Alice von Hildebrand (2)

Note: This post has been corrected to repair a mistaken attribution from an earlier version. There is some explanation in the comments.

Time to get back to Alice von Hildebrand's essay criticizing Christopher West.

She now turns to the Bible to back up her position. What happens is rather curious:

Man easily becomes prey to his feelings. The Bible is rich in such examples. Clearly, King David—a man after God’s own heart (1 Samuel 13:14)—totally lost control of himself when he saw Bathsheba who was very beautiful.  He was defeated by her attraction, and committed adultery, followed by murder.

If we go back and look at the actual story of David and Bathsheba where we find absolutely nothing to justify Hildebrand's suggestion that this is a story about a man losing control of himself. The problem is rather the opposite. What we see is a story of a king abusing his power in a very cold, calculated way.

The story opens with David rising in the late afternoon (where he has been napping miles from the front while his army is fighting to further David's glory by the way) and seeing Bathsheba bathing and he sends to find out who she is. Then he sends for her. Note how pre-meditated all this is. And note also that no resistance is recorded on Bathsheba's part.

The only way you could read that scene as David losing control is if you projected it onto the events yourself. Which, of course, is exactly what Hildebrand has done here.

And it gets worse. Hildebrand writes as if the murder of Bathsheba's rightful husband follows hot on the heels of the adultery but this is hardly the case. The Bible gives us a very important clue in that it tells us that when David and Bathsheba have sex she had just purified herself after her period. This tells us two things. First that she is not pregnant before going to David and second that, at a bare minimum, she has to go through her cycle before she will discover that she is pregnant. This has to be a number of weeks at the very least. The Bible is, as if it often does, telling us a story in a very compact way but the actual events are spread out over time.

When she does learn she pregnant, she sends David a note. This is a powerful hint that the relationship between the two is more amicable than Hildebrand's version would allow. (A point reinforced by their later marriage.) David now constructs an elaborate scheme to get Uriah (husband of Bathsheba) back from the front where he has been fighting and get him to go home to his wife so that he will mistakenly think he is the father. When this fails. he constructs another scheme to get Uriah killed in battle and this succeeds.

Not only does this belie Hildebrand's claim that David is out of control, it tells us that his primary motive here is not sexual but a matter of shame and honour. David has acted in a most shameful way while Uriah has always behaved with honour. David acts so as to prevent his shame from becoming public. It is fear of shame and not sexuality that is the cause of this murder.

Alice von Hildebrand, as I said in my first post on the subject, is writing in good faith. She really believes what she is saying. The problem when it comes to her reading of the Bible is that it is clear that she has a very poor grasp on the issues she is raising. She is just not credible here.

The first post in this series is here.

The next post in the series is here.