In the Torah portion (כִּי תִשָּׂא) to be read this Shabbat, we will read about the first census that was to be taken after the Exodus from Egypt:
שמות 30:11-16
וַיְדַבֵּר יְהֹוָה אֶל־מֹשֶׁה לֵּאמֹר׃
כִּי תִשָּׂא אֶת־רֹאשׁ בְּנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵל לִפְקֻדֵיהֶם וְנָתְנוּ אִישׁ כֹּפֶר נַפְשׁוֹ לַיהֹוָה בִּפְקֹד אֹתָם וְלֹא־יִהְיֶה בָהֶם נֶגֶף בִּפְקֹד אֹת זֶה יִתְּנוּ כל־הָעֹבֵר עַל־הַפְּקֻדִים מַחֲצִית הַשֶּׁקֶל בְּשֶׁקֶל הַקֹּדֶשׁ עֶשְׂרִים גֵּרָה הַשֶּׁקֶל מַחֲצִית הַשֶּׁקֶל תְּרוּמָה לַיהֹוָה׃ כֹּל הָעֹבֵר עַל־הַפְּקֻדִים מִבֶּן עֶשְׂרִים שָׁנָה וָמָעְלָה יִתֵּן תְּרוּמַת יְהֹוָה׃ הֶעָשִׁיר לֹא־יַרְבֶּה וְהַדַּל לֹא יַמְעִיט מִמַּחֲצִית הַשָּׁקֶל לָתֵת אֶת־תְּרוּמַת יְהֹוָה לְכַפֵּר עַל־נַפְשֹׁתֵיכֶם׃ וְלָקַחְתָּ אֶת־כֶּסֶף הַכִּפֻּרִים מֵאֵת בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וְנָתַתָּ אֹתוֹ עַל־עֲבֹדַת אֹהֶל מוֹעֵד וְהָיָה לִבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל לְזִכָּרוֹן לִפְנֵי יְהֹוָה לְכַפֵּר עַל־נַפְשֹׁתֵיכֶם׃
God spoke to Moses, saying:
When you take a census of the Israelite men according to their army enrollment, each shall pay God a ransom for himself on being enrolled, that no plague may come upon them through their being enrolled. This is what everyone who is entered in the records shall pay: a half-shekel by the sanctuary weight—twenty gerah to the shekel—a half-shekel as an offering to God. Everyone who is entered in the records, from the age of twenty years up, shall give God’s offering: the rich shall not pay more and the poor shall not pay less than half a shekel when giving God’s offering as expiation for your persons. You shall take the expiation money from the Israelites and assign it to the service of the Tent of Meeting; it shall serve the Israelites as a reminder before God, as expiation for your persons.
In this passage, the undertaking of a census is viewed as an inherently hazardous undertaking. It would result in a pandemic outbreak, but this would be prevented by the giving of the half-shekel.
Three further censuses were carried out when the Children of Israel were in the wilderness, and they are mentioned in the Book of Numbers (1-2, 26 [which follows a pandemic] and 31). Later censuses were commanded by Joshua, King Saul, and King David and these all passed without incident.
The Dangerous Census Taken by King David
It is this obvious danger that King David was warned about when he commanded his military advisor Joab to “make the rounds of all the tribes of Israel, from Dan to Be’er-Sheva, and take a census of the people, so that I may know the size of the population.” But Joab was reluctant. “May the Lord your God increase the number of the people a hundredfold, while your own eyes see it” he told his king. “But” Joab asked, “why should my lord king want this?”
David was not persuaded, and the census was taken, but something – we are not told what – convinced David that he had made a mistake. “But afterward David reproached himself for having numbered the people. And David said to the Lord, “I have sinned grievously in what I have done. Please, Lord, remit the guilt of Your servant, for I have acted foolishly” (v. 10). God refuses to absolve David, and the prophet Gad gives the king a choice of punishment: “Shall a seven-year famine come upon you in the land, or shall you be in flight from your adversaries for three months while they pursue you, or shall there be three days of pestilence in your land? Now consider carefully what reply I shall take back to He who sent me.” David asks that he not fall into the hands of men, and here the Greek translation known as the Septuagint adds a line not found in the original Hebrew: “So David chose the pestilence. It was the time of the wheat harvest.” As a result of this choice, “God sent a pestilence upon Israel from morning until the set time, and 70,000 of the people died, from Dan to Be’er-Sheva.”
