Uriah is one of those great unsung heroes of history. He belonged to an elite group of warriors known as ‘the Thirty’, renowned for their bravery, skill in battle, and loyalty to the King. He was married, so it seems, to the granddaughter of the King’s closest and most trusted adviser. And he lived within walking distance of the Royal Palace. His character and loyalty to his fellow warriors stands in stark contrast to that of his King.
At a time when the army was at war the King took it upon himself to demand the presence of Uriah’s wife and the rest is history. He got her pregnant, hardly the sort of thing a king would want his loyal soldiers to know about. Just think what that would do for morale. So the King ordered Uriah home from the front. Despite the King’s best efforts Uriah refused to sleep with his wife. It would have violated an ancient warrior code for Uriah to have sex with Bathsheba while his brothers-in-arms were at the front. Such was his loyalty, a loyalty no doubt respected by generations of warriors.
Thwarted, the King sent Uriah back to the front carrying orders that sent him to his death. This allowed the King to move quickly in taking Bathsheba as his wife in a vain attempt to cover up his betrayal, not only of Uriah, but of all his loyal soldiers.
This is a rather well-known Old Testament story, that of David and Bathsheba. However, there is a problem with it. Uriah should never have been born.
Why do I say that? Well, as many critics of the Bible willingly point out, when Israel entered the Promised Land they were commanded by God to slay all the people already living there. Today, we call that genocide, an ugly, repulsive term. The people then living in the land were Canaanites, a term including a number of people groups, including the Hittites. Uriah, part of David’s close and trusted circle of soldiers and advisers, is called in the Bible Uriah the Hittite.
Before Israel entered Palestine God set before them a set of blessings and curses. Basically, if they obeyed all He said they would flourish and become the envy of the world. If they didn’t the promised curses read like all your bad dreams rolled into one, only much worse. Genocide, by comparison, appears merciful.
Yet immediately after the book of Joshua which tells the story of the conquest of Palestine, well before David appears on the scene, we find the book of Judges. After Joshua died the Israelites went completely against the commandments of God, being perhaps more vile in some of their practices than the nations surrounding them. And one of those things they failed to do was kill off the Hittites.
So, not only should Uriah the Hittite never have been born, we are also faced with the question why did this vile nation of Israel survive? Further, why after such a period of violent lawlessness did God appoint David as King and the nation reach its most glorious days under David and his son Solomon?
All of this does not fit with what had been said earlier. Or do we make the mistake of trying to understand the story through the our eyes of our own time and culture without any attempt to understand the culture of the time and the way in which people of the time both thought and wrote.
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