Image Details

Pierpoint Morgan Library/Art Resource, NY (M.638, F.41V)

Caught in flagrante delicto between the sheets of this 13th-century manuscript, King David commits adultery with Bathsheba (lower left) after spying on her while she bathes (top), and then sends her husband Uriah out to die in the front lines of a battle so that he can marry her (lower right). Both adultery and murder violate the commandments given at Sinai, but David did not die for his sins. The authors of the Dead Sea Scroll known as the Damascus Document explain that the Law had been sealed in the Ark since the time of Joshua and was not rediscovered until the reign of King Josiah in the seventh century B.C.E. David could therefore be said not to have been in conscious violation of the Law, and he was not sentenced to death.