>>It seems likely that David would have secured a site
before drawing up
>>plans.
>
>You cannot get beyond the text, but I was dealing with the text. I
was
>making what may be called a reasonable hypothesis for correlating the
data
>from 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles.
Well, Harold, I go away for a week-end and you have been busy! Let me
just, then, return to the point about 2 Samuel 24 and 1st Chronicles 21
(i.e. the price paid by David for 'something' from Ornan/Araunah the
Jebusite). Here is a translation of the two accounts, in part. The
altar/site differential is noted in the text, of course, and you write as
if to show that out could be enough to settle the issue, but that is
not the point: It is this: they are variant accounts of
the same event and the variations are significant. so that even if
'reconciled' they raise redactional issues.
A COMPARISON OF 2Sam 24 and 1Chron 21.
1] The Simple Agenda.
2Sa 24:18
And Gad came that day to David, and said unto him, Go
up, rear an altar unto the LORD in the threshingfloor of
Araunah the Jebusite.
1 Chron 21:18
Then the angel of the LORD commanded Gad to say to
David, that David should go up, and set up an altar unto
the LORD in the threshingfloor of Ornan the Jebusite.
This introduces a single event: David is to buy the threshing
floor of Araunah/Ornan in order to set up an altar there. If you
say the other account means he buys the site too, that is beyond what the
Lord actually orders him to do, because Chronicles, at first, simply
repeats the instruction of the 2nd Samuel version. It would be a
convenient, but unconvincing interpretation to argue for two almost
identical speech-events, and there seems little or no evidence - apart
from the discrepancies themselves - that it is not one occasion.
Here, then, is David's stated agenda, as given, expressed with a little
variation, as in the following verses:
2Sa
24:19
And David, according to the saying of Gad, went up as
the LORD commanded.
1Ch 21:19
And David went up at the saying of Gad, which he
spake in the name of the LORD.
Both suggest David dropped everything and went, in the same emergency
event, at the plague moment. 2]
Seeing the king:
2Sa
24:20
And Araunah looked, and saw the king and his servants
coming on toward him: and Araunah went out, and
bowed himself before the king on his face upon the
ground.
1Ch 21:20
And Ornan turned back, and saw the angel; and his four
sons with him hid themselves. Now Ornan was threshing
wheat.
1Ch 21:21
And as David came to Ornan, Ornan looked and saw
David, and went out of the threshingfloor, and bowed
himself to David with [his] face to the ground.
In both cases, the owner of the threshing-floor is in the floor
itself. Chronicles tells us helpfully that he was engaged in using it for
the purpose for which it was built. Chronicles emphasises the angel
for effect, but Araunah/Ornan's reaction to David is the same: as he
comes out, he bows himself with face to the ground
3]
The Opening of The Transaction:
2Sa
24:21
And Araunah said, Wherefore is my lord the king come
to his servant? And David said, To buy the
threshingfloor of thee, to build an altar unto the LORD,
that the plague may be stayed from the people.
1Ch 21:22
Then David said to Ornan, Grant me the place [maqom] of
[this]
threshingfloor, that I may build an altar therein unto the
LORD: thou shalt grant it me for the full price: that the
plague may be stayed from the people.
Here, the writer is quite awkward. He has to honour the source, and
he cannot be cavalier in changing it, but he also wants to add to the
dimension of the sale. He omits the question of Araunah, perhaps
since it seems to the Chronicler - having emphasised the angel -
that Ornan could not exactly ignore its presence, nor therefore be
in any doubt that the presence of the king might have soemthing to do
with it, a factor which Samuel doesn't take into account: the presence of
the angel is not so emphasised there. Or maybe he simply misses it out
because he wishes to stress the pro-active authority of David the
hero/victim. This last element is because Chronicles represents the event
not as a work of God but of Satan (see both, v1).
Introduction of the word maqom (place) enlarges the reference;
maqom may also have a cultic implication, but still the specific
request is to build an altar. No reference is made here to
any Temple-building vision or plans, because after all this is an
emergency response to divine command, not to an evolved long-term policy.
The agenda above is clearly to buy an altar, and the ambiguous
maqom appears a subtle editorial modulation allowing the
writer to build into a later version of events tradition(?) that Samuel
doesn't have.
4]
The Courtesies.
2Sa 24:22-23
And Araunah said unto David, Let my lord the king take
and offer up what [seemeth] good unto him: behold,
[here be] oxen for burnt sacrifice, and threshing
instruments and [other] instruments of the oxen for
wood. All these [things] did Araunah, [as] a king, give unto
the
king. And Araunah said unto the king, The LORD thy
God accept thee.
1Ch 21:23
And Ornan said unto David, Take [it] to thee, and let
my lord the king do [that which is] good in his eyes: lo, I
give [thee] the oxen [also] for burnt offerings, and the
threshing instruments for wood, and the wheat for the
meat offering; I give it all.
Araunah/Ornan's response is about the same, with elaborate courtesies
seen also in buying the cave of Machpelah (Gen 23:11) where an owner
pretends to give it away and a buyer insists on a fair price.
David's request, in both cases, focuses on an altar; the templar
extension is prepared for by implication only.
