Accounting plague

When King David numbered the people of Israel, the consequence was a plague. In our excessively moralistic age, we think this is just an arbitrary punishment, because morals are not rooted in reality for us. However, no consequence of sin is ever arbitrary in the Bible.

The move to account for all the fighting men is prideful, but specifically because it is attempting to set up a totalising system, something that totally accounts for fighting strength in Israel. Pride, in essence, is the drive for self-sufficiency apart from God.

When you attempt to create a totalising system, however, you cannot explain everything. There are things that don't fit, that pose a question to your system - how do I fit in? As the system moves to accommodate these anomalies, it becomes more fragile. In addition, the pile of questions grows larger. At some point, the system has to collapse, because it can no longer handle the exceptions, resulting in social confusion. It's also worth noting that in the chaos, new systems are born: the world is always changed after a plague.

In the pre-modern world, social unrest of any kind could be described as a plague (similar to the way a flood was used), because a plague is most evident in the impacts on social life.

Thus, we can see that the plague as a consequence of an accounting move fits with the pattern of self-sufficiency collapsing into social disorder, or plague.

Today, we can see COVID also plays to this pattern. Our modern society has made accounting moves that are unrivalled in history, and the natural result is, at some point, a plague. More evident than the natural consequences of the disease are the social measures taken to combat it, and it occurs at a time when social fragmentation is at a high. This is what we might call a 'symbolism happens' moment, where events combine in surprisingly coherent ways.

Incidentally, this is why Apollo is the god of the sun and reason, but also why he visits plagues on people. In addition, the arrow is a symbol of both meanings being noticed, something being pointed out, but also an image of destructive plague.

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