The story of David and Bathsheba, taken from the Second Book of Samuel, remains one of the most disturbing episodes in the Old Testament. In it, King David, from his palace, catches sight of Bathsheba bathing. He summons her to him and sleeps with her, even though she is married to Uriah, one of his soldiers who has gone to the front lines. When he learns that she is expecting a child, David attempts to cover up his transgression by recalling Uriah, but Uriah refuses, out of loyalty, to return home during wartime. The king then orchestrates Uriah’s death in battle, marries Bathsheba, but loses the child born of their union. It is only with the subsequent birth of Solomon that this tragic story finds resolution in a form of dynastic and spiritual continuity.
When Marc Chagall took up this episode in 1979, in a color lithograph, he sought neither to condemn nor to judge, but to suspend the narrative in a light of inner reconciliation. Instead of emphasizing the transgression or the drama, he places at the center a tender, ethereal couple embraced, bathed in a floating atmosphere characteristic of his visual universe. Everything in the composition—the deep colors, the gentle faces, the symbolic elements in the background—evokes the poetic transfiguration of the biblical narrative into a meditation on love.
Although this work was created after his major “Biblical Message” cycle, it extends the momentum of those decades spent exploring the great spiritual figures of the Hebrew tradition. Chagall, then in the twilight of his life, no longer merely illustrates the texts: he expresses their soul, their ambiguities, and their flashes of humanity. Here, David and Bathsheba become less the protagonists of a transgression and more the figures of a love marked by beauty, fragility, and memory. It is an image that does not narrate: it watches over, like an interior stained-glass window.
