Donald F. Murray, «Under Yhwh’s Veto: David as Shedder of Blood in Chronicles», Vol. 82 (2001) 457-476
As grounds for Yhwh’s veto on David’s building the temple, the charge of shedding blood, in Chronicles made against David alone (1 Chr 22,8; 28,3), poses questions both about what is being referred to, and how the charge explains the veto, given that in the Hebrew Bible no other Israelite warrior incurs the charge for killing in warfare. This article explicates the charge, highlights how surprising it is, and then develops a line of argument, drawn principally from Num 31 and 35, that can explain how the Chronicler understood the charge both to be warranted, and to justify Yhwh’s veto.
however, that Chronicles intends to suggest that David’s Md Kp# in war has made him legally or morally culpable. If correctly attributed to the Chronicler, the equation #pn grh (Num 31,19) = #pn-hkm (Num 35,30) = Md Kp# (Num 35,33) is used exclusively to devolve the same automatic religious consequence upon one designated by the first term as devolves upon one designated by (the middle and) the last, i.e. contamination of the place where Yhwh dwells (Num 35,34). It is this ritual contamination that disqualifies David from building Yhwh’s house of rest. Nor, on my account of the Chronicler’s reasoning, is this in any way incompatible with the clear representation of Chronicles that David’s wars were divinely ordered and blessed48, since in Num 31 such a divinely ordered (31,1.7) and blessed (31,8-12) battle results precisely in religious contamination (31,19-24)!
Finally, assuming that I have more or less correctly identified a line of argument that can reasonably be attributed to the Chronicler, why he did not simply assume that David, as #pn grh in war, was ritually decontaminated in the way prescribed by Num 31,19-24 needs some explanation. On the one hand, the uniqueness for the Chronicler of the temple as the locus for the presence of Yhwh among his people would demand a unique degree of ritual purity from its would-be builder, as witness the portrayal of a Solomon unsullied in his devotion to Yhwh as the actual builder. Thus the Chronicler may well have been troubled by the absence of any account of such decontamination of David. But on the other hand, Yhwh’s marked insistence in 1 Chr 22,8 on David’s shedding ‘copious blood’ from his involvement in ‘great wars’ points to an unusual degree of ritual defilement, a degree to which the ritual of decontamination could reasonably appear inadequate. Hence for Chronicles David’s unusual degree of ritual defilement is in irresolvable tension with the demand for a unique degree of ritual purity in the temple-builder. In the end the Chronicler was faced with the recalcitrance of two imperatives not easy to reconcile: on the one hand, his own ideological view that Yhwh had assigned David a leading role in preparing for the temple; on the other, the strength of the received tradition that not David but Solomon actually built it. The issue is not whether the preceding explanation would satisfy us