This is done so that the Chronicler can adapt the text without
wholesale changes to the sacred passage in view. The writer is
opening up the reference, to allow a later, Temple dimension to David's
purchase, in the purchasing of a larger site than the narratives
themselves require in either case, since it is the clear aim of the
Chronicler to edit the story in order to form a bridge to the grandiose
Davidic Temple plans of later. It is notable here that 2 Samuel 24
ends the Books of Samuel, whereas, 1 Chronicles 22-29 is a lengthy coda
in which the son of david, Solomon, is made king in a smooth succession
in which the fratricidal troubles of Samuel-Kings little intrude. Then
again, David continues to organise the Temple with a robustness that is
absent in 1 Kings 1 where he is a sad, regretful, pathetic old man
pleading for revenge, and requiring the presence of a young woman,
Abishag, to keep warm at nights. Kings contrast with the robust visionary
of Chronicles could not be more obvious. In the Chronicler, while
the Temple is central the kingship has been rehabilitated too, so that
David, weak and vicious at the end, and touchy Solomon too, are securely
great.
5]
The Price:
2Sa 24:24
And the king said unto Araunah, Nay; but I will surely
buy [it] of thee at a price: neither will I offer burnt
offerings unto the LORD my God of that which doth
cost me nothing. So David bought the threshingfloor and
the oxen for fifty shekels of silver.
1Ch 21:24-25
And king David said to Ornan, Nay; but I will verily buy
it for the full price: for I will not take [that] which [is]
thine for the LORD, nor offer burnt offerings without
cost. So David gave to Ornan for the place six hundred
shekels of gold by weight.
NOTE AGAIN: The point is that the one conversation has been
changed in order to expand the reference for the editor's purpose.
This is an obvious redaction, building on the ambiguity of the word
maqom, place.
The later price is intended to reflect the prestigious Babylonian number,
600, in the context of gold, and the extension to the maqom
built into the text gives the writer the excuse to introduce this
higher value. Yet all this is done without any internal reason in
the text for that extension, which seems to contradict the first
instruction which was to build an altar. In the Samuel
version, David is not to build a Temple: all is to be left to his son
after his death. The Chronicler wants an idealised David associated with
the temple because he is going to elevate David so much in planning the
Temple, Solomon will be reduced to a mere proxy. It is clever, but
because the writer is so respectful of his source text he dare not change
it enough to hide what he is doing, which is giving David a site for the
Future Temple, with (as you say) the site preparation one would expect
for the building program. The problem is that this is an invention of the
Chronicler to give the building program an apparent genesis in events in
David's life, which Samuel contradicts (2 Sam 7:1-17). In fact, even
Chronicler's David is forced to refer (1 Chron 28:3) to this after a
fulsome description of his role in creating the cultic life of Israel all
while his son is ruling, apparently because he is young (1 Chron
29:1).
6]
The Result.
The result of the transaction is tellingly in keeping with the
source, not the extension of meaning, because when all is said and done
the Chronicler wants to introduce maqom avoiding merely blatant
contradiction.
2Sa 24:25 And David built there an altar unto the LORD, and
offered burnt offerings and peace offerings. So the
LORD was intreated for the land, and the plague was
stayed from Israel.
1Ch 21:26
And David built there an altar unto the LORD, and
offered burnt offerings and peace offerings, and called
upon the LORD; and he answered him from heaven by
fire upon the altar of burnt offering.
In Chronicles, there is an added dimension which seems to confer
priestly grandeur on David, linking the figure around whom Messianism
grew, in literary terms, to a specifically religious vision. The fire
coming from heaven is part of the new, elevated position that idealised
kingship is to have in some later traditions.
Thus, the result of the transaction is not a Temple, of course, but an
altar. The end of both accounts is to fulfil the agenda set earlier,
which includes no mention of a site for anything else. All is the
introduction of the Chronicler, grafting onto his source a subtle hook on
which to hang his next set of chapters, without changing the structure of
the story as he found it in his source, only alteringa detail in
midrashic style, as a prelude to what - to me - is an obvious midrash on
the relationship between ideals of Kingship and Temple.
Contradiction? Not exactly. Revision. Revision which tries to
affirm the past but move on from limitations that past traditions
impose. Of course, looking at the versions of David's end, as with
the two versions of Solomon's (the wise and the foolish) both ethical and
literary arguments can be used to reconcile then. It is the nature of
life itself that human beings are weak and contradictory, and the
Christian tradition regards such conflicts as part of its theological
bread and butter. So, no. It's not difficult to get round it, especially
as the HB/OT itself was plainly, to some extent, a unified tradition
which accepted these different inputs.
But that is quite a different thing from a scholar closing his eyes to
the obvious. And I suppose, when I think of you, Harold, and Dan, with
your reasonableness and sane comment, the one question which I have is:
are you capable of concluding that there is ever a ripple
in the text, ever an editorial hand and a different
theological perspective? The fact that you might not ever be, well,
that's what I find disturbing, because it means that you are
theologically fortified only to deny that which must be denied, rather
than prepared to look at the evidence as you would if it were any other
book than the Bible which is before you, because - to me - if a person
enters in a debate with a counter-analytical agenda, he is an apologist
but not a true scholar. He has a prior agenda, of which others might well
approve, but which betrays honest sight, and evangelicals have become
expert in inventing pseudo-scholarship to prove what they already
believe.
Sincerely,
Bruce Gardner,
Department of Divinity and Religious Studies,
University of Aberdeen,
Scotland. UK.
AB24 3UB.
------------
Bruce Gardner
b.gardner AT abdn.ac.uk
One conversation: two versions,
Bruce Gardner, 03/05/2001