I will be the first to admit that I am a Thomas Hardy Geek. His mid-Victorian novels, set in the English countryside, are evocative and tragic. I loved Tess, and learned more about cows in that book than I did about whales while reading, in the throes of high-school mononucleosis, Moby-Dick.

When, many years later, I became a history teacher, I liked to use film excerpts to show students what I couldn’t necessarily teach them. No better example of this than the 1965 version of Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd.

We had just learned about Jethro Tull, Dutch land reclamation and “Turnip” Townshend and crop rotation—when nitrogen-restoring beans or clover replenish the soil—when Hardy’s dogged but flawed farm owner, Batsheba, allows her sheep to break down a fence and get themselves into a Turnip Townshend clover field.

I saw a Quarter horse of my sister’s die of colic when I was a boy; it was agonizing to watch her suffer until the vet, with us whisked away, put her down. Luckily, Bathsheba’s sheep were rescued by her on-again/off-again foreman, the aptly named Gabriel Oak. In the first scene in this sequence, it’s amazing to see him go to work on gassy sheep.

The banquet scene, with Julie Christie singing, is just as important. The table practically bends under the weight of food; hogs the size of German Shepherds root among the children.

This was the Agricultural Revolution. Thanks to characters like Townshend, food production in Europe increased dramatically and exponentially. Children began living longer, thanks to diet, and parents, who were so shockingly callous toward their children in Early Modern Europe, began to invest their love in them instead.

As macabre as we may find it, this roughly coincided with the birth of photography, including “Death Daguerreotypes.” Parents had their dead children photographed because they didn’t want to let them go.

In the next sequence, with a different song, Carey Mulligan presides over a different version of the banquet scene. Until the later version of Madding, I did not know Carey Mulligan apart from Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. I didn’t understand Leo DiCaprio’s hots for her; I wanted to throw a raincoat around her and feed her some prime rib and a baked potato with plenty of sour cream.

But in the later Far from the Madding Crowd, she more or less holds her own as a singer, and Michael Sheen’s Mr. Boldwood (another Hardy play on names) comes a little unhinged in her presence, just as Peter Finch’s had in the presence of Julie Christie’s Bathsehba.

Hardy chose the name “Bathsheba” with deliberation, too. She is the flame to Boldwood’s moth–and Oak’s, and her ne’er-do-well soldier husband, and to every other man who comes close to her. She burns them.

She is seductive, desirable and a little shameless.

Today I heard what I think was a Christian violinist playing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” in a supermarket parking lot. It may be one of the most beautiful songs ever written. But some miss the Hebrew Scriptures storyline: King David sees Bathsheba bathing nude on her rooftop, is consumed by lust, and so sends her husband Uriah off to die in battle.

That’s why Hardy chose the name.

While his Batsheba has redeeming qualities–toughness, the ability to get along in a man’s world, a formidable work ethic–she undoes the men in her life just as King David was undone.

And, yes, she is seductive. The final scene in the sequence below–Carey Mulligan on horseback in the English countryside–might have tempted me to send her Uriah off to a distant mid-Victorian imperial front where he had at least the chance of being killed by colonial insurgents. At one point, except for being mirror-opposite, she is the exact duplicate, lying on her back, of Elizabeth Siddall, the pre-Raphaelite model who nearly died of pneumonia while posting in a bathtub as Hamlet’s drowned Ophelia.

Bathsheba would’ve had no use for Ophelia. She was made of stronger stuff: let her lover do the drowning.