The Problem with Comparing Bathsheba to a Sheep

Every night, I read to my eight-year-old from a storybook Bible. (It’s called The Peace Table and I highly recommend it if you want inclusive, justice-oriented scripture interpretations, plus artwork depicting Bible characters as POC.) Recently, we read the story of David and Bathsheba, found in 2 Samuel:11-12.

David, king of Israel, of Goliath-slaying fame, sees Bathsheba bathing on a roof, apparently cleansing herself after her menstruation, and decides he must have her. But, there’s one problem—she’s already married to Uriah. David sleeps with her anyway, and Bathsheba gets pregnant. So, David sends Uriah to the battlefront so that he’ll die (after Uriah refuses to abandon his duty to go home and sleep with his wife so he could think he got her pregnant instead). Once Uriah is killed in battle, David marries Bathsheba himself.

Growing up in the LDS church, I heard this story dozens of times, and usually as a cautionary tale about how even the most “righteous” can fall to temptation, particularly sexual temptation in the case of this story. As I read it to my son, we got to the part where the prophet Nathan teaches David about his sin through a parable—and this struck me differently this time around. As Nathan told the parable of the man with many sheep who stole another man’s only sheep for himself, I realized he was literally comparing a woman to livestock. In this instance, the man with many sheep was David, who already had many wives, and stole Uriah’s only wife, Bathsheba, for himself.

The prophet Nathan counseling King David on his sins. lds.org

Obviously, what David did to Uriah was wrong—but what never quite crystallized for me before was how much he wronged Bathsheba as well. Because in this story, she is no more than a sheep—a creature that can be stolen against her will, who belongs to men and whose ownership can be shifted about as they please. I do remember even as a child wondering what Bathsheba thought about becoming David’s wife, but this is never mentioned in the Bible. Her opinions and feelings are treated as insignificant to the tale. Even when the child David fathered dies, this is treated as a result of David’s sin—but Bathsheba, who presumably was only the victim of this situation, also had to suffer the loss of her child.

I feel like this all comes down to, once again, polygamy. Polygamy turns women into objects men can possess and collect as displays of their wealth and power. David’s actions are only portrayed as wrong because he stole something that belonged to another man, not because he took advantage of a powerless human being. This allowed Joseph Smith to, thousands of years later, look at this story and decide David’s multiple wives must have been approved of by God, rather than merely being an unfortunate product of David’s time period.

Photo by Sam Carter on Unsplash

I don’t want to get into what Joseph’s motivations for taking on polygamous wives actually were—in the end, we can only speculate. But, certainly in D&C 132: 38-39, David is cited as a justification for polygamy: “David’s wives and concubines were given unto him of me (God).” David’s son, Solomon, is also mentioned, and in the Bible his sin is portrayed not in having multiple wives but in marrying woman from outside of his faith.

So, maybe this actually comes down to taking the Bible too literally. As I’ve learned from Dan McClellan’s social media, and Rachel Held Evans’s books, A Year of Biblical Womanhood and Inspired, if we truly followed every last thing in the Bible, we wouldn’t be able to mix our fabrics or eat shrimp. The Bible also can be and has been used to justify basically anything—from slavery to misogyny to war and genocide. In the end, Joseph Smith seems to have been a bit selective when it came to restoring all things, and yet insisted polygamy had to be one of those things.

But perhaps we shouldn’t try to exemplify a story where women are treated as equivalent to sheep.