Why Did David Sin by Taking a Census?

David considered the census he conducted to be a sin because to count and enumerate means to set a boundary, and the very act is a challenge to the infinite. If you pay attention, even Joab, his army commander, asks David the same question before the census: “Why would you want to do this?” Joab blesses him by wishing the number of soldiers would double — framing it as a blessingת and then asks: why does the king’s eye seek to count?

Because the feeling of counting brings with it a feeling of ownership and possession: “How many soldiers do I have?” or “I am the master of the soldiers.”

The second reason is that counting resembles espionage you tally and enumerate as if you truly know what is happening, treating your own accounting as an absolute perception of reality.

Interestingly, in many communities today, children on a school trip are not counted directly. The teacher says: A, B, C, D… – so as not to attempt to limit the infinite or challenge it.

Because the moment you count and enumerate, the act is called a “census” (mifkad), and there is a kind of “strictness” (hakpadah), a contraction of relational space, that creates a state of counter and counted, supervisor and supervised. This is a state of rigidity that leads to loss, and indeed we see the consequences of this census play out. In Weinreb’s language it would be: “Once you count ‘here,’ the other side — ‘there’ — awakens and claims its due.”

David sees it as a sin because it is, at its core, a questioning of Divine Providence, a person attempting to grasp the ungraspable. There is an element of arrogance in it. And the chapter shows us the consequence: seventy thousand people in Israel died in a plague, seventy, the numerical equivalent of ayin (the “narrow eye”), the very word Joab had used beforehand.