2 Samuel 11:4 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

David sent messengers and took her From her own house into his palace, not by force, but by persuasion. And he lay with her See how all the way to sin is down hill! When men begin they cannot soon stop themselves. And she returned unto her house With a guilty conscience, and oppressed with terror, no doubt; for she had committed a sin for which the law condemned her to be stoned. She returned, it is probable, early in the morning, to prevent discovery. But how little did it avail to conceal from man a crime, of the commission of which the holy and sin-avenging God, who is no respecter of persons, had been a witness. Alas for poor Bath-sheba! Her confusion and distress were doubtless unutterable. But, in the mean time who can describe the wretched state of David's mind, when the tumult of passion was subsided, Bath-sheba departed, and reason and reflection returned! “The calm reflections of a spirit truly religious,” says Dr. Delaney, “will best imagine the horrors of so complicated a guilt on the recoil of conscience; when all those passions whose blandishments, but a few moments before, deluded, seduced, and overset his reason, now resumed their full deformity, or rushed into their contrary extremes; desire, into distraction; the sweets of pleasure, into bitterness of soul; love, into self-detestation; and hope, almost into the horrors of despair. The wife of one of his own worthies, apparently an innocent and a valuable woman, abused, and tainted, and brought to the very brink of ruin and infamy! A brave man basely dishonoured! and a faithful subject irreparably injured! The laws of God trampled under foot, of that God who had so eminently distinguished, exalted, and honoured him! Well might he cry out, in the anguish of this distracted condition, Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me. In one word, his condition was now so dreadful that it was not easy to bring himself to the presumption of even petitioning for mercy! And this I take to be the true reason why we find no psalm of David penned upon this occasion.” Here we may observe, that any other historian but the sacred would have endeavoured to draw a veil over the conduct of the admired hero of his story, that his reader might not see him falling into such crimes as would shock us even in the most abandoned of men. But the Scriptures are divine. They were written by persons whom divine inspiration had raised above the low thoughts of the mere human mind, and they therefore proceed in another manner. They give us a faithful account of things, without any false colouring, without partiality to any one, without concealing the blemishes or vices of the most favoured characters. For they were intended as well to instruct us by the sins of these persons as by their virtues, and therefore set forth their example in all its parts, that we may as well learn to shun the former as to imitate the latter. We have in this crime of David with Bath- sheba as strong a picture represented to us, as ever was set before the eyes of men, of the true nature and progress of vice, how it insinuates itself into the corrupt minds of men, how easily it overcomes them, if not resisted, and how it proceeds from bad to worse, till, it may be, it plunges them into the greatest depth of iniquity and misery, even, as we see here, into adultery and murder!