Week 15 II Samuel
Chapter eleven. Sundown in Jerusalem, gloaming, only a little light left in the sky. But enough that from his pavilion David can see a woman. She’s on her roof, having as private a wash as she can. He stands watching until the day is full-dark and the woman goes inside. Her image stays in David’s head, and a plan starts uncoiling.
[It’s easy to understand what’s happening in David’s head. How short a step it is from seeing a desirable woman to playing out a sexual fantasy. Image, desire, imagination, body chemicals, dizzily stirring up an intense concoction.]
David stands in the dark with a witches’ brew filling up inside him, and then spilling over into the concrete world of action. David gets the woman, gets his sexual intercourse, conspires to have the woman’s husband killed, and closes the circle by marrying the desirable Bathsheba. On the surface things worked out.
Except there’s a grey stratus smudge on David’s inner horizon: the thing that David had done was evil in the sight of the Lord.
Nathan confronts David.
He tells him that before the adultery, before the murder, back on the dark roof: you despised the word of the Lord. The prophet then adds, quoting the Lord: you despised Me.
David is abjectly, penitently sorry. But the evil outcomes are already working their way out into David’s world.
Note: quotes from II Samuel 11:27 and 12:9-10 (NASB version).