1. And once more the wrath of the LORD was kindled against Israel. The reason for God’s wrath is entirely unspecified, and attempts to link it to events in the preceding narrative are quite unconvincing. In fact, this entire narrative unit (which some scholars claim is itself composite) is strikingly different in theological assumptions, in its imagination of narrative situation and character, and even in its style from the David story proper as well as from the tale of David and the Gibeonites in chapter 21 with which it is symmetrically paired. Perhaps, indeed, there is no discernible reason for God’s fury against Israel. The God of this story has the look of acting arbitrarily, exacting terrible human costs in order to be placated. Unlike the deity of 1 Samuel 1–2 Samuel 20, He is decidedly an interventionist God, pulling the human actors by strings, and He may well be a capricious God, here “inciting” David to carry out a census that will only bring grief to the people.

2. Joab, commander of the force. A different vocabulary is another indication that a different writer is at work here. Throughout the David narrative, Joab is designated sar hatsava’, “commander of the army,” but here the terminology changes to the unusual sar haḥayil, “commander of the force.” Similarly, the verb for “go round,” sh-w-t—it is attached to the Adversary in the frame story of Job—is distinctive of this narrative.

3. But why should my LORD the king desire this thing? Underlying the story is both a cultic and a superstitious fear of the census, reflected in Joab’s objection to it. Several commentators have noted that according to Exodus 30:12 every Israelite counted in a census was required to pay a half shekel as “ransom” (kofer) for his life. Since such payment could not be realistically expected in a total census of the nation, masses of people would be put in a condition of violation of ritual. But there is also a folkloric horror of being counted as a condition of vulnerability to malignant forces. In Rashi’s words: “For the evil eye holds sway over counting.” Beyond these considerations, Joab the commander may have a political concern in mind: the census served as the basis for conscription (compare the notation in verse 9 of those counted as “sword-wielding men”), and thus imposing the census might conceivably have provoked opposition to the threatened conscription and to the king who was behind it. It is noteworthy that the census is carried out by army officers.

5. they crossed the Jordan and camped in Aroer. Aroer is roughly fifteen miles east of the Dead Sea. The trajectory of the census takers describes a large ellipsis: first to the southeast from Jerusalem, then north through trans-Jordan to Gilead and beyond, then west through the northernmost Israelite territory to the sea, then all the way south to Beersheba, and back to Jerusalem. All this, which will lead to wholesale death, is accomplished in nine months and twenty days—the human gestation period.

6. Tahtim-Hodshi. The name is suspect, but efforts to recover an original name behind it remain uncertain.

7. the fortress of Tyre. Evidently a mainland outpost to the south of Tyre proper, which was on an island.

9. sword-wielding. The Hebrew says literally “sword-drawing.”

10. I have offended greatly in what I have done. In contrast to the cogent sense of moral agency and moral responsibility in the David story proper, there is a peculiar contradiction here: David confesses deep contrition, yet he has, after all, been manipulated by God (“incited”) to do what he has done.

11. Gad the prophet, David’s seer. Gad was mentioned earlier (1 Samuel 22:5). His appearance here by no means warrants the claim of Kyle McCarter Jr. and others that this story is the work of a “prophetic” writer. Visionary intermediaries between king and God were a common assumption in the ancient world. Gad is called “seer” (ḥozeh), not the way prophetic writers would ordinarily think of prophets (and also not the term used for Samuel in 1 Samuel 9). Above all, the prophetic current in biblical literature does not presuppose either this kind of arbitrarily punitive God or the accompanying hocus-pocus with choices of punishment and divine messengers of destruction visible to the human characters.

14. Let us . . . fall into the LORD’s hand . . . and into the hand of man let me not fall. There is a puzzle in David’s choice because only one of the three punishments—the flight from enemies—clearly involves human agency. Perhaps David has in mind that an extended famine would lead to absolute dependence on those foreign nations unaffected by the famine, as in the story of Joseph’s brothers going down to Egypt. In all this, it should be noted that David is scarcely the same character we have seen in the body of his story. Instead of that figure of conflicting feelings and emotions so remarkable in psychological depth, we have a flat character instigated to act by God, then expressing remorse, then speaking in rather official tones in his role as political ruler and cultic chief responsible for all the people.

