Russell Brand’s Messiah complex
by Giles Fraser, UnHerd:
He resembles that biblical lothario, King David.
Was it rape? A powerful and charismatic man sees a beautiful woman bathing naked from his bedroom window and sends a couple of heavies to bring her up to his room. That night he has sex with her, and she becomes pregnant. Later, in an attempted cover-up, he would arrange the death of her husband.
So goes the biblical tale of King David and Bathsheba. In the stories that followed, Bathsheba was often depicted as a lascivious trollop who had offered herself to him on a plate. She was asking for it. Women — and not just women — were forever lusting after David. Even the Bible swoons over his good looks: “He was ruddy and had beautiful eyes and was handsome.”
A post-MeToo reading of David and Bathsheba would tell the story in a very different way. It would emphasise that he was a dominant man, a king no less, full of the “vertigo of success”, as one commentator put it, and she was a vulnerable woman, whose husband was away fighting at the front. Did she have a choice? Could she have said no to the King? We don’t know because the Bible doesn’t see fit to let us know her side of things.
This much we do know: when confronted by the prophet Nathan, David crumbles. He composes the 51st Psalm: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.” Is this self-pity or genuine contrition? It’s hard to tell. But David’s son Solomon had a harem of 700 wives and 300 concubines — so being sex-mad clearly ran in the family.
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