1 Chronicles 21-29

With these last chapters of 1 Chronicles, the Chronicler concludes his account of the reign of King David. And oh, it is awesome.

But it starts out with David being not so awesome! What? Chronicler, what hath thou done???

David decides to go against the will of the Lord and take a census of all the people.* Joab, the voice of reason, tries to dissuade David from this act. But David insists, and the census commences. The Lord gets angry and tells Gad, David's seer, that Israel shall be punished. David must choose between three years of famine, three months of military failures, or three days of pestilence. David chooses door number 3, and God sends a pestilence that reportedly kills 70,000 people. Dang!

But then God also sends an Angel to utterly destroy Jerusalem. But David sees the angel and cries out to God to punish him instead of the people, for this was all his fault. Way to take responsibility for your actions and offer yourself to save your people, David. You know what this makes David? AWESOME!

So God tells David to make an altar at the house of some dude named Ornan. Ornan, being an awesome fellow himself, offers his place (in particular, the threshing floor the altar will be built upon) to David for free. David refuses the offer and insists that he must pay full price for it, for he will not give to God burnt offerings that cost him nothing (21:24)** God sends down fire from heaven to burn the offering on the altar and David declares that it will be the future sight of the Temple.

But David says his eventual successor, Solomon, is young and inexperienced, so David makes all the plans and arrangements for the building of the Temple. According to the Chronicler, David got everything ready and just sort of handed the plans over to Solomon to build, since the kid would be too inept to do it on his own. Never mind that Solomon is now remembered as being the wisest of the wise. This, in a way, robs Solomon of perhaps the greatest part of his legacy: the construction of the Temple. Instead, it was all daddy David's doing. Solomon just told the building crews to follow David's plan. Nice one, Chronicler. Way to make David seem even more awesome at the expense of Solomon.

Then David, being awesome, sets up the organization for the priests and Levites and gives them orders on how they will eventually care for the Temple. My commentary states that these arrangements don't appear in other pre-exilic texts, but was the norm for the 2nd Temple after the return from exile. If this is so, then perhaps the Chronicler had David institute such arrangements so as to help legitimize the current Temple order of his day. Think about it. It could be possible.

Anyway, the Chronicler's love affair with David ends with the awesome king overseeing the anointing of Solomon as king. Then David dies. The end.

Wait a minute! Are you serious? That's it? That's all you have to say about David, oh Chronicler? You completely skipped the most exciting part of David's reign from 2 Samuel: Absalom's Revolt! Sure, it's another negative aspect of David that the Chronicler probably deemed not awesome. But, come on! It's a great story of political intrigue! Oh well, guess you'll just have to check out 2 Samuel 13-18 for it.


*The parallel to this story is in 2 Samuel 24. However, here it says Satan (adversary) incites David to order the census, while in 2 Samuel it's God, upset with Israel, who puts it in David's head to have a census. Why is taking a census bad? I don't rightly know. Maybe it was a sign of pride? "Ooo, look at me! I'm Israel, and I'm so cool because I have this many people!" Maybe? Whatever. In any case, God gets mighty upset over it.

**Following David's lead, shouldn't our offerings to God, in whatever form they may take, also cost us? If we give to God only that which we won't miss (loose change, personal budget surplus, etc.) does it really mean anything? Maybe David was on to something. Maybe our offerings should come at great personal sacrifice to ourselves, instead of just whatever extra we can afford. This verse always reminds me of the poor widow who could *only* give two coins. While it seemed a small, unimpressive amount (especially compared to the riches that the wealthy were offering), Jesus said that the widow had given the most, for it cost her everything (Mark 12:41-44; Luke 21:1-4).