15. the fixed time. There is some question about what this refers to, though the grounds for emending the text to solve the problem are shaky. The phrase ought logically to refer to the end of the ordained three days of the plague. Yet David’s intercession to stop the plague short before it engulfs Jerusalem suggests that the plague does not go on for the full three days. The difficulty might be resolved simply by assuming that the initial verb—“and the LORD sent a plague against Israel”—refers to the initiating of the process according to the promised time limitations: God sends a plague against Israel intended to rage for the stipulated time of three days, but after it has devastated the people on a terrible scale for a certain time (perhaps two days?), David, aghast that these horrors should visit his own city as well, takes steps to induce God to cut the plague short.

16. And the messenger reached out his hand against Jerusalem to destroy it. Once again, the apparatus and the theology of this story reflect a different imaginative world from that of the main narrative about David, in which there are no divine emissaries of destruction brandishing celestial swords. The text of the Qumran Samuel scroll, paralleled in 1 Chronicles 21, makes the mythological character of this story even clearer: “and David raised his eyes and saw a messenger of the LORD standing between earth and heaven, his sword unsheathed in his hand reaching out against Jerusalem, and David and the elders fell on their faces, covered with sackcloth.”

stay your hand. Literally, “let your hand go slack, unclench it.”

the LORD’s messenger was at the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. In this fashion, the last-minute averting of the destruction of Jerusalem is linked with the etiological tale explaining how the site of the future temple was acquired. (Although the Temple is not explicitly mentioned, this acquisition of an altar site in Jerusalem is clearly placed here to prepare the way for the story of Solomon the temple builder that is to follow.) Thus, the first sacrifice offered on this spot is associated with a legendary turning away of wrath from Jerusalem—a token of the future function of the Temple. The name Araunah is not Semitic and is generally thought to be Hittite or Hurrian. Some scholars claim it is a title, not a name. In any event, Araunah’s presence indicates that the conquered Jebusites were not massacred or entirely banished but continued to live in Jerusalem under David as his subjects.

17. It is I who offended. The Qumran text reads here, “It is I, the shepherd, who did evil.” That, of course, neatly complements “these sheep” in the next clause, but it is hard to know whether “shepherd” was original or added by a later scribe to clarify the sheep metaphor.

21. Why has my LORD the king come to his servant? Isaac Abravanel aptly notes that it would not have been customary for the king to come to his subject: “You should have sent for me, for the lesser man goes to the greater and the greater does not go to the lesser.” Abravanel, a councillor to Ferdinand and Isabella who was in the end exiled by them, would have been keenly familiar with such protocol.

to build an altar to the LORD, that the scourge may be held back. According to the ritualistic assumptions of this narrative, it requires not merely contrition but a special sacrifice to placate the deity. This leads one to suspect that the story, far from being prophetic literature, may have originated in some sort of priestly circle.

22. Let my lord . . . take . . . what is good in his eyes. In this whole exchange, there is a distinct parallel to Abraham’s bargaining with Ephron the Hittite for the purchase of a gravesite at Hebron in Genesis 23. Ephron, too, first offers to make a gift to Abraham of what he requires, but the patriarch, like David here, insists on paying full price in order to have undisputed possession of the property.

the oxen for the burnt offering and the threshing boards and the oxen’s gear. What Araunah does not offer David is the land itself, which he clearly wants. Both the threshing board and the “gear” (presumably, the yoke) would have been wooden. Since the sacrifice needs to be performed at once in order to avert the plague, Araunah is quick to offer not only the sacrificial beasts but firewood on the spot.

23. All of it Araunah has, O king, given to the king. The Hebrew, with the repeated “king,” looks peculiar, though it is intelligible if the first “king” is construed as a vocative. Some emend the verse to read “all of it has Araunah your servant given to my lord the king.”

25. the LORD granted the plea for the land. This is, of course, a near verbatim repetition of the words that conclude the story of David and the Gibeonites’ execution of the descendants of Saul (21:14). The repetition may well be an editorial intervention intended to underscore the symmetry between the tale of a scourge averted by David’s intercession at the beginning and at the end of this large composite coda to 1 and 2 Samuel. Although neither of these stories is especially continuous with the David story proper, both reflect a connection with it in the emphasis on guilt that the king incurs, which brings disaster on the nation and which requires expiation. But the writer of genius responsible for the larger David narrative imagines guilt in far more probing moral terms and does not assume that the consequences of moral offenses and grave political misjudgments can be reversed by some ritual act.