2 Samuel 24:19 Kommentar

INTRODUCTION TO SECOND SAMUEL 24 In this chapter an account is given of David's numbering of the people, Sa2 24:1; of the sense he had of his sin, and of his acknowledgment of it; and of the Lord's displeasure at it, who sent the prophet Gad to him, to propose three things to him, one of which he was to choose as a punishment for it, Sa2 24:10; when he chose the pestilence, which carried off a great number of the people, Sa2 24:14; and David was directed to build an altar to the Lord in the threshingfloor of Araunah the Jebusite, with whom he agreed for it, and built one on it, and offered upon it, and so the plague was stayed, Sa2 24:18.

And David, according to the saying of Gad, went up as the Lord commanded. From the place where he was in a lower part of the city to Mount Moriah, on which was the threshing floor, a place fit for winnowing corn when threshed. And David, according to the saying of Gad, went up as the Lord commanded. From the place where he was in a lower part of the city to Mount Moriah, on which was the threshing floor, a place fit for winnowing corn when threshed. 2 Samuel 24:20 sa2 24:20 sa2 24:20 sa2 24:20And Araunah looked,.... Peeped up out of the place in which he had hid himself with his four sons, for fear of the angel, and which they saw, Ch1 21:20, and saw the king and his servants coming towards him; he perceived, by the course they steered, that they were coming to him: and Araunah went out; of the threshingfloor, out of the place where he had hid himself, for he had been threshing wheat, Ch1 21:20; nor was it thought below great personages in those times to be employed in such work; so Gideon was threshing, when the angel of the Lord appeared to him, Jdg 6:11; Boaz winnowed barley in his threshingfloor, Rut 3:2, and bowed himself before the king with his face to the ground; in reverence of the king.

Notice, brothers, that no place in the land of the Jews was found worthy for the altar of the Lord to be built; but in the land of the Gentiles a place is chosen where the angel is seen and the altar of the Lord is built, and thus the wrath of the almighty Lord is appeased. Then already was prefigured the fact that in the hearts of the Jews no worthy place could be found to offer spiritual victims; the land of the Gentiles, that is, the conscience of Christians, is chosen as the place for the Lord’s temple. This the apostle clearly indicates when he rebukes the Jews and says, “It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken to you first, but since you have judged yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we now turn to the Gentiles.” This means [that] because you have rejected Christ and have not prepared a worthy place on which to set the Lord’s altar, we will put it in the land of the Gentiles, that is, in the hearts of all the people. For this reason the same apostle exclaims to us, “Holy is the temple of God, and you are this temple.” Now notice, dearly beloved, that the land of the Gentile king was chosen at the time when the Jewish people were struck by God’s plague. This we see fulfilled in the Lord’s passion; for when the Jewish people rejected the Lord and crucified him, then his altar was consecrated on the threshing floor of the Gentiles, that is, on every land. That is why the angel of the Lord stood on the threshing floor of the Gentile king; the true angel, Christ, visited the people of the Gentiles.

David is tempted by Satan to number Israel and Judah, Sa2 24:1. Joab remonstrates against it, but the king determines that it shall be done; and Joab and the captains accomplish the work, and bring the sum total to the king: viz.: eight hundred thousand warriors in Israel, and five hundred thousand in Judah, Sa2 24:2-9. David is convinced that he has done wrong; and the prophet Gad is sent to him, to give him his choice of three judgments, one of which God is determined to inflict upon the nation, Sa2 24:10-13. David humbles himself before God; and a pestilence is sent, which destroys seventy thousand men, Sa2 24:14, Sa2 24:15. The angel of the Lord being about to destroy Jerusalem, David makes intercession, and the plague is stayed, Sa2 24:16, Sa2 24:17. Gad directs him to build an altar to the Lord on the threshing-floor of Araunah, where the plague was stayed, Sa2 24:18. He purchases this place for the purpose, and offers burnt-offerings and peace-offerings, Sa2 24:19-25.

