I asked in the previous post about blaming Bathsheba, “If it was a rape, why isn’t it presented as a rape?” James McGrath asks to the contrary, if we call Amnon’s assault of Tamar “rape,” why do we not apply the same category to David’s sexual encounter with Bathsheba? “Where in the story is Bathsheba complicit? Where is she willing? Where does she give consent?”

James McGrath made this comment in response to my treatment of Bathsheba’s bathing in my previous two posts (see the links below):

I found myself unable to keep reading after you blamed Bathsheba for washing herself after the end of her menstruation as the Law mandates, in a place that should have been private, because according to you she knew the king did not march out with his fighting men, had a vantage point to leer inappropriately, and she knew he would do so and… what?

In response to the last post asking whether David raped Bathsheba a couple of online commentaries defending the rape interpretation were flagged up on Facebook: David’s Rape of Bathsheba and Murder of Uriah (2 Samuel 11-12) by the Theology of Work Project, and

Reading parts of a recent bad-tempered Twitter row about David and Bathsheba, I began to wonder whether Bathsheba is to be regarded in any sense as responsible for the turn of events. I was told that “she was really asking for it” interpretations are wildly inappropriate fantasies and that I should go away and think about why I was interested in this interpretation. I can understand the modern sensibilities at play here, but this is not a modern text, and “she was really asking for it” seems to me to miss the point.

I have two preliminary points to make from a biblical perspective.

Matthew Hartke posted a couple of pages from Robert Carroll’s book When Prophecy Failed: Cognitive Dissonance in the Prophetic Traditions of the Old Testament on Twitter last week. It got me fretting. The argument of the book is that there is evidence in the Old Testament of how Israel sought to mitigate the failure of prophecy either by revising prophecy or by revising history, and that cognitive dissonance theory helps us to understand the psychological or sociological processes underlying the accommodation. The thesis gets at the heart of Hartke’s own rejection of Christianity, which he states very well:

I couldn’t help reaching the conclusion that Christianity itself, in all its various iterations, was the product of our widely attested tendency to cling to our deeply held beliefs when they come into conflict with reality, rationalizing away the conflict instead of letting go.

What did Christ smell like? Paul says that the apostles—he has in mind at least himself, Timothy, and Titus—are the “fragrant aroma of Christ to God among those being saved and among those perishing” (2 Cor. 2:15). Careless readers of scripture that we are, we happily assume that the goal of Christian spiritual growth or discipleship is to become more Christ-like, to be conformed to his image, to give off the sweet smell of Jesus in the world. But when we look closely at how Paul develops these themes, a rather disconcerting picture emerges.