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The Lineage of Grace series is a five-novella series from Francine Rivers that focuses on the five women found the in the ancestry of Jesus: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary. Having already read the first three in the series, I was a little more than underwhelmed. The narrative format is clearly intended to be more Bible study than story and doesn’t do a great job of merging developing historical and cultural context. Unspoken: Bathsheba, however, is even worse than I was expecting.

In Rivers� imagination of the story, Bathsheba is the daughter of one of David’s mighty men, fighting with him before he was king. Bathsheba has known of David since her childhood and always been smitten by him. Rivers portrays an eight-year-old Bathsheba openly wishing that she could be David’s wife and hoping that David will notice her.

Bathsheba grows up and is given in marriage to Uriah, an idol worshipping Hittite that she does not love. Francine Rivers seems to be going out of her way to justify the relationship between David and Bathsheba and make any impropriety about it primarily Bathsheba’s. When David sees her bathing on the roof, he does not realize who it is. When she’s called to him, and he learns her identity, he realizes she is Uriah’s wife and nearly backs down before an aide goads him into it.

In this telling, Bathsheba realizes David is watching and wants him to see her. She is seen as complicit and, when David sends for her, she is hopeful that her dream of being a princess will be realized—or at very least, her dream of one night with David. It’s a victim-blaming, harmful whitewashing of a story that clearly presents David as a murderer and rapist.

Unspoken: Bathsheba uncomfortably and grossly portrays Bathsheba as the sexual aggressor, even when everything in the biblical narrative paints her as a victim. This is not consensual adultery. This is not the end of an unrequited love. This is rape. And to call it anything else gaslights those who have been sexually abused and justifies sexual abusers. This is dangerous theology and for it to come from the pen of a woman revered in Christian fiction circles and widely read, even outside the Christian community, is categorically abhorrent.