Bathsheba Quotes

Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.

Once upon a time there was a wicked witch and her name was Lilith Eve Hagar Jezebel Delilah Pandora Jahi Tamar and there was a wicked witch and she was also called goddess and her name was Kali Fatima Artemis Hera Isis Mary Ishtar and there was a wicked witch and she was also called queen and her name was Bathsheba Vashti Cleopatra Helen Salome Elizabeth Clytemnestra Medea and there was a wicked witch and she was also called witch and her name was Joan Circe Morgan le Fay Tiamat Maria Leonza Medusa and they had this in common: that they were feared, hated, desired, and worshiped.

He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not break.

Don’t get smart - you two are in a heap of trouble!” snarled Anderson. “Names!” “Names?” repeated the long-haired driver. “Er — well, let’s see. There’s Wilberforce . . . Bathsheba . . . Elvendork . . .” “And what’s nice about that one is, you can use it for a boy or a girl,” said the boy in glasses. “Oh, our names, did you mean?” asked the first, as Anderson spluttered with rage. “You should’ve said! This here is James Potter, and I’m Sirius Black!” “Things’ll be seriously black for you in a minute, you cheeky little —

Maybe it takes a devil to fight a devil,” I said. “But at the end of that fight, Bathsheba,” he said, “don’t only devils remain?

Well, what I mean is that I shouldn’t mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband. But since a woman can’t show off in that way by herself, I shan’t marry—at least not yet.

You cannot move forward if you are always thinking backwards

Don't take on about her, Gabriel. What difference does it make whose sweetheart she is, since she can't be yours?' 'That's the very thing I say to myself,' said Gabriel.

You know, mistress, that I love you, and shall love you always

There are occasions when girls like Bathsheba will put up with a great deal of unconventional behavior. When they want to be praised, which is often; when they want to be mastered, which is sometimes; and when they want no nonsense, which is seldom.

There is a loquacity that tells nothing, which was Bathsheba's; and there is a silence which says much: that was Gabriel's.

When the love-led man had ceased from his labours Bathsheba came and looked him in the face. 'Gabriel, will you you stay on with me?' she said, smiling winningly, and not troubling to bring her lips quite together again at the end, because there was going to be another smile soon. 'I will,' said Gabriel. And she smiled on him again.

Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women do when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.

By making inquiries he found that the girl's name was Bathsheba Everdene, and that the cow would go dry in about seven days. He dreaded the eighth day.

Dazzled by brass and scarlet - O, Bathsheba - this is a woman's folly indeed!

She felt powerless to withstand or deny him. He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind, finds it to blow so strongly that it stops the breath.

The difference between love and respect was markedly shown in her conduct. Bathsheba had spoken of her interest in Boldwood with the greatest freedom to Liddy, but she only communed with her own heart concerning Troy.

Bathsheba, though she had too much understanding to be entirely governed by her womanliness, had too much womanliness to use her understanding to the best advantage.

I have danced at your skittish heels, my beautiful Bathsheba, for many a long mile and many a long day.

The rarest offerings of the purest loves are but a self-indulgence, and no generosity at all. Bathsheba,

Bathsheba looked at Benedict. "You never told me they were matchmaking." "He didn't notice!" said his father before Benedict could answer. "He didn't notice handsome young misses of unexceptionable family. He didn't notice beautiful heiresses. We tried bluestockings. We tried country girls. We tried everything. He didn't notice! But Bathsheba Winngate, the most notorious woman in all of England, he noticed." "We notorious women tend to stand out," she said.

But you are too lovely even to care to be kind as others are.

A new beginning is better than an old ending

If you fight the devil, you become him." “Maybe it takes a devil to fight a devil,” I said. “But at the end of that fight, Bathsheba,” he said, “don’t only devils remain?

There are occasions when girls like Bathsheba will put up with a great deal of unconventional behaviour. When they want to be praised, which is often, when they want to be mastered, which is sometimes; and when they want no nonsense, which is seldom.

Oak was just thinking that whatever he himself might have suffered from Bathsheba's marriage, here was a man who had suffered more, when Boldwood spoke in a changed voice—that of one who yearned to make a confidence and relieve his heart by an outpouring.

