Bad Theology

Text for today: II Samuel 24

God is annoyed with Israel and incites King David to carry out a census. Having spent nine months and three weeks counting his people, David repents; whereupon God offers him the choice of plague, famine or three months fleeing before his enemies as punishment. Begging not to be given over to human mercy, David gives his people over to the still more dubious mercy of God, who afflicts Israel with a pestilence that kills seventy thousand men. God orders His hired killer to spare Jerusalem, whereupon David asks Him to spare the people and punish him. God then orders David to erect an altar on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite; David obeys and offers up sacrifices, and the plague is averted.

Once again we find the Heavenly Father enjoying His hobby of cardiac adjustment, the better to punish His creatures for the nature to which He has predestined them. According to I Chronicles 21 it is Satan who incites David; but it would of course be blasphemous to assume that Satan has the power to act against the will of God, and the consequences are identical. Possibly David's sin was to complete the census without screwing half a shekel of silver from rich and poor alike, in accordance with God's law (Exodus 30 xi-xvi); although, since the whole incident originates with God's arbitrary urge to inflict collective punishment, it is at least arguable that any omissions David made were also the Father's work.

Once God's wrath is appeased and the massacre brought to a halt at Jerusalem's very gates, David is shrewd enough to beg the tyrant to do exactly as He has just done, and to request that His wrath, now conveniently neutered, should fall upon the king's own house. It is at this juncture, after a mere seventy thousand deaths, that it occurs to David to wonder (entirely in vain) what his people may have done to provoke their Father's latest tantrum. While hardly a profound level of compassion, this is more sympathetic than the attitude of David's descendant Jesus, who was born during another inconvenient census and who never evinced the smallest degree of concern for the victims of His Father's eagerly anticipated genocide.