Voices Out of the Silence

In the spring of the year, the time when kings go forth to battle, David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel; and they ravaged the Ammonites, and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem. It happened, late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking upon the roof of the king's house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful. And David sent and inquired about the woman. And one said, "Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?" So David sent messengers, and took her; and she came to him, and he lay with her....And the woman conceived; and she sent and told David, "I am with child."

So David sent word to Joab, "Send me Uriah the Hittite...." When Uriah came to him, David asked...how the war prospered. Then David said to Uriah, "Go down to your house"....But Uriah slept at the door of the king's house....David said to Uriah, "...Why did you not go down to your house?" Uriah said to David, "The ark and Israel and Judah dwell in tents; and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are camping in the open field; shall I then go to my house, to eat and to drink, and to lie with my wife?...I will not do this thing." The next day David invited him, and he ate in his presence and drank, so that he made him drunk; and in the evening he went out to lie on his couch with the servants of his lord, but he did not go down to his house.

In the morning David wrote a letter to Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah. In the letter he wrote, "Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, that he may be struck down and die".... When the wife of Uriah heard that Uriah her husband was dead, she made lamentation for her husband. And when the mourning was over, David sent and brought her to his house, and she became his wife, and bore him a son. But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord. And the Lord sent Nathan to David ....Nathan said to David, "... Why have you despised the word of the Lord...? David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the Lord." And Nathan said to David, "The Lord also has put away your sin; you shall not die. Nevertheless...the child that is born to you shall die"....

And the Lord struck the child that Uriah's wife bore to David, and it became sick. David therefore besought God for the child; and David fasted, and went in and lay all night upon the ground. And the elders of his house stood beside him....On the seventh day the child died....Then David comforted his wife, Bathsheba, and went in to her, and lay with her; and she bore a son, and he called his name Solomon.... So David gathered all the people together and went to Rabbah, and fought against it and took it. - Excerpted from 2 Samuel 11-12

The story is a familiar one to most of us. A king's lust gets the better of him, and he finds himself trapped in a desperate situation. David tries to extricate himself by arranging an unexpected furlough for Bathsheba's husband, Uriah.

We can imagine it was an awkward scene when Uriah arrived. David makes small talk about the war and then encourages Uriah to go to his wife, hoping his problem is solved and no one will ever suspect that David is the father of the baby. But Uriah, a man of some integrity, refuses to revel in the comforts of home while the other soldiers suffer the discomforts of war.

David is forced to come up with a Plan B. He invites Uriah to stay with him in Jerusalem, fills him with wine, and tries again to encourage him to go home to his wife. But still Uriah refuses. Backed into a corner, David arranges Uriah's death. And in what seems to be a bit of divine understatement, the scripture tells us, "The thing that David had done displeased the Lord."

The incident has gone down in history as David's "great sin." Indeed, the story and David's later psalmodic reflection on it plumb the depths of his anguish and grief, offering much to be learned about sin and repentance.

But what struck me most deeply as I recently reread the story of David and Bathsheba was not what was recorded there but what was missing. It has never occurred to the biblical historians to call the incident Bathsheba's "great loss." With the exception of a brief notation that Bathsheba mourned the deaths of her husband and son, the thoughts and feelings, dreams and hopes, fears and strengths of Bathsheba appear nowhere in the story.

Set in the middle of a scenario of military intrigue and victory is the very personal tragedy of a woman who is powerless to affect her own situation. She has no description apart from being the daughter of a particular man and the wife of another. The only attribute assigned to her is a physical attractiveness that arouses the lust of the king, who uses his power to violate her and her marriage vow and then arranges the death of her husband.

We will never know what resistance or willingness Bathsheba offered to the king's demand. Was she, too, plagued with guilt and shame? Or did she feel herself a very personal victim of the passions, power, and prowess of a man infected with a foretaste of military victory and a desire to conquer?

If David's plan to trick Uriah had succeeded, would Bathsheba have been an accomplice in the plot, quietly bearing the king's son? Could she ever love the king who had demanded her?

Surely at first she must have been plagued with ambivalence, loving the child that she bore as part of her own flesh and despising it for the sign that it was of her shame and pain. As the child grew within her, did the new life become a sign of hope? Did it make the other sorrows bearable?

As the time came close for her to deliver, did she have dreams again - for herself, for her baby? Did a day ever come when she whispered to herself, "I want it to be a son; I want this child to have a life full of choices and not a life full of pain"?

As she went through the agony of childbirth, did she not wish that this boy were a son of her poor, fallen soldier instead of a king? As old dreams died, did she find room for joy?

While the king fasted for the life of his son and the elders rushed to his side, what quiet sorrow did she feel in her soul? What hatred for the sinner? Did she not cradle that dying child and cry out to God for its life? In the frenzy of mourning, did she not feel utterly alone with her grief?

I picture a heart torn in two. I picture a woman pondering in that broken heart, "No one can touch the pain of a woman who never even had herself and now has lost everything."

