunk (2 Samuel 11:6–13). David sent him back with a letter for Joab: Uriah was to be put where the fighting was fiercest and left to be struck down. He was killed under the wall of Rabbah with others of David’s men (2 Samuel 11:14–17, 24). When Bathsheba had mourned her husband, David brought her to his house. She became his wife and bore a son. The chapter ends: “the thing that David had done displeased Yahweh” (2 Samuel 11:26–27).

Samuel says that the Lord sent Nathan to David. The prophet told him of a rich man with many flocks who took a poor man’s one ewe lamb to feed a guest. David said that the man deserved to die. Nathan answered, “You are the man.” Because David had killed Uriah and taken his wife, the sword would never leave his house, and what he had done in secret would be done to his own wives in the sight of all Israel (2 Samuel 12:1–12). David said, “I have sinned against Yahweh.” Nathan replied that the Lord had put away his sin and that he would not die, but that the child would (2 Samuel 12:13–14). The child fell ill, and David fasted and lay on the ground; on the seventh day it died (2 Samuel 12:15–18). Bathsheba bore David another son, Solomon (2 Samuel 12:24–25).

Later in the book David’s son Absalom drives him out of Jerusalem and takes his father’s concubines in a tent on the palace roof, “in the sight of all Israel” (2 Samuel 15:13–14) (2 Samuel 16:21–22).

The biblical writers treat the episode differently. Kings judges that David did what was right all his life “except only in the matter of Uriah the Hittite” (1 Kings 15:5). Chronicles tells of the siege of Rabbah, with David remaining in Jerusalem, and passes straight to the city’s capture (1 Chronicles 20:1–3). The heading of Psalm 51 assigns that prayer of repentance to David “when Nathan the prophet came to him” (Psalm 51:1–4). Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus names Solomon’s mother only as the woman who had been Uriah’s wife (Matthew 1:6).

How this is dated

Traditional date. From later tradition or from internal biblical chronology, with no outside anchor.

Samuel gives no year. The story is set in David’s years at Jerusalem, during the war with Ammon (2 Samuel 10:1–7) (2 Samuel 11:1); those years run from about 1003 to about 970 BC, reckoned as David becomes king explains.

The next generation narrows the span. Solomon was born to Bathsheba after the first child had died (2 Samuel 12:24). He reigned forty years (1 Kings 11:42), and his son Rehoboam was forty-one at his own accession (1 Kings 14:21), so on these figures Rehoboam was born about a year before Solomon became king. Solomon was therefore already a father when he became king about 970 BC, which puts his own birth in the 980s BC at the latest, and the events told here come before it. The year shown, about 995 BC, is a placing within that span and is not given by any source; it is a conventional placing, marked as traditional like the date of the covenant with David. If the forty-year reigns are round numbers, as the note on David’s accession allows, the margin is wider.

David, Bathsheba and Nathan

How this is dated

Primary sources

Scripture

In context

Grows out of

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