After the year was expired — at the turn of the year, spring, when the rains ended and roads dried — at the time when kings go forth to battle. The narrator sets the norm in the first clause and the exception in the last: David sent Joab... and all Israel... But David tarried still at Jerusalem. The king's first verb in the verse is sent; his last is tarried. Nothing is said against staying home — he had armies and a general for the siege of Rabbah (10:14) — and the study will not say the verse convicts him. It only notes where the narrator chose to begin, and with what word: tarried.

1 Chronicles 20:1 has this verse almost word for word, then goes straight to the taking of Rabbah (12:26-31), leaving out everything between. Chronicles does not tell the Bathsheba story; Samuel does, in full, about the man it has called the one after his own heart (1 Samuel 13:14). Readers should take that in before reading further: the book that has defended David at every turn — against the Amalekite, against Joab, against the murderers of Ishbosheth — is about to tell the worst thing he did, from his own side of the roof, with nothing left out.

In an eveningtide... David arose from off his bed — the king has slept through the afternoon and walks on the roof of the cedar house that Hiram built (5:11), above every other roof in the city. From the roof he saw a woman washing herself. The text says she was washing, that she was very beautiful, and that he saw; verse 4 will add that the washing was purification after her monthly uncleanness (Leviticus 15:19-28). It does not say she meant to be seen, and the study does not say it either. A king on the highest roof in Jerusalem can see into courtyards; that is all the verse establishes.

The verbs of verses 2-4 are the chapter's structure: he saw, he sent, he took. Readers have set them beside Eve's saw... took (Genesis 3:6) and Samuel's warning of what a king would do — he will take your daughters... he will take your fields (1 Samuel 8:11-17). The narrator makes no such comment. He simply lets the king who enquired of the LORD before every move in chapters 2 and 5 now enquire after the woman (v. 3), and lets the reader hear the difference.

The answer to his enquiry is a warning in the form of a question. Is not this Bathsheba — named; the daughter of Eliam — an Eliam son of Ahithophel is among David's mighty men (23:34), and if he is the same man, Bathsheba is the granddaughter of the counsellor who will go over to Absalom (15:12); readers have long noticed the possibility, and the text neither confirms nor denies it; the wife of Uriah the Hittite — a married woman, and her husband one of the thirty, the last name on the list (23:39). The one who answers gives David three reasons to stop. He hears all three.

Uriah the Hittite. A man of a people Israel was to have driven out (Deuteronomy 7:1), bearing a name that means something like the LORD is my light, serving in the king's elite, married to a daughter of one of the king's own officers. He is a convert, or the son of one, living by Israel's God and Israel's war-discipline more strictly than Israel's king. The narrator calls him Uriah the Hittite five times in the chapter, at every turn where his fate is decided (vv. 3, 6, 17, 21, 24); the foreignness is kept in the reader's ear, and so is the name.

David sent messengers, and took her. The text frames David as the actor — sent, took, lay with her — and Bathsheba as the one acted upon; the one verb that is hers, she came, is what a woman summoned by the king's messengers does. The study will not blame her beyond what the text does, which is nothing; it will not speculate on what she felt, which the text does not say; and it notes that Nathan's parable (12:4) will call her the poor man's lamb, taken. Whatever more some readers have seen, the narrator put the verbs where he put them.

For she was purified from her uncleanness — the clause explains the washing of verse 2 and establishes something the story needs: she had just finished her monthly purification, so the child of verse 5 cannot be Uriah's. And she returned unto her house. It is over in a sentence, and the king presumably expected it to stay over. Then verse 5, the only words Bathsheba speaks in the chapter: I am with child. Two words in Hebrew, and they begin everything that follows. The narrator gives her no more, and the study adds no more.

David's first remedy is to bring Uriah home so that the child can be thought his. The soldier is summoned from the siege, asked polite questions about the war (v. 7), and told go down to thy house, and wash thy feet (v. 8), with a dish from the king's table following him. He sleeps at the palace door with the guard. Asked why, he gives this answer. The ark, and Israel, and Judah, abide in tents — the ark went out with the army, as in 1 Samuel 4:4, and the whole nation is in the field. Shall I then go into mine house... and lie with my wife? Soldiers in the LORD's war kept from women (1 Samuel 21:5; Deuteronomy 23:9-10), and the Hittite keeps the rule.

As thou livest, and as thy soul liveth, I will not do this thing. He swears by the king's life to the king who is trying to make him break his discipline, and he does not know why he is being pressed. Readers should hear his the ark... in tents against the king who in 7:2 could not bear that the ark dwelt within curtains while he sat in cedar; the sentiment has changed houses. Whether Uriah suspected anything the text does not say, and the study does not guess. What it says is that the one man in the chapter who keeps faith with the ark, the army, his commander and his wife is the foreigner, and that it costs him his life.