BATHSHEBA'S MARGINALIZATION from her own story might not have felt so weighty in my reading of the account if hers was an isolated case. But any serious reader of the biblical record encounters the overwhelming loss of women's history in its pages. For those of us who are women, one of the difficult struggles we face as Christians is coming to terms with the fact that the record of our faith largely excludes us. We can search out and claim the Deborahs and Esthers and Priscillas, who are profiles of wisdom, courage, and faith, but they seem all too rare in a history whose shapers are men.

The Hebrew Testament is a disturbing record that for the most part portrays women as property, pawns, and prostitutes; cursed if they are "barren," cyclically unclean; identified only as wives of important men, mothers of important sons. We are often unnamed, as in the case of God's blessing after the great flood: "God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth'" (Genesis 9:1). We have no idea of the names of the wives who had no small part in this effort to be fruitful.

Hebrew law assigned women the status of property. A Genesis account of Lot's capture shows Abraham as rescuer of Lot, along with "his goods, and the women and the people" (Genesis 14:16), offering women a ranking somewhere between possessions and persons.

In the patriarchal Hebrew culture, lineage was traced through the male line, and even God was claimed as the "God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob," with no mention of Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel. The contributions of these women to faith history are largely written out of the biblical account.

Rachel and her sister, Leah, were used as pawns in a ploy by their father to trick Jacob, who loved and desired to marry Rachel. Laban, the father, fearing that Leah was so plain as to have no chance of marriage, substituted Leah for Rachel on Jacob's wedding night (Genesis 29).

The two sisters, like most of the women in the Hebrew Testament, are peripheral to the biblical account except in their capacity to bear sons. Rachel anguished over her inability to conceive and finally turned over her maid, Bilhah, to Jacob so that he could have sons through her (Genesis 30:1-8). This script was previously played out by Sarah and her maid, Hagar, who bore a son for Abraham (Genesis 16:1-6).

The desire for plentiful male offspring created a culture in which men were free to have several wives, and situations such as Bilhah's and Hagar's were considered acceptable. We find only a few brief glimpses at the insecurity, shame, and anguish such situations must have caused for women.

Among the most difficult of the biblical texts to read are those that center around the outright abuse of women. Immediately following the David and Bathsheba account is the story of Tamar, a daughter of David who was the object of her brother Amnon's lust. Amnon feigned illness and called for Tamar to bring him some cakes, sending away the others at his bedside. Then, despite her pleadings and resistance, he overpowered and raped her. Another brother, Absalom, warned her to keep the incident quiet for Amnon's sake. We know nothing more of Tamar except that she "dwelt, a desolate woman, in her brother Absalom's house" (2 Samuel 13:20).

The 19th chapter of Genesis records the sojourn of two men in the home of Lot. The men of the city of Sodom surrounded Lot's home and demanded to see the two visitors, desiring them for homosexual rape. Lot condemned them for their wickedness and then offered to the crowd his two virgin daughters in place of the two men. Fortunately, the daughters were saved from such a fate.

A disturbing underlying assumption of the story is that homosexual rape is more sinful than heterosexual rape, that the violation of young women is not as serious an offense as the violation of men. Such a double standard surfaced in more subtle ways in Hebrew law as well. Adultery was considered a most serious offense because it was seen as a violation of a man's property rights, and a significant part of Tamar's desolation resulted from her being considered "damaged property" after her rape.

Women went from the homes of their fathers to the homes of their husbands. Women on their own had no rights and no means of survival. Widows and their children were the most vulnerable class in Hebrew culture, and the phrase "widows and orphans" appears throughout the scriptures as the paradigmatic example of oppression and powerlessness.

The Book of Ruth is the story of two widows who, left to glean in the fields, survive by their own resourcefulness and love for one another. But ultimately they recognized that long-term survival depended on the protections of a stable relationship with a man, and Ruth married an in-law, Boaz.

Concubinage was acceptable under Hebrew law. It created a class of women who faced the vulnerability of living with a man under a virtual sexual slave-master relationship, without the legal protections and securities of marriage. An unnamed concubine of Bethlehem was not as fortunate as Lot's daughters in Sodom.

Judges 19 tells the story of the concubine, who had left her master, a Levite, and returned to the home of her father. The Levite went after her and was bringing her back when night fell. They slept in the open square of a city, where an old man discovered them and then took them into his home.

As in Sodom, the men of the city knocked on the door and demanded the Levite for immoral purposes. The old man condemned them for their wickedness and offered instead his virgin daughter and the concubine. "Ravish them and do with them what seems good to you; but against this man do not do so vile a thing," the old man said to the crowd of men. So the man "seized his concubine, and put her out to them; and they all knew her, and abused her all night until the morning" (Judges 19:24-25). At dawn the men let her go, and the woman went and fell down at the door of the old man's house.

What follows the brutal gang rape is equally appalling:

Her master rose up in the morning, and when he opened the doors of the house and went out to go on his way, behold, there was his concubine lying at the door of the house, with her hands on the threshold. He said to her, "Get up, let us be going." But there was no answer.
Then he put her upon the ass; and the man rose up and went away to his home. And when he entered his house, he took a knife, and laying hold of his concubine he divided her, limb by limb, into twelve pieces, and sent her throughout all the territory of Israel. - Judges 19:27-29

Such unspeakable violence is only possible in a culture in which women have been so objectified as to be considered less than human.

