Canter Bridge

To count the troops in the blush of peace seems a reasonable thing to do. One takes inventory of the men he can summon should the deposed threat rise again. An accurate count makes matters of taxation and crop projections more science and less art. A prudent king, one thinks, ought to count.

The Book of Chronicles lays upon this scene a more jaundiced eye. Likely fueled by the pre-monarchic suspicion of standing armies and royal militias, the narrator quickly sizes up David’s prudence as a kind of idolatry of the state. The Lord will raise up both leaders and warriors when they are needed, the logic seems to run. The aggrandizement of central command and the perennial temptation of kings to march before armies and enjoy too much the grandstand view as the missiles pass by is, from this angle of view, a rejection of the Lord’s pledge to nourish and protect his Israel.

With prophets like Nathan and Gad shuffling about, David must have known this. Joab certainly did.

Pragmatism, then as now, is its own witness. It carries its own bullhorn, employs its own marketing office, makes itself seem obvious, unquestionable, the kind of evident next step that only detached mystics and men who take their religion a bit too unmixed would fail to embrace at first opportunity.

So David’s census went on, carried out under the reluctant directives of Joab, a man of war who had known the sound of divine armies fighting for Israel when the Philistines outnumbered. Job had known the serendipities of victory snatched from the direst of circumstances. He had looked into the bloodied faces of warriors, seen them exult over a victory that only YHWH could have achieved. He knew the lines in masculine faces that say, ‘I should have been dead.”

David was not prepared to postpone his need to know Israel’s number by the force of a warrior’s narrative logic. Math, with its reassuring exactness, seemed the better science.

Yet when faced with a prophet who presented three unwelcome options by which David’s Israel might endure YHWH’s counterpunch to the king’s well-reasoned mistrust, David once again glimpses into the heart of God. ‘Give me three days of divine plague’, he makes his choice, ‘for YHWH is very merciful and men are not.’

Finally, David’s science catches up with the perspicuity of faith. He is right, of course, in his judgment. The narrative that follows shows YHWH restraining his bloody Angel at a threshing floor that would soon be half visible among the smoke of sacrifice.

The biblical tradition urges us to embrace the threshing floor of Goren as the Jebusite turf that would underlie Solomon’s temple itself. There, under a more urbane roof, sacrifice would continue incessantly. That smoke would, in YHWH’s strange divine economy, not only appease a demanding deity who had looked upon what Joab called David’s ‘great cause of guilt’. Rather, animals would die and smoke would ascend in constant plea for YHWH’s mercy to extend itself through the length and breadth of an entire people’s folly and gratitude.

David, ever the warrior, was not so wise in stable times. Give him a crisis and he becomes wise again. But, oh, the cost …