Everything you can say about mothers is true, no matter how good or how bad. But it is
surprising when you discover that one who you thought was so bad turns out to be so
good. Who would ever dream of holding up Bathsheba as an example of motherhood? Is
she not the hussy who seduced David into his greatest fall, and thereby became one of the
few Bible women to be welcomed to the Hollywood screen? She entered the stage of
history with nothing but a bath towel, and she walked off in the royal robes of a queen.
This is the stuff of soap operas, and Bathshebas was willing to play a nude scene, and so
she would have been popular in our day.
This is the image we have of this woman, and so it is hard to see past the scandal to
the facts. If a woman is raped it is her fault says the popular philosophy of our day. She
was asking for it they say, and we impose this view on the Bible. Bathsheba was taking a
bath where her body was exposed, and so she is presumed guilty of being a seducer.
Never did a bath create so much dirt. The waters are so muddied by the shocking event
of David’s affair that nobody bothers to look at the facts. Let me share them with you.
Bathsheba was never once rebuked or urged to repent, as was David.
Nathan the prophet who condemned David for the sin is always shown as having
the highest respect for Bathsheba.
Bathsheba was a victim of a power structure over which she had no control. It
was just like the case of Sarah being taken by the king into his harem. She and
Abraham had no control. David had 8 wives at the time of the affair, and yet he
took another man’s wife by force. The full weight of guilt for the whole scandal
lies on his head.
So the question is, does being raped make you a bad person or a bad mother? The
clear answer is, absolutely not. In contrast to the world, which Christians often follow,
who put down Bathsheba as one of the bad women of the Bible, God exalts this abused
woman and compensates for her awful tragedy by making her one of the most famous
mothers who ever lived. She bore 4 sons to David and one of them was the wisest king
who ever ruled Israel. King Solomon was possibly the wisest ruler who ever lived. You
can bad-mouth her all you like, but God used this mother to change history in ways that
no other mother has ever been used. God’s judgment is that being sexually assaulted
does not make a woman a bad mother.
She had more than her share of tragedy. She was assaulted by the king and then had
her husband murdered because she was unfortunate enough to get pregnant. The child
was taken shortly after birth, and so at a young age she had lost both a mate and a child.
As a more mature woman she suffered the danger of being killed by plots within the royal
family, and she got one of the family killed her self by trying to do him a favor. It made
David so angry that he had one of his own sons killed. Even without the sex scandal her
life could have been a soap opera. Being a good mother does not shield anyone from
suffering. In fact, it was the asset of her great beauty that started all her suffering that
we have recorded in Scripture. There is a price to pay for beauty, and it is often a very
high price, as her life illustrates.
She was a pretty woman, but a part from that asset the Bible does not reveal her to
be one endowed with any great gifts. She was a queen, but as far as the record goes, she
was just like any ordinary housewife. As one commentator pointed out, she never says a
word or takes an action by her own will. She is completely dominated by men, and has
not a liberated bone in her body. She is totally submissive within a system of male
domination. There is nothing about her that draws our attention to her except her
beauty. That is why she is a good example of motherhood. She was really quite
commonplace and unspectacular, and not the sort of mother who wins the mother of the
year award. She does not stimulate flowery poetry.
Bathsheba was surrounded by the luxury of royalty and the artistic gifts of David and
Solomon, who were two of the most creative men ever to live. But she was just ordinary
as far as the record goes, but she was greatly loved and honored by these two men. That
is a message that mothers need to hear. You don’t have to be a wonder woman and
Helen of Troy rolled into one to be a good mother. The good mother is simply one whose
children grow up to love and appreciate her because of her love and influence. Thomas
Fessenden wrote-
You painted no Madonnas,
Or chapel walls in Rome,
But with a touch divine
Upon the walls of home.
You wrote no lofty poems
With rare poetic art,
But, with a finer vision
You put poems in my heart.
You craved no shapeless marble
To symmetry divine,
But with a nobler genius
You shaped this soul of mine.
You built no great cathedrals
The centuries applauded,
But with a grace exquisite
Your heart was house of God.
Bathsheba represents the vast majority of mothers, and as we look at her role in her
son’s lives we see it is one that every mother can play. It is almost a cliché, but the fact is,
the best thing a mother can give to her child to make her a good mother is love. All the
studies on how the love of a mother affects a child’s personality is fulfilled in Solomon.
He became the first king in the Bible who got along with the whole world. He had a reign
of peace without war. He built relationships with all the nations of the world. He had no
urge to go out and put his sword through an enemy. He had the most powerful army in
the world, and he had the most sophisticated weapons, but he didn’t use them, for he was
a man of peace. You have to give his mother a lot of credit for this.
Ashley Montagu in his book On Being Human writes, “The evidence is
overwhelming that when the child’s basic needs are adequately satisfied, when, in other
words, the child is loved, and it is exposed to the necessary but minimum amount of
frustrations, no matter in what culture or class that child grows and develops, it tends to
be a better equilibrated, less aggressive, more cooperative person than one who has not
been adequately loved in childhood. We live by a pure flame within us. That flame is
love. It is the source from which we draw and convey our warmth to others. It is the
light which guides us in relation to our fellow men.”
Bathsheba suffered from the violence of her day. She was taken by force into
David’s bed, and her husband was murdered. Warfare was a way of life as she grew up.
She raised a king who was into making peace rather than war. He wrote the great love
song and built up the world’s biggest harem and produced a golden age of peace and
prosperity where love was the theme, and not war. Bathsheba had to give Solomon a lot
of mother love to produce a personality like his, which was so radically different from the
culture, and from his father who was a man of war. The fact is, she was a mother who
made a difference.