The roots of the dehumanization go deep. The creation story itself has been misused to justify the subjugation of women, and Eve has been burdened with responsibility for giving evil a toehold in the world. Such a view has served through the centuries to equate women with temptation, deception, and manipulation.

WITH SUCH A VIEW predominating in Hebrew culture, it is no surprise that patriarchal assumptions carry over into the New Testament. We don't confront there the brutal subjugation that seems to be a foundational pattern in the Hebrew Testament, but we are still faced with a biblical record whose primary players are men.

The narrative focuses around Jesus, the circle of 12 men closest to him, then Paul and the other missionaries who established the early church. The chronicle of events is authored by men who offer us a Word that is at the same time inspired by God and limited by the perspective of the vessels of that Word.

Language is often jarring. The liberating message of Galatians 3:28, which affirms that in Christ "there is neither male nor female," is couched between verses proclaiming that we are all "sons of God" and "Abraham's offspring."

We continue in the New Testament to be negligible, as we read that when Jesus fed the crowd on seven loaves and a few fish, "Those who ate were four thousand men, besides women and children" (Matthew 15:38). And words addressed to particular conflicts in specific historical situations, especially Paul's words about the role of women in a few of the early churches, have been distorted into universal truths about the second-class status of women in the faith.

Faced with such evidence of our assumed inferiority - and even non-existence - in our faith tradition, as Christian women we need to find creative ways to see the good news behind the hurt and pain.

We can start by recovering God's original intention. The creation narrative makes plain that we were created "in the image of God...male and female" (Genesis 1:27). We bear the mark of God, too.

God's original plan included partnership between man and woman. Subjugation was part of the Fall, part of the arrangement created by sin (Genesis 3:16). Redemptive relationships include respect and mutuality.

The liberating message of the prophets is for us as well. The repeated call for an end to oppression included justice for the widows as well as the slaves. The condemnation of the power arrangements that created marginalized classes included the seeds of a new vision for women as well as men. This vision was given flesh in the person of Jesus.

Neither Male Nor Female
An understanding of the revolutionary nature of the social vision that would be fulfilled in Jesus was first entrusted to a woman. Even before Jesus was born, Mary gave forth praise for the day that had arrived in which God had "put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree...filled the hungry with good things, and the rich...sent empty away" (Luke 1:52-53).

The day had already arrived for Mary. A poor Jewish woman had been chosen to bear the good news, to carry in her flesh the son of God. It was the women, Mary and Elizabeth, who understood first, while Joseph tried to keep things quiet and Zechariah was struck silent for his unbelief.

Women were the most significant people not only at the beginning of Jesus' life, but also the ones who stayed closest to him in his death. While the disciples huddled in fear during events surrounding the crucifixion, the women kept vigil at the cross. And they were the first witnesses to the risen Christ who then told the news to the disciples. The revelation of the resurrection to Mary Magdalene and the others was particularly astounding in a society in which the testimony of women was considered unreliable and inadmissible in court.

Throughout his life Jesus' response to women was one of compassion and inclusion, a rare posture in his day. He was not afraid to be seen in public with the most marginalized "sinners" - prostitutes, adulteress, and a woman who had been "unclean" for many years with a flow of blood. He revealed himself as the Messiah to the Samaritan woman at the well, invited Mary of Bethany to sit with him and learn, welcomed Mary Magdalene into his circle of friends, and received an anointing of rich ointment before his death, rebuking his disciples for criticizing the woman who lavished such attention on him.

The epistles, too, carry kernels of liberation. Life in Christ bears this promise: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).

This verse was a baptismal formula in the early church. To be part of Christ meant to be baptized into a new social order in which there was no place for divisions based on race, class, or sex.

Each pair of attributes contains one that is considered better than the other. Paul often gave exhortation to correct the Jews' perception that they were more faithful than the Gentiles; it was clearly better to be free than a slave; and Jewish males gave regular thanks in a traditional Jewish prayer for not being born women.

The message of the verse is that all experience is valid. Wholeness doesn't lose distinctions but places value on all perspectives. And distinctions are not to be used as reasons for division or oppression. Unity can come only when all experience - that of women as well as men - is valued and made part of the church's history.

We can go a long way toward recovering our history. Though our stories seem few and far between in the biblical record, we can celebrate the rather miraculous fact that women like Deborah, Esther, and Priscilla broke through the limitations of patriarchy and helped to shape history. Against all odds they became, respectively, a prophetess and judge over Israel, a queen who pleaded for and saved the lives of her people, and an articulate church leader who risked her life to save Paul's.

We can also deepen our history by writing in the stories of women like Bathsheba, who can help us understand our own pain and oppression and invite us into a solidarity with women past and present.

Perhaps most important, with the knowledge that other women have gone courageously before us, we can refuse to be the victims of history and claim our right to be its shapers. The record of faith is not yet closed. It is being constantly written by people who attempt to live their lives in faithfulness to God. Throughout history that has always included women and men. It is our responsibility to see that our half of the story gets written.

Joyce Hollyday was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.