The second remedy: he made him drunk. The king who sang the psalms sets out to break a faithful man's resolve with wine at his own table, and fails — drunk, Uriah went out to lie on his bed with the servants, and went not down to his house. The narrator reports the attempt without a word of comment, which is his method throughout the chapter; the facts carry the judgment until verse 27. Readers should notice how each step is smaller and meaner than the last: a summons, a hint, a dish of meat, a second day, a drinking-bout, and then a letter.

Uriah's drunken integrity is the hinge of the story. Had he gone home, there would have been no letter and the thing might have stayed hidden; because he would not, David must choose between confession and murder. The study does not say that God arranged Uriah's refusal; the text does not. It says that an ordinary man's steadiness forced a king to show what he was willing to do, and that the king, given one more night to turn back, used it to write to Joab.

David wrote a letter to Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah (v. 14). The man carries his own death-warrant, sealed, and does not open it, because he is the kind of man who does not. The order is exact: the forefront of the hottest battle, then retire ye from him — the Ammonites are to do the killing and the Israelites are to let them, so that the king's hand is nowhere near it. Nathan will cut through the arrangement: thou hast killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword... with the sword of the children of Ammon (12:9). Hiring the enemy's sword is still killing.

The study names it as the text does — murder, premeditated, in writing — and notes what it required: a general who would obey. Joab does (vv. 16-17), and in his own way, assigning Uriah unto a place where he knew that valiant men were, so that there fell some of the people of the servants of David with him. More men die than the letter asked, and Joab now holds a letter in the king's hand. Readers of chapter 3 will know what it means that Joab has this on David; readers of 1 Kings 2:5 will see that David never forgot what Joab was capable of. One adultery has become one murder and several deaths and a general who cannot be dismissed.

And Uriah the Hittite died also. The clause is set at the end, after some of the people — the narrator counts the others first. Joab's coaching of the messenger (vv. 18-21) is one of the coldest passages in the book: he foresees the king's anger at a sortie too near the wall, foresees the king citing Abimelech killed by a woman's millstone at Thebez (Judges 9:50-54 — Jerubbesheth is Jerubbaal, Gideon, with bosheth for baal as in Ishbosheth), and tells the man to end with Thy servant Uriah the Hittite is dead also. That sentence, Joab knows, will end the king's anger. It does.

The messenger in the event (vv. 22-24) says it before being asked. Readers should feel what has happened to David's court: the general knows what the king wants to hear, the runner knows which name quiets the king, and nobody says the word murder. The narrator reports the military blunder — fighting under a wall, the oldest mistake — as real, and as deliberate. Men were spent to cover a king. The Hittite who would not go home to his wife lies under the wall of Rabbah with Israelites who did not know why they were there.

Let not this thing displease thee, for the sword devoureth one as well as another. It is the only comment David makes on the death he ordered, and it is a proverb about the chances of war — true in general, and in this case a lie. The Hebrew of displease thee is let it not be evil in thine eyes; verse 27 will use the same idiom of God — the thing... was evil in the eyes of the LORD. The narrator has set the two sentences to answer each other: what the king tells Joab not to see as evil, the LORD sees as evil. The study takes that as the chapter's built-in verdict.

Make thy battle more strong against the city... and encourage thou him. The king returns to the war as if nothing had happened and sends his general comfort. Readers who remember Abner's shall the sword devour for ever? (2:26) will hear the word devour again, now in the mouth of a man who has fed it a friend. Nothing in the chapter so far has condemned David — not the narrator, not Nathan, not any voice — and verse 25 shows why that silence is terrible: the king has explained the death to himself, and found it acceptable.

When the wife of Uriah heard that Uriah her husband was dead, she mourned for her husband (v. 26) — the narrator gives Bathsheba her grief, and in that verse names her only by her relation to Uriah. The mourning is seven days by custom; then David sent and fetched her — the verb of 9:5, used there for Mephibosheth — and she became his wife, and bare him a son. To the court it looks like a king honouring a fallen soldier's widow. Matthew 1:6 will keep the record straight: of her that had been the wife of Urias.

But the thing that David had done displeased the LORD. Twenty-six and a half verses of saw, sent, took, wrote, died, fetched — and not one word of judgment from the narrator until this, the last line of the chapter. He withholds comment so that the reader follows the king's own reasoning to the end and finds, at the end, that it was all seen. The sentence is literally was evil in the eyes of the LORD; David watched a woman from the roof, and the LORD watched David. The next chapter begins And the LORD sent (12:1). Everything in chapter 11 that David sent is now answered by what God sends.