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David, Bathsheba, and Uriah
At the season when kings normally campaign, David remains in Jerusalem. From the roof of the king’s house he sees Bathsheba washing, learns that she is Uriah’s wife, sends for her, sleeps with her, and receives word that she is pregnant. Test the tradition: the text puts David on the rooftop; it does not say Bathsheba was bathing on a rooftop or deliberately trying to attract him, and it gives no seduction motive for her.
David recalls Uriah and repeatedly attempts to send him home. Uriah refuses the comforts of home while the ark and Israel’s soldiers are in the field, even after David gets him drunk.
David writes Joab an order placing Uriah in the hardest fighting and withdrawing support from him. Uriah unknowingly carries the message that arranges his own death.
Joab carefully prepares a messenger for David, anticipating criticism over the dangerous approach to the wall. The report ends with the information David most wanted: Uriah is dead.
Bathsheba mourns Uriah, then David brings her into his house and she bears a son. The narrator breaks David’s apparent success with the decisive verdict that what David did displeased the LORD.
First Kings later gives an inspired retrospective that David generally did what was right before YHWH except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite, explicitly singling out the sin narrated in 2 Samuel 11. The later verdict confirms the exceptional gravity of David’s abuse, adultery, and orchestrated killing.
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