“Who Framed Bathsheba?”

The story of David and Bathsheba is a powerful ur-narrative of forbidden desire, and its consequences, that has been appropriated through time, through cultures and through a variety of technologies of capture to reveal a wider range of perspectives on the relationship between a king and his subject, illicit relationships between the sexes and the betrayal of God by even the best of men. This chapter will attempt to discover where this tradition of reading Bathsheba as a seductress really began: in the biblical texts, the literature, the paintings? Beyond a cultural historical hunt to find out who framed Bathsheba, the frameworks offered by centuries of readers of Bathsheba may be used to re-read the biblical narrative; to explore not only the extent to which Bathsheba herself has been re-invented for a wide range of purposes, but the way in which adaptation, in turn, promotes re-readings that occasionally expose the more subtle and nuanced aspects of the biblical narrative itself.