David Walked Jacob's Rope to the Ground God Had Picked

Click for full size

The Oath He Swore Standing Up

David swore it out loud, in front of witnesses, with the crown already on him and a cedar house already built. He would not walk into his own house. He would not climb into his own bed. He would not give sleep to his eyes or let his eyelids close until he found a place for the Lord, a resting place for the Mighty One of Jacob.

It is a strange thing for a king to promise. Kings sleep. That is most of what the office is good for after the wars are over. David had taken the city, buried his enemies, brought the Ark up with shouting and horns, and then he stood in the middle of all of it and swore off his own bed until he found one patch of dirt.

He did not know where it was. That was the whole trouble.

Heaven Would Not Say It First

God had promised a place. The promise named no hill, no valley, no town, no tribe. Seek out his dwelling and come there, was all it said, and the order of those words was the order of the work. A man looks first, and a prophet tells him afterward whether he has found it. Nobody was going to hand a king a map.

There was a rope running through the world for anyone who knew how to look. When God parcelled out the nations he kept one portion for himself, and the measuring line he used was a man. Abraham was one strand of it, walking the ridge road with an unnamed mountain somewhere ahead of him. Isaac was the second, digging wells and being driven off them and digging again. Jacob was the third, and a rope of three strands does not snap easily.

David had sung about it himself. The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places, he sang, which is a surveyor's word for a plot of ground. A rope like that binds a portion to whoever stretched it, and this portion belonged to God. He had spent his boyhood on those hills with sheep. He knew what the country looked like. He walked it now like a man looking for something he had lost, through Ephrathah, out in the fields of the wood, watching for the place that was already his and would not identify itself.

The Count That Went Wrong

Then he numbered the people.

He sent Joab out to walk the whole country and bring back a figure, and Joab argued with him and lost, and nine months and twenty days later the number came in. Eight hundred thousand men who could draw a sword in Israel. Five hundred thousand in Judah. David heard the total and his own heart hit him in the chest.

Gad the prophet came in the morning with three choices in his hands. Famine for years, flight before enemies for months, or three days of plague. Let me fall into the hand of God, David said, and not into the hand of men. Seventy thousand men died between Dan and Beersheba before the plague was called off.

The Angel Standing on the Threshing Floor

The angel came on toward Jerusalem with his hand still out, and God said enough, and the hand stopped.

It stopped over a threshing floor on the ridge above the city, a flat circle of packed rock where a Jebusite named Araunah was beating out wheat with his four sons. David looked up and saw what was standing there with a drawn sword above the roofs of his own capital. He went down on his face in front of it. I am the one who sinned, he said. I am the one who did wrong. These are sheep. What have they done? Let your hand be against me and against my father's house.

Gad reached him that same day, out of breath, with the sentence David had waited half his life to hear. Go up. Build an altar to the Lord on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.

He had walked the whole length of the rope and it ended here, on a farmer's stone floor, on the worst morning of his reign.

Fifty Shekels and a Fire Made of Farm Tools

Araunah saw the king coming up the hill toward him and bowed with his face to the ground and tried to give the place away. Take it, my lord. Take the oxen for the offering. Take the threshing sledges for firewood, take the yokes, take the wheat, all of it, free.

No, David said. I will buy it from you for a price. I will not bring the Lord my God an offering that cost me nothing.

He weighed out fifty shekels of silver into the hands of a Jebusite farmer, and then he broke up the man's threshing sledges and stacked them, and lit them, and roasted an ox on the fire of the tools that had worked that floor. The plague stopped. Years later his son laid the foundations of a house on that same rock on Mount Moriah, on the spot where the sword had halted, on the ground a shepherd boy had been walking toward since before he knew there was anything to find.