I can’t say I enjoyed completing the census booklet any more than I enjoyed completing income tax returns. As with multiple choice exams, the compiler’s skill is in framing the questions. Somehow theory and practice are not always an exact match and the person on the receiving end of the questionnaire leaves the task with an uneasy feeling that he or she might have done better. However, unease is often our lot and good government requires appropriate tools and information to do its job so we do our best and hope – as always – that there are greater minds than ours at work on the raw material.
Conducting a census in a well-equipped society with the latest aids in information technology at hand is one thing. A census in a rural society with rudimentary record-keeping and slow and often unreliable communications is something else altogether. We should, therefore, come to a reading of the accounts of King David’s census in 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles 21 with a due sense of the difficulties involved.
If the Devil is in the detail in many documents nowadays listing terms and conditions, he was more seriously involved in King David’s inquiries. The King encountered resistance to his plan by his chief of staff Joab. Lurking in the background was a more formidable motivator: Satan. To untangle the strands in the two accounts is, as Cressida Dick might say, fiendishly difficult. Mostly we ignore the complications and turn our attention to something else. We do not see any investigation of the practicalities of administering King David’s kingdom as one of our priorities in reading the Scriptures.
We have to beware of bringing our own sophisticated sensibilities to a reading of Scripture. Mathematical exactitude and historical method have moved on since the compilation of the historical documents of the Old Testament. We are well aware of this when we read of the dimensions and cargo of the Ark, for example. We have to consider where the main weight of the narrative is to be found. It is more important, for example, to be aware of the mood of an elephant than the number of teeth it has.
There we are. I have done my duty with the census. I move on to other things.
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