In 2 Samuel 24, David ordered a census of the people, and we’re told that God was displeased with this. Even his general Joab, who just 4 chapters before had no issue with murdering a man by disembowelment and leaving him to wallow in the dirt until he died, objected to David as if a census was against God’s law. But where is this law against a census? If there was, then Moses didn’t seem to know about it, for the children of Israel were numbered twice when they were in the wilderness, at the beginning and end of the book of Numbers.
This article is taken from my book, When Humans Wrote Scripture.
Perhaps even stranger to the modern reader, we’re actually told that God told David to number the people! How can it be a sin if God told him to do it? And why was David caused to sin, if it was the people God wanted to punish? Why would they be punished for a single man’s sin? For the ancient reader, these may have not been issues. One clue may have been in the word “incited”. To trick one’s enemy, to use deception in battle, was never and has never been considered wrong, at least not as a blanket rule.[1] It may also seem strange to the modern reader for God to cause humans to sin, or to mislead them, or to take away at least some free will and then hold them accountable for their action; but there are several examples of exactly that happening in the Hebrew Bible.[2] God does what he wants, and probably most of the ancients simply accepted that, just as the ancients thought however their god-kings ruled was just the way it was. Demanding an answer from God was not wise or even considered right; even the modern idea of people having the right to choose their own path or even their own nature would have been foreign to the ancients.[3]
There are other differences in 1 Chronicles 21 of David’s census. The book of Chronicles is more favorable to the kings of Judah than the book of Kings, even omitting David’s murder and adultery in the Bathsheba incident. Here, we’re not told that God incited David to perform the census, but the Adversary (or Accuser, the meaning of Satan) was the one who stood against Israel. So did God or Satan incite David? Satan is actually depicted in the Hebrew Bible like an officer, even prosecuting attorney, of God’s court, so this would not be a problem for the ancients as it is for moderns, who see Satan as an enemy of God.[4] The Chronicles and Kings accounts also give totally different census numbers.
Both the Chronicles and Kings accounts have David appeal to God on behalf of the people, stating that it was his sin, not theirs; he requests the sin be upon him. I believe this extra detail is part of the tapestry of soteriology[5] that the biblical authors wove around the Davidic throne and its promise of a Messiah that would save Israel, an idea that began with Abraham and Moses, the great redeemer, who asked to bear the sins of the people.[6] David’s actions that day actually lead to the purchase of land from an “unclean” Jebusite, where David makes sacrifice (contrary to the Mosaic law?[7]) to avert the plague, which will become the site of the Temple, because David was afraid to go near the Tabernacle at Gibeon. None of these details are superlative to the narrative. I intend to argue later that the motif of the Gentiles funding or building the Tabernacle/Temple goes as far back as the story of the plundered Egyptians at the Exodus, small details that the ancients would have understood.
David is given one of three choices: famine, defeat in battle, or pestilence. He chooses, instead of falling into the hand of man, to “fall into the hand of YHVH, for his mercy is great.” That mercy resulted in God’s slaughter of 70,000 people. I give all these details because I believe moderns are very much out of tune with the nature of the God of the Bible, and these will help us begin to understand the God who would incite David to sin.
But back to the question of how a census was a sin, in light of no apparent command against it (at least not in the scriptures we still have today). One possible explanation, based on revelation that we actually have, are the prohibitions placed on kings in Deuteronomy 17, which show in principle that the king should rely on God, not military might. He is not, for example, to multiply horses, especially horses from Egypt,[8] or even excessive silver and gold. My guess is that most modern theologians, absent this incident, would consider it an interpretive stretch to assume that Deuteronomy 17 prohibited a census. However, the ancients’ view of interpretation was often different than moderns are comfortable with.[9] However, I do not believe this to be the best explanation, based on the Bible’s own commentary.
