David and Bathsheba (Apologetics)

At court their eyes had met, and lingered, and now they were hooked.

Things weren’t good with her husband, and while he was away with the army her time had come.

She patiently watched a window at the palace for a glimpse of her desire. She washed, then lay naked in full view of the window. The king sent for her immediately.

Afterwards, inevitably, guilt set in. She was pregnant and the indiscretion would be discovered. King David ordered her husband to come home. She could sleep with him and no one would ever know it was not his child.

But when he came home, Uriah was in no hurry to sleep with Bathsheba. He stayed at the palace instead, and made an excuse about his duty being with his troops in battle.

The king panicked, sent Uriah back to the war, and secretly gave orders for him to be abandoned by his troops so that the enemy could kill him.

After Bathsheba finished mourning for her husband, David married her, and she gave birth to a son.

Secrets fade like truth.

The prophet Nathan came to speak with the king. ‘Judge this case for me. In a certain town there were two men, one rich, the other poor.

The rich man had flocks and herds in great numbers.

But the poor man had nothing at all except one little ewe lamb that he had bought. He nourished her, and she grew with him and his children. She shared the little food he had and drank from his cup and slept in his bosom. She was like a daughter to him.

Now, the rich man received a visitor, but he would not take from his own flocks and herds to prepare a meal for the wayfarer who had come to him. Instead he took the poor man’s ewe lamb and made a meal of it for his visitor.’

David was very angry at the rich man.

Nathan said to David: “You are that rich man! You have been made king and given everything, many wives and many children, but you took Uriah’s wife, then had him killed’

David and Bathsheba’s infant child grew sick and died within a week, the lovers accepted this as their punishment.

They had more children. Their second child Solomon became another great king. The Christ was descended from this royal line, fourteen generations after David, through his father Joseph.

The huge stone carving of a protective spirit was once part of a wall of carvings in an Assyrian palace.

Context (so what?)

To disprove the existence of God by examining the bible with forensic, evidentiary technique is to use the mindset of an apologist trying to prove the existence of God the same way.

The belief system which underpins the Christian subculture should be understood with different techniques like anthropology, sociology, psychology, or much better, in music, art, prayer and love.

This story of Nathan prophesying to David from 2 Samuel after David’s awful betrayal of Uriah is a fine example of the allegorical meaning of the bible stories. Why would someone argue against understanding the bible in an allegorical way after reading this?

The picture came from the Assyrian: Art and Empire Exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1997. The huge stone carving was once part of a wall of carvings in an Assyrian palace. The carvings were all brightly painted like Egyptian murals and would have been amazing to see. Even now it is a striking piece of work.

Assyrian art created enormous excitement among archaeologists and apologists when Assyrian cities were rediscovered in the Iraqui desert in the mid 19th century. There were depictions of the Jewish people in exile in Assyria, which were some of the first pieces of hard evidence of historical credibility for the Bible.

Rather than providing insight into people’s vision of God, angels, and the supernatural, the pictures of Assyrian protective spirits created fundamentalist hysteria about how different they must be from any Christian vision because they are from outside the Jewish culture.

The Hittites were from another Bronze Age and early Iron Age civilization contemporary with the Egyptians and the Assyrians. German archaeologists established evidence of their culture and empire with discovery of a royal library in 1906.

The Assyrian Empire was finished when Nineveh fell to the Babylonians in 612 BC.