He will forgive you, but he won't remove the consequences... We must learn to obey

Never take the first brick out of the wall unless you know it is meant to fall

There are considerations even before my consideration for you; reparations to be made-ties you know nothing of. If you repent of marrying, so do I.

It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession; with totally differing aims the method is the same on both sides. But the understood incentive on the woman's part was wanting here. Besides, Bathsheba's position as absolute mistress of a farm and house was a novel one, and the novelty had not yet begun to wear off.

In the worst attacks of trouble there appears to be always a superficial film of consciousness which is left disengaged and open to the notice of trifles, and Bathsheba was faintly amused at the boy's method, till he too passed on.

Never forget who you are or where you have come from while being found by others

He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind, finds it blow so strongly that it stops the breath.

Boldwood always carried with him a social atmosphere of his own, which everybody felt who came near him; and the talk, which Bathsheba's presence had somewhat suppressed, was now totally suspended.

Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable. Gabriel lately, for the first time since his prostration by misfortune, had been independent in thought and vigorous in action to a marked extent-conditions which, powerless without an opportunity as an opportunity without them is barren, would have given him a sure lift upwards when the favourable conjunction should have occurred. But this incurable loitering beside Bathsheba Everdene stole his time ruinously. The spring tides were going by without floating him off, and the neap might soon come which could not.

Bathsheba," he said tenderly and in surprise, and coming closer: "if I only knew one thing- you would allow me to love you and win you. and marry you after all-- if I only knew that.!" "But you never will know", she murmured. "Why?" "Because you never ask." "Oh-Oh!" said Gabriel, with a low laugh of joyousness. "My own dear-

I have dealt with the poor, Bathsheba. They need a great deal, but I do not believe they feel any great want for aristocratic females dressed in the latest stare of fashion telling them they are proud, vain, and licentious.

We want our way like David with Bathsheba We are dreamers we are schemers like Jacob the deceiver But You meet us at the river and You show us a good fight Then You bless us and You name us and You make morning of our night

Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.

If you have the strength to stay, you have the power to leave

Boldwood, whose unreasoning devotion to Bathsheba could only be characterized as a fond madness which neither time nor circumstance, evil nor good report, could weaken or destroy. This fevered hope had grown up again like a grain of mustard-seed during the quiet which followed the hasty conjecture that Troy was drowned. He nourished it fearfully, and almost shunned the contemplation of it in earnest, lest facts should reveal the wildness of the dream. Bathsheba having at last been persuaded

If you fights the devil, you become him. "Maybe it takes a devil to fight a devil," I said "But at the end of that fight, Bathsheba," he said, "don't only devils remain?" And for a moment in the ocean, there was only blackness. We were alone. Even with ourselves And whatever devils lurked, unseen.

Hence Bathsheba lived in a perception that her purposes were broken off. She was not a woman who could hope on without good materials for the process, differing thus from the less far-sighted and energetic, though more petted ones of the sex, with whom hope goes on as a sort of clockwork which the merest food and shelter are sufficient to wind up; and perceiving clearly that her mistake had been a fatal one, she accepted her position, and waited coldly for the end.

Heaven opened then, indeed. The flash sprang from east, west, north, south, and was a perfect dance of death. The forms of skeletons appeared in the air, shaped with blue fire for bones-- dancing, leaping, striding, and mingling in unparalleled confusion. With these were intertwined snakes of green, rising and falling, and behind these was a broad mass of lesser light. From every part of the tumbling sky came a shout. ... Gabriel was almost blinded, and he could feel Bathsheba's warm arm tremble in his hand-- a sensation new and thrilling. But love, life, everything human, seemed small and trifling beside the spectacle of an infuriated universe.

Always remember who you are and where you have come from while in the process of being found by others

Silence did not always mean indifference

...as Milton's Satan first saw Paradise.

–Me quedaré –dijo Gabriel. Y Bathsheba volvió a sonreír.

Tras realizar algunas averiguaciones supo que el nombre de la muchacha era Bathsheba Everdene

Bathsheba había alcanzado ese punto en el que la gente deja de preocuparse por lo que los demás puedan pensar.

Jerusalem is a very small town. And Bathsheba was a very loud woman. Maybe even Uriah knew.

Todo lo que conseguí de Bathsheba fueron balas de paja, pero cuando estaba conmigo creí que eran promesas talladas en piedras preciosas.

Polly was the same age as Alma, but daintier and startlingly beautiful. She looked like a perfect figurine carved out of fine French soap, into which someone had inlaid a pair of glittering peacock-blue eyes. But it was the tiny pink pillow of her mouth that made this girl more than simply pretty; it made her an unsettling little voluptuary, a Bathsheba wrought in miniature.

Bathsheba you are the first woman of any shade or nature that I have ever looked at to love, and it is the having been so near claiming you for my own that makes this denial so hard to bear. How nearly you promised me! But I don't speak now to move your heart, and make you grieve because of my pain; it is no use, that. I must bear it; my pain would get no less by paining you.

Bathsheba's was an impulsive nature under a deliberative aspect. An Elizabeth in brain and a Mary Stuart in spirit, she often performed actions of the greatest temerity with a manner of extreme discretion.

Well, what is your opinion of my conduct," she said, quietly. "That it is unworthy of any thoughtful, and meek, and comely woman." In an instant Bathsheba's face coloured with the angry crimson of a Danby sunset. But she forbore to utter this feeling, and the reticence of her tongue only made the loquacity of her face the more noticeable. The next thing Gabriel did was to make a mistake. "Perhaps you don't like the rudeness of my reprimanding you, for I know it is rudeness; but I thought it would do good.

Never since the broadsword became the national weapon had there been more dexterity shown in its management than by the hands of Sergeant Troy, and never had he been in such splendid temper for the performance as now in the evening sunshine among the ferns with Bathsheba. It may safely be asserted with respect to the closeness of his cuts, that had it been possible for the edge of the sword to leave in the air a permanent substance wherever it flew past, the space left untouched would have been almost a mould of Bathsheba's figure.

Her original vigorous pride of youth had sickened, and with it had declined all her anxieties about coming years, since anxiety recognizes a better and a worse alternative, and Bathsheba had made up her mind that alternatives on any noteworthy scale had ceased for her.

Boldwood had not been outside his garden since his meeting with Bathsheba in the road to Yalbury. Silent and alone, he had remained in moody meditation on woman's ways, deeming as essentials of the whole sex the accidents of the single one of their number he had ever closely beheld.

He leaned forward. “Bathsheba,” he said in the soft Scottish drawl that always caused unwarranted tremors to shiver through her. “Are you trying to seduce me?” Yes. She would die before saying it out loud. “Would it be faster to try to hire you?” Liam laughed. “You couldn’t afford me, love.

This is how the devil works with temptation—little compromises. King David committed adultery with Bathsheba, murdered Uriah, and lied to his people. And it began with a small, lingering, lustful look. We should pray, “Lord, lead me away from even the little things, because that’s how the big things start.

She was going to be okay. I knew she was. She had forever changed my life and I had changed hers. I had heard a soldier once speak of the camaraderie men who fight in battle have with each other. I felt that way with Bathsheba now. She was more than just a name in my Bible, and we’d become more than just friends.

Whether he chooses a 'scholarly' or a 'popular' edition the modern reader is likely to have his judgement influenced in advance. Almost invariably he will be offered an assisted passage. Footnotes, Forewords, Afterwords serve notice that a given text is intellectually taxing—that he is likely to need help. Such apparatus is likely to be a positive disincentive to casual reading. But a cheaper edition may offer interference of another kind. Reminders, in words or pictures, of Julie Christie's Bathsheba Everdene or Michael York's Pip can perhaps create a beguiling sense of accessibility. But they may also pre-empt the imaginative responses of the reader.

Was Bathsheba altogether blind to the obvious fact that the support of a lover's arms is not of a kind best calculated to assist a resolve to renounce him? Or was she sophistically sensible, with a thrill of pleasure, that by adopting this course for getting rid of him she was ensuring a meeting with him, at any rate, once more?

What I meant to tell you was only this', she said eagerly, and yet half-conscious of the absurdity of the position she had made for herself: 'that nobody has got me yet as a sweetheart, instead of my having a dozen as my aunt said; I hate to be thought men's property in that way_ though possibly I shall be to be had some day" Bathsheba Everdene

Although she scarcely knew the divinity's name, Diana was the goddess whom Bathsheba instinctively adored. That she had never, by look, word, or sign, encouraged a man to approach her—that she had felt herself sufficient to herself, and had in the independence of her girlish heart fancied there was a certain degradation in renouncing the simplicity of a maiden existence to become the humbler half of an indifferent matrimonial whole—were facts now bitterly remembered. Oh, if she had never stooped to folly of this kind, respectable as it was, and could only stand again, as she had stood on the hill at Norcombe, and dare Troy or any other man to pollute a hair of her head by his interference!

I have walked arm in arm in the lion’s den with Daniel. I stood with David when he was tempted by Bathsheba as she bathed at the pool. I have been in the fiery furnace with Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego. I slew two thousand with Samson when he swung the jawbone, and was blinded with St. Paul on the road to Damascus. I wept with Mary at Golgotha.

There are occasions when girls like Bathsheba will put up with a great deal of unconventional behaviour. When they want to be praised, which is often, when they want to be mastered, which is sometimes; and when they want no nonsense, which is seldom. Just now the first feeling was in the ascendant with Bathsheba, with a dash of the second. Moreover,

The more she tried to live a perfect life for God, the more she recognized her failings.

Never forget that everything you have, even the breath in your body, comes from the Almighty One, so be grateful for all you are given.

-خانم شما چوپان نمی خواهید؟ دختر روبند از چهره گشود. چهره اش سراپا شگفتی بود. گابریل و دلدار سنگدلش-بت شبا اوردین- رودرروی هم بودند! بت شبا چیزی نگفت و او بی اندیشه، با صدایی شرمزده و اندوهگین، تکرار کرد:"خانم، چوپان می خواهید؟

He crossed over towards Bathsheba, who turned to greet him with a carriage of perfect ease. He spoke to her in low tones, and she instinctively modulated her own to the same pitch, and her voice ultimately even caught the inflection of his. She was far from having a wish to appear mysteriously connected with him; but woman at the impressionable age gravitates to the larger body not only in her choice of words, which is apparent every day, but even in her shades of tone and humour, when the influence is great.

Y al fin el octavo día llegó. La vaca había dejado de dar leche para el resto del año, y Bathsheba Everdene no volvería a subir la colina. Gabriel había alcanzado un punto en su existencia que jamás habría podido imaginar poco antes. Disfrutaba diciendo « Bathsheba» en privado, en lugar de silbar; y empezó a gustarle más el pelo negro, pese a que desde niño se había jurado fiel al castaño, distanciándose de los demás hasta ocupar a sus ojos un espacio insignificante. El amor es una fuerza posible que nace de una debilidad real.

You know, mistress, that I love you, and shall love you always. I only mention this to bring to your mind that at any rate I would wish to do you no harm: beyond that I put it aside. I have lost in the race for money and good things, and I am not such a fool as to pretend to 'ee now I am poor, and you have got altogether above me. But Bathsheba, dear mistress, this I beg you to consider -- that, both to keep yourself well honoured among the workfolk, and in common generosity to an honourable man who loves you as well as I, you should be more discreet in your bearing towards this soldier.

Carew was always a partisan of my wife. I mean, of Katherine. Then of Mary, crying up her rights.’ Henry is thoughtful. ‘Carew’s wife is still a beautiful woman.’ He almost drops his papers. He imagines the words dragged out of him: Majesty, I know you had to do with Eliza Bryan in your young days, but you cannot order a man’s death and then marry his widow. King David sent Uriah into battle to be killed: thereafter, he impregnated Bathsheba, who gave birth to a dying child. He thinks, somebody else will have to tell him. Lord Audley. Fitz. I have had enough of refraining him from what will hurt him, slapping away his hand like a nursemaid.

them flouncing into the pool, drinking, tossing up their heads, drinking again, the water dribbling from their lips in silver threads. There was another flounce, and they came out of the pond, and turned back again towards the farm. She looked further around. Day was just dawning, and beside its cool air and colours her heated actions and resolves of the night stood out in lurid contrast. She perceived that in her lap, and clinging to her hair, were red and yellow leaves which had come down from the tree and settled silently upon her during her partial sleep. Bathsheba shook her dress to get rid of them, when multitudes of the same family lying round about her rose and fluttered away in the breeze thus created, "like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing." There was an opening towards the east, and the glow from the as yet unrisen sun attracted her eyes thither. From her feet, and between the beautiful yellowing ferns with their feathery arms, the ground sloped downwards to a hollow, in which was a species of swamp, dotted with fungi. A morning mist hung over it now—a fulsome yet magnificent silvery veil, full of light from the sun, yet semi-opaque—the hedge behind it being in some measure hidden by its hazy luminousness. Up the sides of this depression grew sheaves of the common rush, and here and there a peculiar species of flag, the blades of which glistened in the emerging sun, like scythes. But the general aspect of the swamp was malignant. From its moist and poisonous coat seemed to be exhaled the essences of evil things in the earth, and in the waters under the earth. The fungi grew in all manner of positions from rotting leaves and tree stumps, some exhibiting to her listless gaze their clammy tops, others their oozing gills. Some were marked with great splotches, red as arterial blood, others were saffron yellow, and others tall and attenuated, with stems like macaroni. Some were leathery and of richest browns. The hollow seemed a nursery of pestilences small and great, in the immediate neighbourhood of comfort and health, and Bathsheba arose with a tremor at the thought of having passed the night on the brink of so dismal a place.

I looked at Batsheva and suddenly felt as I had throughout that long night after I'd returned from Beit Lehem, when I sat up waiting for some stillborn vision. I knew now why I felt so ill that night. All through that vigil, he had been raping her. And I had let myself call it a seduction. As I looked at her now, I was shamed by my own thoughts. In a way, I, too, had violated her.

Listening to the rabbis, one would’ve thought the only figures worth mention in the whole of history were Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph . . . David, Saul, Solomon . . . Moses, Moses, Moses. When I was finally able to read the Scriptures for myself, I discovered (behold!) there were women. To be ignored, to be forgotten, this was the worst sadness of all. I swore an oath to set down their accomplishments and praise their flourishings, no matter how small. I would be a chronicler of lost stories. It was exactly the kind of boldness Mother despised. On the day I opened the chest for Yaltha, I had completed the stories of Eve, Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Leah, Zilpah, Bilhah, and Esther. But there was so much remaining to be written—Judith, Dinah, Tamar, Miriam, Deborah, Ruth, Hannah, Bathsheba, Jezebel.

She was conquered; but she would never own it as long as she lived. Her pride was indeed brought low by despairing discoveries of her spoliation by marriage with a less pure nature than her own. She chafed to and fro in rebelliousness, like a caged leopard; her whole soul was in arms, and the blood fired her face. Until she had met Troy, Bathsheba had been proud of her position as a woman; it had been a glory to her to know that her lips had been touched by no man's on earth—that her waist had never been encircled by a lover's arm. She hated herself now. In those earlier days she had always nourished a secret contempt for girls who were the slaves of the first good-looking young fellow who should choose to salute them. She had never taken kindly to the idea of marriage in the abstract as did the majority of women she saw about her.

She flung her arms round Troy's neck, exclaiming wildly from the deepest deep of her heart— "Don't—don't kiss them! O, Frank, I can't bear it—I can't! I love you better than she did: kiss me too, Frank—kiss me! You will, Frank, kiss me too!" There was something so abnormal and startling in the childlike pain and simplicity of this appeal from a woman of Bathsheba's calibre and independence, that Troy, loosening her tightly clasped arms from his neck, looked at her in bewilderment. It was such an unexpected revelation of all women being alike at heart, even those so different in their accessories as Fanny and this one beside him, that Troy could hardly seem to believe her to be his proud wife Bathsheba. Fanny's own spirit seemed to be animating her frame. But this was the mood of a few instants only. When the momentary surprise had passed, his expression changed to a silencing imperious gaze. "I will not kiss you!" he said pushing her away.

One more story from the Bible, about King David. He slept with a married woman, Bathsheba, and got her pregnant. In order to cover up his transgression, David arranged for Bathsheba’s husband, a soldier, to die in battle. David then took Bathsheba as his own wife. God sent a prophet named Nathan to let David know this behavior was unacceptable. But how does a lowly prophet go about imparting such a message to the king of Israel? Nathan told him a story. He described to David two men, one rich and one poor. The rich man had huge flocks of animals; the poor man had just one little lamb, whom he treated like a member of his family. One day a traveler came through. The rich man, Nathan told King David, was happy to feed the traveler but he didn’t want to take a sheep from his own flock. So he took the poor man’s only lamb, killed it, and served it to the traveler. The story enrages David: “The man who did this deserves to die,” he says. “That man,” Nathan tells him, “is you.” Case closed. Nathan didn’t berate David with rules—Hey, don’t covet your neighbor’s wife! Hey, don’t kill! Hey, don’t commit adultery!—even though David had broken all of them. He just told a story about a lamb. Very persuasive.

In the stories of faith I grew up with, men were allowed a full range of emotion: King David, who calls on God to destroy his enemies. Absalom rising up against his father the king. Jonah stewing under his tree, looking out on the city God saved but he hates. Job crying out to God for his miserable fate. But the rage of good women in the Bible is all in the subtext. Nowhere is there an Eve angry for being removed from Eden and the loss of her two sons. Where is Esther, where is her horror and pain watching the genocide of her people? Or Ruth, who followed her miserable mother-in-law to a foreign land and had to listen to that lady bitching as if she felt nothing? The women allowed to have feelings in the Bible are always the villains. Michal sneering at David that he ought to put his clothes on and stop dancing like a naked fool. She is indicted for her words, but hadn’t she just been married, abandoned, and then taken back by this man? Used as a political pawn, then ignored for Bathsheba. Then there is Sarah, who beat her maidservant Hagar, blaming her for what should have rightly fallen on the shoulders of Abraham. And Job’s wife, who Biblical scholars condemn for telling her husband to curse God and die. But wasn’t she just wishing him a swift end to the suffering that they had walked through hand in hand?

She had her head down, her back half turned to me. But even from that partial view, I could see that she was, as David had said, a striking woman: creamy skin, a glossy fall of obsidian hair, which she wore unbound and uncovered. Even in her loose robe it was possible to discern long, slender legs, a supple rounding of hips, and generous breasts, against which the baby lay, his thick shock of hair bearing fiery witness to his paternity. When David presented her she looked up, and I took a step backward. Her eyes were unexpected: a luminous blue. Also shocking: despite her tall, full figure, the face that gazed up at me was the face of a child. She was very young.

Bath-sheba was not only the mother of Solomon, but also the distant ancestress of Christ. For us, therefore, these Hittites of Judæa have a very special and peculiar interest.

When I read the stories in the Bible about people such as Sarah, Jacob, or David, what stands out is not their virtue but their very strong wants. Sarah wanted her son to prevail over Hagar's son, Jacob wanted his older brother's blessing, and David wanted Bathsheba. While these cravings clearly bought them all kinds of well-deserved trouble, they also kept these characters very, very alive. Their desires propelled them in ways that God could use, better than God could use those who never colored outside the lines.

Tilly might say that it’s not fair that it’s the presidents and generals, the famous scholars and civic leaders, who get the monuments. But she’s also too young to see the way that we’re all acting out the same stories, over and over again. We are all, at any given moment, Adam or Eve, Bathsheba or Odysseus or Scarlett O’Hara. The Little Match Girl or someone you read about in the newspaper. Seen from a great distance, it might appear that none of us is ever doing anything new at all.

An idle mind was a recipe for disaster. Bathsheba wasn’t just teetering on the edge; I knew she was going to be diving right into a pool of tragedy.

But then there is Bathsheba’s statement in 1 Kings 1:17: “She said to him [David], ‘My lord, you swore to your servant by YHWH your God, saying: Your son Solomon shall succeed me as king, and he shall sit on my throne.’” This adds a less savory perspective to the story.  Randall Bailey has argued that this statement, made by Bathsheba before David has made any official gestures indicating his choice of Solomon as his successor, indicates that this dynastic choice was a precondition Bathsheba set before she would marry David. 

In other words, Nathan had Bathsheba play on David’s faulty memory.  A common coping mechanism for people with dementia or Alzheimer’s like symptoms is to claim to remember things that others indicate that they should remember. 

Perhaps we could fool them, but Bathsheba was entering into a place I couldn’t help her. It was a dark place filled with the result of one night of bad choices. I could feel it beginning to erupt. It was as if Bathsheba had been sitting on a mountain and like a volcano it was getting ready to explode.

Maybe it takes a devil to fight a devil," I said. "But at the end of that fight, Bathsheba," he said, "don't only devils remain?" And for a moment there in the ocean, there was only blackness. We were alone. Even with ourselves. And whatever devils lurked, unseen.

These women were not perfect and yet God in His infinite mercy used them in His perfect plan to bring forth the Christ, the Savior of the world. We live in desperate, troubled times when millions seek answers. These women point the way. The lessons we can learn from them are as applicable today as when they lived thousands of years ago. Tamar is a woman of hope. Rahab is a woman of faith. Ruth is a woman of love. Bathsheba is a woman who received unlimited Grace. Mary is a woman of obedience.

On the sixty-fifth page the rabbis are arguing about King David and his ill-gotten wife Bathsheba, a mysterious biblical tale about which I’ve always been curious. From the fragments mentioned, it appears that Bathsheba was already married when David laid his eyes upon her, but he was so attracted to her that he deliberately sent her husband, Uriah, to the front lines so that he would be killed in war, leaving Bathsheba free to remarry. Afterward, when David had finally taken poor Bathsheba as his lawful wife, he looked into her eyes and saw in the mirror of her pupils the face of his own sin and was repulsed. After that, David refused to see Bathsheba again, and she lived the rest of her life in the king’s harem, ignored and forgotten. I now see why I’m not allowed to read the Talmud. My teachers have always told me, “David had no sins. David was a saint. It is forbidden to cast aspersions on God’s beloved son and anointed leader.” Is this the same illustrious ancestor the Talmud is referring to? Not only did David cavort with his many wives, but he had unmarried female companions as well, I discover. They are called concubines. I whisper aloud this new word, con-cu-bine, and it doesn’t sound illicit, the way it should, it only makes me think of a tall, stately tree. The concubine tree. I picture beautiful women dangling from its branches. Con-cu-bine. Bathsheba wasn’t a concubine because David honored her by taking her as his wife, but the Talmud says she was the only woman David chose who wasn’t a virgin. I think of the beautiful woman on the olive oil bottle, the extra-virgin. The rabbis say that God only intended virgins for David and that his holiness would have been defiled had he stayed with Bathsheba, who had already been married. King David is the yardstick, they say, against whom we are all measured in heaven. Really, how bad can my small stash of English books be, next to concubines? I am not aware at this moment that I have lost my innocence. I will realize it many years later. One day I will look back and understand that just as there was a moment in my life when I realized where my power lay, there was also a specific moment when I stopped believing in authority just for its own sake and started coming to my own conclusions about the world I lived in.

A king who cannot keep possession of the women who belong to him cannot hold a kingdom together. - Mother of Bathsheba

Maybe it’s only those who’ve made such chaos of their lives who understand the heights bad depths of God’s mercy. - David

Beauty is often deceitful and vain . You’ve grown up with beautiful women around you . You know how treacherous they can be. - Bathsheba

A man’s heart can die before a spear ever pierced him. - Bathsheba

A man’s hearted could rub deeper than any gift could reach.

A man’s hatred could run deeper than any gift could reach.

Every summer, we used to clean and prepare the stoch for the overnight sleep accommodations. I imagined the atmosphere on those roofs - quiet, without noise or the sound of our home appliances. No buzzing fans, no refrigerator’s groans, and no air conditioner rattling. People enjoyed their sleep. I thought it was fun, at least on those nights when I used to sleep at my grandmother's in the transit camp. The overnight stays under the open sky were fascinating. Even there on the roof they must have watched the stars and their movements up in Heaven. I could not hide my smile when I remembered the time I was on my way to see my mother, and  I noticed a woman going up to sunbathe on the roof with only a tiny bikini on her body. It was in the summer months, in one of the adjacent streets. I realized that my mother was right. There were many uses for flat roofs. I remembered, of course, the biblical story of David and Bathsheba. Yes, King David made an intelligent use of the stoch. He was on one when not far away, while on another roof, Bath-Sheba pleasantly washed herself. It turns out that she knew how to take advantage of the roof too.