2 Samuel 24:1 Meaning Again Yahweh’s Anger Burned Against Israel

The counting is the whole trouble. When the warring self at the center of a person reaches out to tally the powers of spirit and mind and hold them as a personal possession, something recoils, and that recoil reads in the old text as kindled anger. The force that prompts the census and the force that resents it are one current running 2 directions, light and dark of a single power, the way one electricity both lights a room and burns it down. Take the living faculties as owned and you have already lost them. They cannot be possessed like cattle, only inhabited, and the moment they become mine they turn against the one who counts.

So the war inside the man moves against his own higher seeing, and the reckoning that was meant to secure his strength is what unsettles it.

David: the part of the personality surrounded by inner war, the true self warring against the flesh Israel: Isis, Ra, and El, the spirit and mind and God-within unified in one body Judah: the right hemisphere of the brain, the seat of the higher seeing