Top of Page
Page Style
the spring, at the time of the year when kings go off to war, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel, and they destroyed the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem.
2 One evening David got up from his bed and strolled around on the roof of the royal palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful. 3 David sent someone to find out about the woman, and the man told him, “Isn’t this Bathsheba daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?” 4 David sent messengers to get her, and when she came to him, he lay with her. (She had just purified herself from ceremonial uncleanness because of her period.) Then she went back to her house. 5 The woman conceived, and she sent word to David, “I am pregnant.”
6 So David sent word to Joab: “Send Uriah the Hittite to me.” And Joab sent Uriah to David. 7 When Uriah came to him, David asked how Joab and the troops were faring and how the war was going. 8 Then David said to Uriah, “Go down to your house and wash your feet.” So Uriah left the palace, and a gift from the king was sent after him. 9 But Uriah slept at the entrance of the royal palace with all of the servants of his lord; and he did not go down to his house.
10 When David was told, “Uriah did not go home,” David spoke Uriah and asked him, “Haven’t you just come from a journey? Why didn’t you go home?”
11 Uriah said to David, “The ark and Israel and Judah are staying in tents, and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are camping in the open fields. How could I then go down to my house to eat and drink, and to lie with my wife? As you live, by your very life, I will not do such a thing.”
12 Then David said to him, “Stay here today also, and tomorrow I will send you back.” So Uriah remained in Jerusalem that day and the next. 13 Then David invited Uriah to eat and drink with him, and David got him drunk. But in the evening Uriah went out and slept on a bed among his master’s servants, and he did not go home.
14 In the morning David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it with Uriah. 15 In the letter he wrote:
Put Uriah in the front line where the fighting is fiercest;
then withdraw from him, so that he is struck down and dies.
16 So when Joab was besieging the city, he positioned Uriah in a place where he knew valiant warriors were located. 17 When the men of the city came out and fought against Joab, some of the troops from David’s army fell; and Uriah the Hittite also died.
18 Then Joab sent a full report of the battle to David. 19 He instructed the messenger: “When you have finished reporting all the events of the war to the king, 20 then if king becomes very angry and he asks you, ‘Why did you get so close to the city to fight? Didn’t you know that they would shoot arrows from the walls? 21 Who struck down Abimelech son of Jerub-besheth at Thebez? Didn’t a woman throw an upper millstone on him from the wall, so that he died there’?”
22 So the messenger set out from there. When he arrived, he told David everything that Joab had sent him to tell. 23 The messenger said to David, “The men overpowered us and advanced against us out in the open, but we rallied and drove them back up to the entrance to the gate. 24 Then the archers shot arrows at your servants from the walls, and some of the king’s servants are dead; and your servant Uriah the Hittite is also dead.”
25 David told the messenger, “Say this to Joab: ‘Do not let this matter upset you, for the sword devours one as well as another. Press home your attack against the city and destroy it’! Give him encouragement!”
26 When Uriah’s wife heard that her husband Uriah was dead, she mourned for her husband. 27 When the time of mourning ended, 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.