Numbering of the People, and Pestilence - 2 Samuel 24 For the purpose of ascertaining the number of the people, and their fitness for war, David ordered Joab, his commander-in-chief, to take a census of Israel and Judah. Joab dissuaded him from such a step; but inasmuch as the king paid no attention to his dissuasion, he carried out the command with the help of the military captains (Sa2 24:1-9). David very speedily saw, however, that he had sinned; whereupon the prophet Gad went to him by the command of Jehovah to announce the coming punishment, and give him the choice of three different judgments which he placed before him (Sa2 24:10-13). As David chose rather to fall into the hand of the Lord than into the hand of men, God sent a pestilence, which carried off seventy thousand men in one day throughout the whole land, and had reached Jerusalem, when the Lord stopped the destroying angel in consequence of the penitential prayer of David (Sa2 24:14-17), and sent Gad to the king to direct him to build an altar to the Lord on the spot where the destroying angel had appeared to him (Sa2 24:18). Accordingly David bought the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite, built an altar upon it, and sacrificed burnt-offerings and thank-offerings, after which the plague was stayed (Sa2 24:19-25). This occurrence, which is introduced in the parallel history in 1 Chron 21 between David's wars and his arrangements for a more complete organization of the affairs of the nation, belongs undoubtedly to the closing years of David's reign. The mere taking of a census, as a measure that would facilitate the general organization of the kingdom, could not in itself be a sinful act, by which David brought guilt upon himself, or upon the nation, before God. Nevertheless it is not only represented in Sa2 24:1 as a manifestation of the wrath of God against Israel, but in Sa2 24:3 Joab seeks to dissuade the king from it as being a wrong thing; and in Sa2 24:10 David himself admits that it was a grievous sin against God, and as a sin it is punished by the Lord (Sa2 24:12.). In what, then, did David's sin consist? Certainly not in the fact that, when taking the census, "he neglected to demand the atonement money, which was to be raised, according to Exo 30:12., from all who were numbered, because the numbering of the people was regarded in itself as an undertaking by which the anger of God might easily be excited," as Josephus and Bertheau maintain; for the Mosaic instructions concerning the atonement money had reference to the incorporation of the people into the army of Jehovah (see at Exo 30:13-14), and therefore did not come into consideration at all in connection with the census appointed by David as a purely political measure. Nor can we imagine that David's sin consisted merely in the fact that he "entered upon the whole affair from pride and vain boasting," or that "he commanded the census from vanity, inasmuch as he wanted to have it distinctly set before his own eyes how strong and mighty he was" (Buddeus, Hengstenberg, and others); for although pride and vanity had something to do with it, as the words of Joab especially seem to indicate, David was far too great a man to allow us to attribute to him a childish delight in the mere number of souls in his kingdom. The census had certainly a higher purpose than this. It is very evident from Ch1 27:23-24, where it is mentioned again that it was connected with the military organization of the people, and probably was to be the completion of it. David wanted to know the number of his subjects, not that he might be able to boast of their multitude, nor that he might be able to impose all kinds of taxes upon every town and village according to their houses and inhabitants, as Ewald maintains; but that he might be fully acquainted with its defensive power, though we can neither attribute to him the definite purpose "of transforming the theocratic sacred state into a conquering world-state" (Kurtz), nor assume that through this numbering the whole nation was to be enrolled for military service, and that thirst for conquest was the motive for the undertaking. The true kernel of David's sin was to be found, no doubt, in self-exaltation, inasmuch as he sought for the strength and glory of his kingdom in the number of the people and their readiness for war. This sin was punished. "Because David was about to boast proudly and to glory in the number of his people, God determined to punish him by reducing their number either by famine, war, or pestilence" (Seb. Schmidt). At the same time, the people themselves had sinned grievously against God and their king, through the two rebellions headed by Absalom and Sheba.

