David made one mistake that cost seventy thousand lives. He counted his people.
The Torah had been explicit: if you number Israel, every person counted must pay a half-shekel to God (Exodus 30:12). David forgot—or ignored—this command and ordered Joab to conduct a full census. Joab protested that there was no need. David insisted. It took nine months and twenty days to complete, and the results were staggering: nine hundred thousand fighting men from the tribes of Israel, plus four hundred thousand from Judah alone. Benjamin and Levi went uncounted because David, struck by guilt, halted the census before it was finished.
God's response was immediate. The prophet Gad appeared with three choices—each one devastating. Seven years of famine. Three months of defeat by enemies. Or three days of plague. David's reasoning, as Josephus records it, was painfully logical. Famine? He had grain stored—he'd survive while others starved. That would look self-serving. Military defeat? His fortified cities and elite soldiers gave him an advantage his people lacked. Also self-serving. So he chose the plague—the one punishment that would fall equally on king and commoner alike. "It is much better," he said, "to fall into the hands of God than into those of his enemies."
The pestilence began at dawn. By dinner, seventy thousand were dead. Josephus describes the horror in vivid detail: people dying so suddenly they collapsed on top of one another, some struck blind before the end, some disintegrating so completely there was nothing left to bury, mourners dropping dead in the middle of funeral rites for others.
Then David looked up. He saw the destroying angel suspended in the air above Jerusalem, sword drawn, ready to strike the city itself. David threw himself to the ground in sackcloth and cried out: "I am the shepherd who sinned—punish me and my house, but spare the sheep who did nothing wrong!"
God relented. The prophet Gad told David to go immediately to the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite and build an altar. Araunah offered the site, his oxen, and his ploughs as a gift. David refused. "I will not offer to God a sacrifice that costs me nothing." He paid fifty shekels of silver for the threshing floor, built the altar, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings. The plague stopped.
Josephus then drops a breathtaking detail: this was the same spot where Abraham had once bound Isaac for sacrifice (Genesis 22:2). The place where a father nearly killed his son, and where a king's sin nearly killed a nation, would become the site of Solomon's Temple—the holiest ground in the world.
From that moment, David dedicated his remaining energy to preparing for a building he would never live to see. He gathered ten thousand talents of gold. A hundred thousand talents of silver. Brass and iron beyond counting. He organized the Levites—thirty-eight thousand of them—into divisions for construction, judiciary, gatekeeping, and music. He divided the priesthood into twenty-four courses, a rotation system Josephus says still functioned in his own day, nearly a thousand years later.
Standing before the assembled rulers, David laid out the temple plans that God had given him—every foundation, every chamber, every vessel weighed to specification. Then he gave from his own treasury: two hundred talents of gold, three hundred talents of pure gold for the Holy of Holies and the cherubim. The leaders and tribes responded with five thousand talents of gold, ten thousand talents of silver, and precious stones beyond measure. David blessed God aloud, calling him "the Father and Parent of the universe." The next day, they sacrificed a thousand bulls, a thousand lambs, and anointed Solomon king a second time.