Tuesday, March 25, 2025

Bathsheba's And David's Baby

In the aftermath of David's adultery with Bathsheba and murder of Uriah, the prophet Nathan confronts him at God's prompting according to the text of 2 Samuel 12.  Nathan says in verse 14 that David will not die following David's acknowledgement of his sin--sin which deserves premature death by execution (Leviticus 20:10, Deuteronomy 22:22).  There was mercy on this level.  However, the prophet also states in the same verse that the son born to Bathsheba and David from the adulterous sex will die.  What happens to this child according to Biblical doctrines instead of non sequitur assumptions and moronic traditions?  Some (hyper-Calvinists) might insist he went to hell if he would have rejected God when older.  Other people say the child went to heaven if it was too young to sin.  The only way that the chapter touches on this at all is indirectly: David says that he will go to his son and his son will not return to him (2 Samuel 12:25).

David only says he will in some sense go to the child.  He does not speak of any alleged immediate afterlife he would share with his son and certain not of heaven as popularly conceived of, as will be addressed.  From the wording of 2 Samuel 12 alone, it would not follow that he is referring to a conscious afterlife that the baby is already experiencing which David will eventually join.  The text is perfectly compatible with the idea that David only expects to join his son in death at some point.  The child will not return to life, but David's life can end so that both are dead.  This passage does not provide any real details, much less hints, about what the intermediate state before the final judgment is, or if there is one.  It also says nothing about whether babies that die automatically go to heaven or hell at some point as some assume.

One must look to other passages.  In actuality, Peter says in Acts 2:29-34 that David did not ascend to heaven when he himself died, having just quoted Psalm 16 where David says God will not abandon him to Sheol, the state of the dead.  Jesus also teaches in John 3:13 that he is the only person who has ever been to heaven.  David, Bathsheba, Rachel, Elisha, Joseph, and more all went to Sheol upon death according to the Bible.  What, then, is Sheol like?  Contrary to a popular misconception of it as an afterlife realm of consciousness divided into a side for the righteous and a side for the wicked, it is not a place where spirits of the dead are rewarded or punished before the final judgment.  It is a place/state that all people are reduced to at death in which the righteous and wicked alike are unconscious (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10, Job 3:11-19, Psalm 6:5, and so on).

Animals like sheep go there as humans do because Sheol is the earth or water that holds a body rather than an underworld of consciousness (Psalm 49:14).  For the mind, which is not inhabiting the body after death (James 2:26), there is only unconscious sleep until an eventual eschatological resurrection of humanity (Daniel 12:2).  When David says in Psalm 16 that God will not abandon him to Sheol (a state of oblivion for conscious perception, as Psalm 88:10-12 would suggest even in isolation from explicitly direct passages like Ecclesiastes 9:5-10), or the grave, he is also alluding to a future resurrection.  Otherwise, he and everyone else would remain in unperceiving sleep where no one can think or feel or praise God, for it is only the living that can worship him (Isaiah 38:18-19).

It is plainly taught, just not in 2 Samuel 12, that the son of Bathsheba and David goes to an unconscious sleep before which he will either rise to eternal life in bliss with Yahweh, either because he had not sinned or because he chooses God after the resurrection, or rise to be killed permanently if he refuses to align with truth (Matthew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6).  There will be no eternal torture in hell for their child or for the many genuinely wicked figures in Biblical narratives either way.  Theirs is the second death (Revelation 20:15) if they neither repentant in this life nor in the next after their resurrection--yes, this is logically possible, and the Bible does not say it will not be permitted.  It is in fact highly probable since God wants everyone to repent (2 Peter 3:8-9, 1 Timothy 2:3-6, Acts 17:30), as well as since not everyone has exposure to Christianity or the evidence for it, and yet John still says there are people from every nation, tribe, and language that receive salvation (Revelation 5:9-10, 7:9-10).

The innocence of the baby as a human that has little to no capacity to sin out of intentionality or philosophical carelessness alone means the child would not deserve hell.  No one is even in hell right now according to the Bible.  Only after Satan is placed in the lake of fire are wicked humans restored to life from Sheol and damned to be killed in hell (Revelation 20:10-15).  The child is also not in heaven.  No one is in heaven until after the resurrection of the righteous and heaven comes to the new earth through New Jerusalem (Revelation 21-22).  Right now, says the Bible, the righteous sleep, and the wicked likewise sleep, unaware of even the self-evidence of logical axioms and the existence of their own consciousness.  The two outcomes to follow are either eternal bliss or eventual destruction with an eternal exclusion from life itself.  The child of Bathsheba and David is neither suffering nor in heaven if Christianity is true.

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