The best-fit explanation for David’s sin, based on the Bible’s own testimony, is found in 1 Chronicles 27:23. Stay with me, because, from a logical standpoint, this is going to get weird. We’re told that David did not count those below the age of twenty, for the Lord had promised to make Israel as numerous as the stars of heaven.[10] (This age limit detail is entirely absent from both accounts of David’s census, although it fits because he was numbering fighting age men.) There you have it: God had promised to make the children of Israel uncountable: therefore, an attempt to count them would be sin. That seems to be the understanding of this passage, even if the interpretation seems weird to us moderns. But wait, it gets weirder. Another problem arises: it also seems, based on this passage, to be saying that David avoided violating the principle by only numbering those above the age of 20. So did he sin, or didn’t he? Also note that this interpretation logically precludes the interpretation that David violated the commands for kings to depend on God. Especially considering that similar censuses had been conducted before, with the approval of God, when it would seem that the writers already considered the “enumerable prophecy” to be fulfilled.[11] And here we find one more twist of weirdness: Joab did not number Levi because violating God’s law was repugnant to him (which seems odd, considering he was a stone-cold killer); however, in the censuses that God approved in Numbers during the time of Moses, not only did they number Levi, but they numbered all males from a month old and up! And while we’re on the subject of kings, it appears that Deuteronomy 17 allowed the appointment of a king, as long as God chose the king, even though I Samuel 8:7 suggests that the people sinned when they asked for a king. Of course, modern scholars date Deuteronomy, whose laws regarding kings come conspicuously four centuries before Israel had any, to a much later period than the time of Moses; we’ll come back to this in the second part of this book.
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[1] There were always exceptions, of course. Before the American Revolution, the “proper” way to do battle was to meet standing on the field and shoot at each other, then spear each other with bayonets. When the colonies rebelled, they found this arrangement disadvantageous, and used guerilla warfare, firing from cover; this especially was useful with the advent of American longer, rifled barrels that had more range. Thus eventually changed “acceptable” warfare (where the first Great War of 1917 saw men hiding in trenches, for fear of even better weapon technology that allowed a single man to mow down many). The tradition of facing one’s enemy potentially harmed the British cause in another interesting incident, for George Washington was spared from being shot by a British sniper once, because his back was turned, and shooting a man in the back was considered cowardly. That standard too would soon disappear.
[2] For instance, it was an evil spirit from the Lord that caused Saul to want to spear David in 1 Samuel 18, and 19, although there is good textual evidence that one of those accounts was interpolated. (See the section below on textual variants.) And it was God who sent a false messenger to deceive a king and cause him to fall in 1 Kings 22:22.
[3] Isaiah 45:9
[4] E.g., Job 1:6-12; Zechariah 3:1
[5] Coming from the Greek word for “salvation”, soteriology is the study of teachings regarding salvation. Many kings, including ones who ruled over Palestine, took the title Soter in the Greek world, as a way of expressing what they did for the people. The gods too were often titled this way, such as “Zeus Soter.”
[6] Genesis 18; Exodus 32:32
[7] Deuteronomy 12:11 restricts sacrifice to the place where God chooses, except that this was God’s choice, for David to sacrifice at Jerusalem, and thus legitimize the site of the Temple.
[8] A rule that Solomon would flagrantly violate, with no mention in Scripture of God’s disapproval, much less a subsequent slaughter of the people as YHVH’s retribution.
[9] For instance, when Jesus was asked to comment on Moses allowing divorce, he not only contradicted Moses, but he violated a modern and fairly logical rule of interpretation to do so. This rule says that one uses explicit passages to understand the less explicit passage. Jesus cited Genesis 1:27 and 2:24, which speaks of the union of man and woman, but not divorce explicitly. Thus Jesus ignored the explicit passage of Moses which allowed divorce, even though he is said to have condemned anyone who incited anyone to break any command of Moses. (Compare Matthew 5:19, 31, 32.) See also later chapters for more on the teachings surrounding divorce. There is an argument that Moses did have in mind the same “fornication exception clause” that Jesus teaches, because Deuteronomy 24 speaks of a man finding “some uncleanness” in his wife, but this seems contradicted by Jesus’ portrayal of Moses’ law as a change from how it was in the beginning.
[10] Cf. Genesis 26:4
[11] Numbers 1:2,3; 26:4; cf. Numbers 23:10