The Chronicler managed to tell the life story of King David without mentioning his affair with Bathsheba and subsequent murder of Bathsheba's husband Uriah. This is perhaps the most audacious whitewash in the history of, well, history, since the Chronicler's sole task seemed to be documenting the genealogy of all the leading families in post-exilic Judaism, and the Uriah affair irrevocably altered the family tree of the most prominent of Jewish families, arguably the most prominent royal family of all time. So when Hanna Rosin at Andrew Sullivan's blog laments the media's lapse into euphemism when discussing Senator Kennedy's swimming away from the car containing Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick, I have to say, Euphemism is better than dead silence.
Her larger point is that the Kennedy men were misogynists, and it's an open question as to whether Kennedy's extraordinary legislative record on behalf of women, the poor, the sick and the disabled altogether makes up for his personal chauvinism, although she's inclined to say Yes.
We do know about the adultery with Bathsheba and the conspiracy to murder Uriah, thanks to the Deuteronomic historian and Saint Matthew, and yet the canon as a whole celebrates David as a man after God's own heart, who eloquently expressed his zeal for Yahweh in poetry, song and dance, not to mention the slaying of Israel's enemies. Public statesmanship can redeem private failures.
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