12
Go and speak to David, Thus says the LORD, I offer you three things: choose you one of them, that I may do it to you.
13
So Gad came to David, and told him, and said to him, Shall seven years of famine come to you in your land? or will you flee three months before your foes while they pursue you? or shall there be three days' pestilence in your land? now advise you, and consider what answer I shall return to him who sent me.
14
David said to Gad, I am in a great strait: let us fall now into the hand of the LORD; for his mercies are great; and let me not fall into the hand of man.
15
So the LORD sent a pestilence on Yisra'el from the morning even to the time appointed; and there died of the people from Dan even to Be'er-Sheva seventy thousand men.
16
When the angel stretched out his hand toward Yerushalayim to destroy it, the LORD repented him of the evil, and said to the angel who destroyed the people, It is enough; now stay your hand. The angel of the LORD was by the threshing floor of Aravna the Yevusi.
17
David spoke to the LORD when he saw the angel who struck the people, and said, Behold, I have sinned, and I have done perversely; but these sheep, what have they done? Please let your hand be against me, and against my father's house.
18
Gad came that day to David, and said to him, Go up, rear an altar to the LORD in the threshing floor of Aravna the Yevusi.
19
David went up according to the saying of Gad, as the LORD commanded.
20
Aravna looked forth, and saw the king and his servants coming on toward him: and Aravna went out, and bowed himself before the king with his face to the ground.
21
Aravna said, Why is my lord the king come to his servant? David said, To buy the threshing floor of you, to build an altar to the LORD, that the plague may be stayed from the people.
22
Aravna said to David, Let my lord the king take and offer up what seems good to him: behold, the oxen for the burnt offering, and the threshing instruments and the yokes of the oxen for the wood: