“Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew her
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah”
Alan Light dove deep into the history of Leonard’s Cohen most famous song in his book The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of ‘Hallelujah‘ revealing how Cohen struggled with eighty (!) initial verses detailing David’s notorious crimes before narrowing it down to four. Cohen’s personal struggles at the time echoed through the poem’s final form, as he later spoke about it: “Finally I understood that it was not necessary to refer to the Bible anymore. And I rewrote this song; this is the ‘secular’ ‘Hallelujah.’ ”
Cohen was hardly the first to face the terrible tale that is the turning point in King David’s story and career. Generations of biblical readers have found weird ways to try and absolve him of the sins he commits in today’s infamous chapter.
Led by lust, David breaks 3 of the 10 commandments as this story unfolds: Coveting a man’s wife, having sex with her, and killing her husband.
As the war rages on, David’s back in Jerusalem, trusting his generals to win. From his penthouse, at dusk, he spots the beautiful Bathsheba, a soldier’s wife, bathing. We follow his male gaze penetrating her private moment. Messengers are sent to summon her over to his bed.
Bathsheba - her Hebrew name Bat-Sheva might mean ‘The Seventh Daughter’ or the “Daughter of the Oath”, is perhaps alluding to her important social status. Her father, Eliam, and her husband, Uriah, are members of David’s inner circle, with him since his outlaw days, and highly respected. Uriah is identified as a Hittite, one of the local Canaanite people. Most assume that Bathsheba’s origins are Judean, but that is not made clear. The Hittites are key coalition partners for David and later Solomon and David’s violation of this woman who now identifies with them also adds to the problematic politics of this incident, beyond the moral, ethical and legal dimensions.
She is not asked for consent at any stage of this story.
She will have lots to say in the future, but throughout this defining chapter in her life only two of her words are recorded, sent to David through a messenger:
וַתַּ֖הַר הָאִשָּׁ֑ה וַתִּשְׁלַח֙ וַתַּגֵּ֣ד לְדָוִ֔ד וַתֹּ֖אמֶר הָרָ֥ה אָנֹֽכִי׃
The woman conceived, and she sent word to David, “I am pregnant.”
The king will up up having her husband, the loyal soldier Uriya, killed in battle to cover up his tracks.
After her husband is killed on the front, the pregnant widow moves into the harem and gives birth to a baby boy.
“Is there anything a king cannot do?” Tikva Frymer-Kensky asks in Reading the Women of the Bible wonders. “David, the imperial king, may be testing his limits… Motives and intentions of the story are left to the readers, who have come up with many versions of the story over the years.”
The maneuverings and manipulations of most of the Talmudic and medieval Jewish commentators Frymer-Kensky refers to, as they try to claim David’s continued innocence is impressive - and disturbing. But there were always other voices of protest, suspicious of this patriarchal painful history - even way pre #metoo. They’ve been those who asked and sought other ways of telling this story for it really is. Those questioning voices include, incredibly, whoever managed its very inclusion in the biblical canon. These authors or editors may indicate an opposition to David’s legacy, and perhaps even to the concept of the monarchy itself, embedded in the telling of this tale itself. For why else was this bad publicity included?
Literary critics remind us that the scribes and storytellers who spun this story in the royal court of King Solomon and his descendants were describing Solomon’s mother - the kingmaker, Queen Batsheva, and the story of her ascent on the scene. Did they want to depict her as rape victim or an innocent woman who knew opportunity when it came her way to rise and rule?
There’s much to protest and explore in this despicable tale of david. In
The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel, Halbertal and Holmes unpack what may be at the root of the story - the corruption of power and the price paid by ordinary people for the privilege of having an all powerful king:
“In the world portrayed by the Book of Samuel, organized political structures -- especially the powers to tax and conscript -- originate in violence. They arise initially from the need to establish an adequate collective response to hostile outside forces. This originally defensive political project, as the author of the Book of Samuel understood it, is inescapably afflicted by the prospect of a self-defeating turnaround: if the sovereign ruler amasses sufficient power to safeguard his people from outside threats, he will also be in a position to redirect that power to torment and abuse his people with sovereign impunity.
The subtlest features of this imperious rechanneling of political violence from foreign threats toward the king’s own subjects go far beyond the potentially unfair but in principle acceptable burdens of taxation and conscription against which the prophet Samuel so heatedly warned. These features are explored through..David’s murder of his loyal officer Uriah along with the collateral killing of some of Israel’s best soldiers in 2 Samuel 11. Read closely, this story conveys the Samuel author’s penetrating grasp of the origins and nature of political crime….
David was coolly confident to the point of recklessness. He felt no particular need for discretion. He sent one messenger to inquire about the beautiful woman and he sent others to fetch her and bring her to his palace. But David’s nonchalance conveys more than the careless mind-set of a domestically unchallenged ruler. As other readers of these verses have noted, the verb “send” dominates the narrative. By repeatedly employing this verb, the author wishes to stress a central feature of both the way power is constituted and how it operates.
Hierarchically organized power is defined by the power-wielder’s capacity to act from a distance. Delegation involves the capacity to create extended causal chains, embroiling and implicating multiple subordinates whose actions radiate downward from an apex or outward from a center. The longer the chain, the greater the power of the sovereign who acts invisibly though its multiple links. It is as if the arm of the sovereign literally reached its remote objective through a succession of proxies carrying out his commands. So the repetition of the verb “send,” which pervades the entire narrative, emphasizes the centrality of acting from a distance to the exercise of great political power. The ruler’s numerous messengers, surrogates, and agents serve not only as tools of his power but, more significantly in the present context, as decoys obscuring the initiator’s identity and disguising his stage-management of the way the action unfolds.”
The legendary teacher of Torah and biblical scholar Nechama Leibowitz once claimed that “It is prohibited to teach chapter 11, without teaching chapter 12.”
She brings our attention to the chapter’s end, in which a baby boy is born to Bathsheba and David, and that this whole affair is evil in the eyes of YHWH, who, like us, has been watching. And it doesn’t end there. The story continues tomorrow, reminding David, and us, that nobody’s perfect, and nobody, not even anointed kings can remain above the law.
Or can they? Only at this point in the story does the author clearly make an explicit moral judgment about David’s actions. Robert Alter comments that “The invocation of God’s judgment is the introduction to the appearance of Nathan the prophet, reliving first a moral parable and then God’s grim curse on David and his house.”
It’s a broken hallelujah, all the way.
Image: Bathsheba at Her Bath (Bathsheba Holding King David's Letter) by Rembrandt, 1654
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