Bathsheba: Reluctant Beauty (Dangerous Beauty #2)

by Angela Elwell Hunt (Goodreads Author)

After sending his army to besiege another king's capital, King David forces himself on Bathsheba, a loyal soldier's wife. When her resulting pregnancy forces the king to murder her husband and add her to his harem, Bathsheba struggles to protect her son while dealing with the effects of a dark prophecy and deadly curse on the king's household.

Combining historical facts with detailed fiction, Angela Hunt paints a realistic portrait of the beautiful woman who struggled to survive the dire results of divine judgment on a king with a divided heart.

My Review: 1/10

Full disclosure: I only made it about 10% of the way through and I knew at Chapter 2 that this would not be the book for me.

Painting Nathan, of all people, the prophet who confronts and convicts David about his sin with Bathsheba, as a man who lusts after her himself, always "painting her face over his wife's" when they are intimate was enough to make me sick.

Nathan was human, so obviously he sinned. And given that the Bible describes Bathsheba as being desirable in appearance, it is possible that he had a natural physical response to her. But what is described in the opening chapters is not a passing, knee-jerk response, but a deliberate passion that is grown over DECADES by him, the imaginings of which are still privately indulged in after they are both married.

I don't know what the author was trying to do here. Possibly send the message that no one, not even a messenger of God, was immune to her appeal. But I thought it took a lot of nerve and left me nauseated. This had no Biblical basis that I know of or could find. And if that's just the beginning... I don't think I could stomach the way she portrays history that is bad enough as it is.