God's injustice: 70,000 people killed for David's sin
God sends a plague that kills 70,000 people after David's census. Killing people for someone else's offense is an atrocity, even when the one responsible is called God.
God kills 70,000 people after David takes a census. David commits the offense. Thousands of other people suffer the punishment. The central moral failure in 2 Samuel 24 is God's decision to take their lives for an act they did not choose. 2 Samuel 24:10–15
So the Lord sent a pestilence upon Israel from the morning even to the time appointed: and there died of the people from Dan even to Beersheba seventy thousand men.
Punishing one person for someone else's wrongdoing is unjust. Killing thousands on that basis is an atrocity. The fact that the story attributes this act to God does not make it morally acceptable. It makes the claim that this God is perfectly good much harder to defend.
Imagine a dictator who discovers that a mayor has broken his rules by ordering an unauthorized census. The dictator is furious. To punish the mayor, he orders his soldiers to execute thousands of residents. The mayor survives to learn his lesson.
The residents did not order the census. They had no control over the mayor's decision. Yet the dictator makes them pay for it with their lives.
We would recognize this as evil. The mayor's disobedience would provide no justification for killing those residents. Even if the mayor had committed a serious crime, the dictator would still be responsible for choosing to kill people who did not commit it. Their deaths would be the dictator's crime.
That is the moral problem with God's conduct in this passage. The people become instruments for punishing their ruler. Their lives matter less than the lesson God intends to deliver.
David's own response exposes the injustice. He acknowledges his wrongdoing and questions why the people are being struck down:
And David spake unto the Lord when he saw the angel that smote the people, and said, Lo, I have sinned, and I have done wickedly: but these sheep, what have they done? let thine hand, I pray thee, be against me, and against my father's house.
It is the question the victims deserve to have answered. What did they do to warrant death? Why should their lives be taken because their king sinned?
Their innocence of David's decision is the relevant issue. We do not need to claim that every victim was morally perfect. An unrelated fault does not make someone a legitimate target for punishment over an act committed by another person. Otherwise, any cruelty could be excused by pointing out that its victims had flaws.
The opening of the chapter makes God's responsibility even more troubling. God is already angry with Israel and incites David to take the census. The chapter does not identify the offense behind that earlier anger:
And again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say, Go, number Israel and Judah.
This detail deserves to be faced directly. The narrative presents a broader grievance against Israel, so it would be inaccurate to say that God's anger begins only with the census. But being angry with a population does not establish that each person killed deserves death. An unspecified national offense cannot do the moral work of proving individual responsibility. God also helps bring about the very act followed by the punishment.
Calling the plague a consequence of bad leadership does not absolve its sender. Leaders can certainly harm their people through reckless decisions. Here, however, God deliberately sends the plague. The deaths follow from his choice to inflict it. If someone kills your neighbor to punish you, the killer remains responsible for your neighbor's death.
David accepts responsibility for the census in his own confession:
And David's heart smote him after that he had numbered the people. And David said unto the Lord, I have sinned greatly in that I have done: and now, I beseech thee, O Lord, take away the iniquity of thy servant; for I have done very foolishly.
Nor can the punishment be justified by making David's offense sound more serious. Suppose the census expressed arrogance or disobedience. That would still leave the same unanswered question. Why kill other people? Increasing the king's guilt does nothing to establish theirs.
An all-powerful God could confront David directly, stop the census, or impose a consequence on David himself. He would have no need to use thousands of other people's deaths to make his point. The availability of those alternatives makes the cruelty harder to excuse.
God eventually orders the destroying angel to stop before it devastates Jerusalem:
And when the angel stretched out his hand upon Jerusalem to destroy it, the Lord repented him of the evil, and said to the angel that destroyed the people, It is enough: stay now thine hand. And the angel of the Lord was by the threshingplace of Araunah the Jebusite.
Stopping further killing matters. It does not make the earlier killing just. We would not declare our imaginary dictator benevolent because he eventually told his soldiers they had executed enough residents.
Seventy thousand deaths also mean grief spreading through families and communities. Each victim had a life beyond David's relationship with God. Treating those lives as expendable turns human suffering into a teaching device for someone else's moral development.
Read without granting God an automatic exemption from moral judgment, the episode depicts an angry ruler inflicting lethal collective punishment. God throws a fit, and people who did not order the census pay with their lives. Supreme power makes that act possible. It supplies no moral justification for it.
The wrongdoing at the center of this article is God's. He chooses to kill thousands in response to another person's offense. If we condemn that conduct when a human ruler commits it, we should condemn it here. Worship does not turn cruelty into goodness.