David went up to Aravnah according to the command of God. Sa2 24:20-21 When Aravnah saw the king coming up to him with his servants (ויּשׁקף, "he looked out," viz., from the enclosure of the threshing-floor), he came out, bowed low even to the earth, and asked the king what was the occasion of his coming; whereupon David replied, "To buy the floor from thee, to build an altar to the Lord, that the plague may be turned away from the people." Sa2 24:22-23 Aravnah replied, "Let my lord the king take and offer up what seemeth good unto him: behold (i.e., there thou hast) the ox for the burnt-offering, and the threshing-machine, and the harness of the ox for wood" (i.e., for fuel). הבּקר, the pair of oxen yoked together in front of the threshing-machine. הבּקר כּלי, the wooden yokes. "All this giveth Aravnah, O king, to the king." המּלך is a vocative, and is simply omitted by the lxx, Vulgate, Syriac, and Arabic, because the translators regarded it as a nominative, which is quite unsuitable, as Aravnah was not a king. When Thenius, on the other hand, objects to this, for the purpose of throwing suspicion upon the passage, that the sentence is thus stamped as part of Aravnah's address to the king, and that in that case the words that follow, "and Aravnah said," would be altogether superfluous; the former remark is correct enough, for the words "all this giveth Aravnah ... to the king" must form part of what Aravnah said, inasmuch as the remark, "all this gave Aravnah to the king," if taken as the historian's own words, would be in most glaring contradiction to what follows, where the king is said to have bought the floor and the oxen from Aravnah. And the words that follow ("and Aravnah said") are not superfluous on that account, but simply indicate that Aravnah did not proceed to say the rest in the same breath, but added it after a short pause, as a word which did not directly bear upon the question put by the king. ויּאמר (and he said) is often repeated, where the same person continues speaking (see for example Sa2 15:4, Sa2 15:25, Sa2 15:27). "Jehovah thy God accept thee graciously," i.e., fulfil the request thou presentest to Him with sacrifice and prayer. Sa2 24:24 The king did not accept the offer, however, but said, "No; but I will buy it of thee at a price, and will not offer burnt-offerings to the Lord my God without paying for them." Thus David bought the threshing-floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver. Instead of this, the Chronicles give "shekels of gold, in weight six hundred." This difference cannot be reconciled by assuming that David paid his fifty shekels in gold coin, which would have been worth as much as six hundred shekels of silver, since gold was worth twelve times as much as silver. For there is nothing about gold shekels in our text; and the words of the Chronicles cannot be interpreted as meaning that the shekels of gold were worth six hundred shekels of silver. No other course is left, therefore, than to assume that the number must be corrupt in one of the texts. Apparently the statement in the Chronicles is the more correct of the two: for if we consider that Abraham paid four hundred shekels of silver for the site of a family burial-place, at a time when the land was very thinly populated, and therefore land must certainly have been much cheaper than it was in David's time, the small sum of fifty shekels of silver (about 6) appears much too low a price; and David would certainly pay at least fifty shekels of gold. But we are not warranted in any case in speaking of the statement in the Chronicles, as Thenius does, as "intentionally exaggerated." This style of criticism, which carries two kinds of weights and measure in its bag, explaining the high numbers in the books of Samuel and Kings as corruptions of the text, and those in the Chronicles as intentional exaggerations on the part of the chronicler, is sufficiently dealt with by the remark of Bertheau, that "this (i.e., the charge of exaggeration) could only be sustained if it were perfectly certain that the chronicler had our present text of the books of Samuel before him at the time." Sa2 24:25 After acquiring the threshing-floor by purchase, David built an altar to the Lord there, and offered burnt-offerings and supplicatory-offerings (shelamim: as in Jdg 20:26; Jdg 21:4; Sa1 13:9) upon it to the Lord. "So Jehovah was entreated, and the plague was turned away from Israel." This remark brings to a close not only the account of this particular occurrence, but also the book itself; whereas in the Chronicles it is still further stated that Jehovah answered David with fire from heaven, which fell upon the burnt-offering; and that after his prayer had been answered thus, David not only continued to offer sacrifice upon the floor of Aravnah, but also fixed upon it as the site for the temple which was afterwards to be built (Ch1 21:27; Ch1 22:1); and to this there is appended, in Sa2 22:2., an account of the preparations which David made for the building of the temple. It is not affirmed in the Chronicles, however, that David fixed upon this place as the site for the future temple in consequence of a revelation from God, but simply that he did this, because he saw that the Lord had answered him there, and because he could not go to Gibeon, where the tabernacle was standing, to seek the Lord there, on account of the sword of the angel, i.e., on account of the pestilence. The command of God build an altar upon the threshing-floor of Aravnah, and offer expiatory sacrifices upon it, when connected with His answering his prayer by turning away the plague, could not fail to be taken as a distinct intimation to David, that the site of this altar was the place where the Lord would henceforth make known His gracious presence to His people; and this hint was quite sufficient to determine the site for the temple which his son Solomon was to build.