IT WAS SPRINGTIME. Perhaps the trees were coming into leaf; perhaps wildflowers were beginning to emerge as the ground began to warm. But it was also the season in which kings took their armies into battle with neighboring nations. And for some reason, King David, known far and wide as a valiant warrior himself, stayed home as his top general Joab led the army against the Ammonites. We’re not told why David remained in the palace. But I imagine him being bored, perhaps even antsy, a part of him wishing he could be out on the battlefield himself.

One evening, unable to sleep, he got out of bed and wandered aimlessly about the roof of the palace. Thus begins one of the most sordid episodes of David’s life:

From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, and David sent someone to find out about her. The man said, “She is Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite.” Then David sent messengers to get her. She came to him, and he slept with her. (Now she was purifying herself from her monthly uncleanness.) Then she went back home. The woman conceived and sent word to David, saying, “I am pregnant.” (2 Sam 11:2-5, NIV)

As stories go, it’s an extremely condensed account that doesn’t give us much to go on. Over the centuries, however, interpreters and screenwriters alike have done Bathsheba a great injustice. They portray her as a seductive temptress, taking a bath in full view of the palace, trying to lure the king into her wily clutches.

There is nothing in the text to support this. Indeed, the evidence points in the other direction. We shouldn’t imagine her as somehow dragging a bathtub outside and waiting for the opportune moment to put on a peep show in broad daylight. First, it was probably evening, and David should have been in bed; she may not even have been able to see him. Second, as the New International Version translates it, she was “purifying herself from her monthly uncleanness.” In other words, at the end of the day, Bathsheba was engaging in a ritual cleansing of menstrual blood, as prescribed by the Law of Moses. She, not David, was the one doing God’s will.

Moreover, consider the way the servant describes her to David. She is someone’s daughter. She is someone’s wife — the wife of Uriah the Hittite, a foreigner loyal to David and serving in his army. Consider too the way Bathsheba is described in the genealogy at the beginning of Matthew’s gospel. Matthew doesn’t call her “Bathsheba”; he calls her “Uriah’s wife” (Matt 1:6). This is the only place in the genealogy that Matthew uses a description instead of a name. It’s as if to remind his readers that the only person to whom he gives the title “king” in the lineage of the Messiah was also an adulterer.

To his crime of adultery, David added murder. Bathsheba was pregnant, and soon the truth of David’s sin would be revealed. He thus tried to cobble together an alibi by calling Uriah from the battlefield to the palace, hoping he would then go home to sleep with his wife and later think the child was his. But faithful Uriah refused to go home while his comrades had to sleep in tents; he slept with the palace servants instead.

So David sent Uriah back to Joab. In a tragic irony, Uriah dutifully carried to his general the very letter that would seal his doom: Joab was to arrange for Uriah to be killed in battle. At the time, David may not have considered the difficult position he put Joab in by issuing such a command. How was Joab to make it look like Uriah was only another unfortunate casualty of war? By sacrificing other men with him. It wasn’t just Uriah who paid the price of David’s sin. And after the murderous deed had been done, and Bathsheba had properly mourned the death of her husband, David took her as his wife.

Not long after, God sent the prophet Nathan to confront David with his sin; the king was to be punished for the crimes of both murder and adultery. Through Nathan, God delivered these words of condemnation:

Why did you despise the word of the LORD by doing what is evil in his eyes? You struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and took his wife to be your own. You killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. Now, therefore, the sword will never depart from your house, because you despised me and took the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your own. (2 Sam 12:9-10)

I BRING UP this story as an example to help ground our understanding of what Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount. We’ve already seen how in Matthew 5 he challenges the kind of superficial piety that dares to think we’re innocent of murder if we’ve never actually taken a life. No, says Jesus; contemptuous anger is enough to make us guilty in the eyes of a righteous God. And in the passage we’ll consider next, Jesus applies the same kind of counterintuitive logic to the commandment against adultery.

But before we do that, let me ask you to ponder this question: if David had only leered at Bathsheba from his palace but hadn’t slept with her, would he have been innocent of adultery?

Understandably, we might be tempted to say, “Well, technically, yes. If he didn’t sleep with her, then he would have been innocent of violating the commandment.” But it should be clear from the account that David’s behavior was steeped in sin from the beginning.

Remember the tenth commandment: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor” (Exod 20:17). The king saw and desired Bathsheba, and instead of turning away, he abused his royal power one step at a time. He indulged his desire by finding out more about her (today, he might have looked her up on the Internet).

Then he had her brought to the palace. Did she know why? Could she have refused the invitation? The text is too delicate to give us the details, but we should probably not think of this as a consensual relationship, any more than loyal Uriah would have considered himself the king’s equal. David took advantage of his power and took advantage of Bathsheba.

The ultimate outcome was adultery and murder — but it began with a look. Is that look by itself adultery? Technically, no.

But as Jesus will insist, the answer is yes — because kingdom righteousness, the righteousness that surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, is not defined by technical distinctions.