A different account of this story is found in the Book of Chronicles. In one of its versions it is Satan who entices King David to count the population. Joab then decides to count those under the age of twenty, in clear defiance of the orders for the census found in the Book of Exodus. “Joab son of Zeruiah did begin to count them, but he did not finish; wrath struck Israel on account of this, and the census was not entered into the account of the chronicles of King David” (1 Chronicles 27:24). In addition, there is no mention – in either version - of the giving of the required half-shekel. This is the basis for several medieval biblical commentaries who explained that the pandemic that followed was because the expiation (kopher) had not been given. Rashi believed that the counting invoked the Ayin Harah, the Evil Eye, and this was the cause of the pandemic that followed, though he doesn’t elaborate.
ולא יהיה בהם נגף. שֶׁהַמִּנְיָן שׁוֹלֵט בּוֹ עַיִן הָרָע, וְהַדֶּבֶר בָּא עֲלֵיהֶם, כְּמוֹ שֶׁמָּצִינוּ בִימֵי דָּוִד
for numbers (i.e. things that have been numbered) are subject to the influence of the “evil eye”, and therefore if you count them by their polls pestilence may befall them, as we find happened, in the days of David (II Samuel 24:10 and 15).
As a consequence of King David’s refusal to take a personal punishment for his crime of counting the people, a pandemic killed 70,000 of his subjects. This belief remained prevalent among the Jews of eastern Europe, who had a saying in Yiddish “When you don’t count, a blessing comes” [Az me tseylt nisht, kumt arayn di brokhe], and Jewish children would protect themselves when being counted while in Polish public schools by whispering “oyf di tseyn” - “on my teeth.”
The Pandemic Gods of the Ancient Near East
The fear of taking a census is actually far older than the Torah itself. It can be found in the writings found at Mari, an ancient city in what is now northwestern Syria. The royal archives there contained thousands of letters which were first excavated in the 1930s, and include detailed written records of how the census was to be taken. Some of the words that appear on the Mari cuneiform letters are like the Hebrew constructs used in the Bible. For example, “to record” (paqadum) has the same root as the Hebrew root word p-k-d meaning “to count.” And the famous Jewish Assyriologist Ephraim Avigdor Speiser (1902-1965) noted that in Mesopotamian lore “the writing down of names could on certain occasions be a very ominous process…on periodic occasions, the higher powers made lists which determined who among the mortals was to live and who was to die.”
There must thus have been a time when the ancient Near Easterner shrank from the thought of having his name recorded in lists that might be put to unpredictable uses. Military conscription was an ominous process because it might place the life of the enrolled in jeopardy. The connection with the cosmic " books " of life and death must have been much too close for one's peace of mind. It would be natural in these circumstances to propitiate the unknown powers, or seek expiation as a general precaution. In due time, such a process would be normalized as a tebibtum in Mesopotamia, and as a form of kippurim among the Israelites… And such fears would be kept alive by plagues, which must have decimated crowded camps more than once.
Nergal. Fragment of impression of seal from Larsa. 2nd millenium BCE, Baghdadi Museum. From here.
In ancient Mesopotamia, there were several deities associated with plagues and pandemics. Nergal, the king of the underworld, was a god of war who was also responsible for plagues. Around the second century B.C.E his role was merged with another god, Erra, and the combined Nergal/Erra god-complex became responsible for both war and pestilence. Namtar (literally, “fate”) was another Mesopotamian deity associated with disease, whose role, wrote to John Betz, “was more similar to the that of the grim reaper of modern folklore” (A Tale of Two Plague Gods,” Biblical Archeology Review 47, no. Winter 2021). He is described in Sumerian texts as having “no hands, has no feet, [and] who takes away/goes about by night.” Nergal acted as a sort of judge to whom an appeal for clemency could be made, while Namtar had the role of judicial executioner, who could not be reasoned with. “In some ways” Betz noted, “this dynamic is not unlike that between YHWH and personified pestilence. As in Habakkuk 3, plague and pestilence are sometimes YHWH’s instruments, but elsewhere we find prayers to YHWH against plague and disease. Returning to 2 Samuel 24:10-25 and 1 Chronicles 21:1-30, we can see this distinction. The angel bringing the plague cannot be reasoned with, but YHWH can be. When YHWH is moved to compassion by his people’s suffering, he is the one who tells the angel to halt the plague.”
As the centuries passed, the census remained unwelcome, but less than it had been before. In biblical times it was still ominous to be counted, but it became possible to prevent any harm by paying a half-shekel to the Temple. Which is why we read in this week’s Torah portion:
so that no plague may come upon them through their being counted
וְלֹא־יִהְיֶה בָהֶם נֶגֶף בִּפְקֹד
[Excerpted from Jeremy Brown. The Eleventh Plague. Jews and Pandemics from the Bible to COVID-19. Oxford University Press, Fall 2022.]
