An Atheist Explores the Bible Part 59: God sends a plague for holding a census and a famine for the sins of a dead man. Yay. (2 Samuel 21-24)

2 Samuel 21-24
God sends a plague for holding a census and a famine for the sins of a dead man. Yay.

Welcome to another instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).

In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT

For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP

And now:

2 Samuel 21

“Then there was a famine in the days of David three years, year after year; and David enquired of the LORD. And the LORD answered, It is for Saul, and for his bloody house, because he slew the Gibeonites.

This chapter is a mixed bag of incident, and begins with a famine in Israel, which God has sent as a punishment for Saul attacking the Gibeonites, despite the fact that Saul is long dead and those remaining are not responsible.

Nevertheless, David offers redress to the Gibeonites, and what they want is seven men of Saul’s descent. David gives them seven grandsons of Saul, including what must be some of his own sons as they are five sons of Michal – it seems rather unkind to kill off all of her sons just because she stopped him dancing. The other sons come from Rizpah. The Gibeonites hang them, and Rizpah stays at the gallows and stops any carrion creatures from taking the bodies. Eventually David recovers the bones of Saul and Jonathon, adds the bones of the hanged seven men and inters them all in the family sepulchre.

After this, the Philistines are at war again. The Israelite generals entreat David not to put himself on the frontline, and then various named Israelites, including Abishai, kill some giants who are kin of Goliath, including the wonderfully-named Ishbibenob and another one with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot.

2 Samuel 22

“And David spake unto the LORD the words of this song in the day that the LORD had delivered him out of the hand of all his enemies, and out of the hand of Saul:”

David gives a song of victory, and there’s something very psalm-like about this chapter (perhaps not surprisingly as I seem to recall that David is thought to be the author of quite a large chunk of the psalms.

Waxing poetic, the language here is very good, the gist being that God is great and has granted David victory – it’s kind of hard to do it justice with a summary and I wonder how I’m going to do the psalms. There are 150 chapters in that book and I expect them to get a bit repetitive.

I mean, taken individually the lines don’t necessarily match up, the song states that God brings down the proud but then begins to boast about how successful David’s been in battle; best not to look at it too hard.

2 Samuel 23

“And he shall be as the light of the morning, when the sun riseth, even a morning without clouds; as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain”

The first verse of this chapter tells us that these are the last words of David, so I suppose suddenly he’s dying. David gives some words about what a good leader should be, couched in poetic terms that are nice, but not entirely useful in a practical sense. The rest of the chapter is a roll-call of his followers – verses 24-39 are just a list of names – with some emphasis on Abishai and other generals. Not a lot of interest, to be honest.

2 Samuel 24

“So Gad came to David, and told him, and said unto him, Shall seven years of famine come unto thee in thy land? or wilt thou flee three months before thine enemies, while they pursue thee? or that there be three days' pestilence in thy land? now advise, and see what answer I shall return to him that sent me.”

In a chapter that feels oddly tacked on, or at least ought to have come before Ch 23, David decides to make a census of the land (end result: 800,000 men of Israel, 700,000 men of Judah. Yes, only fighting men get counted). Apparently, though, this is sinful (pride?) because God gets angry at David for doing this and offers him the choice of three possible dooms, in the world’s first, and worst, game show. David chooses box number three – pestilence for three days – and 70,000 people get killed until God suddenly gets remorseful and stops the plague, provided that David builds him an altar.

David finds the place where the plague-carrying angel has stopped, near the threshing floor of a man named Araunah. Araunah is surprised to see the king there but offers him materials for building the altar, which is duly done and the plague ended. A strange little interlude to end the books of Samuel on, especially as there is no clearly defined moral lesson to be had from it. Don’t count your troops or you’ll get a plague. Except that Moses took a census in Numbers, and nothing bad happened.