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In 2 Samuel 24, King David commits one of his very few blunders as God's handpicked ruler of Israel and orders that a census be taken of the people. As a result of this royal faux pas, God sends a plague that wipes out much of Israel's population.1 Of all of the perplexing facets of this story, the most intriguing and the most troubling is that the historian credits David's error and, by implication, the ensuing plague to none other than the deity, who is said to have incited David to order the census in the first place. On the whole, the Chronistic version of this story parallels its Deuteronomistic source. But in several instances the Chronicler deviates from the story as we have it in the MT of 2 Samuel. The most remarkable of these deviations is in the very first line of the account, in which a redactor attempts to shed light on the source of David's plan and Israel's troubles. 2 Samuel 24:1 reads,
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Again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, "Go, count the people of Israel and Judah."2
But the parallel account in 1 Chronicles (21:1) begins somewhat differently:
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Satan/a Satan stood up against Israel, and incited David to count the people of Israel.3
In 2 Samuel, it is Yhwh who is angry with Israel and incites David against them, but in 1 Chronicles the direct cause of David's error is identified as a certain (ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.), "satan" That a satan is named as the instigator of David's census and the plague that ensues rather than Yhwh, as in the earlier version of the story, raises two perplexing and related questions. Who is this satan? And why would a redactor substitute this figure for the deity?
Traditionally, these questions have been answered as follows: The satan of 1 Chronicles 21 is none other than Satan, the archenemy of God, who appears so prominendy in later literature. According to this interpretation, the Chonicler has replaced the deity with Satan as the instigator of David's sin in this passage in order to clear the...