counters language?” (12). My corollary question is this: What happens when the reader converts language into imagery? What happens when words conjure a picture for the reader? For indeed, in Exum’s reading of Bathsheba, this is exactly what happens. She claims that we are invited to look, to convert words into a mental tableau of the king and the bathing woman. The grammar of this conversion remains to be articulated. When artists paint biblical scenes (or indeed any incident represented in a literary