Ornan

Ornan is the name the books of Chronicles give to the Jebusite landowner whose threshing floor stood just outside Jerusalem, where David built an altar to Yahweh and where Solomon afterwards built the temple. In the parallel account in 2 Samuel the same man is called Araunah, and the dictionary form Ornah or Arania reflects the same name in other translations; the two Hebrew spellings are close enough that they almost certainly refer to one person, though the reason for the difference is not stated in the text. Linguistically, the name is widely thought to be non-Hebrew in origin, possibly Hurrian, and some scholars have suggested it functioned as a title meaning something like "lord" rather than a personal name — a suggestion, not a certainty, and one that bears on the difficult line in 2 Samuel 24:23, where the Hebrew can be read either as Araunah giving gifts to the king or as "Araunah the king" giving them.

The narrative says that the destroying angel was halted "by the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite" (2 Samuel 24:16) and, in the Chronicler's wording, was standing there with a drawn sword stretched out over Jerusalem (1 Chronicles 21:15–16). David, having confessed that the sin of the census was his own and not the people's (2 Samuel 24:17; 1 Chronicles 21:17), was told through the prophet Gad to go up and raise an altar on that spot (2 Samuel 24:18; 1 Chronicles 21:18). Ornan offered the site and everything needed for the offering — the cattle, the threshing sledges and the yokes of the oxen for firewood — and blessed the king with the words "May Yahweh your God accept you" (2 Samuel 24:22–23). David refused to take it as a gift: "I will not take that which is yours for Yahweh, nor offer a burnt offering that costs me nothing" (1 Chronicles 21:24). He built the altar, offered burnt and peace offerings, and the text says Yahweh was entreated for the land and the plague was removed from Israel (2 Samuel 24:25).

Established geography and later biblical interpretation place this threshing floor on the ridge that 2 Chronicles 3:1 calls Mount Moriah, "where Yahweh appeared to David his father, which he prepared in the place that David had appointed, on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite." A threshing floor was a flattened, exposed rock or earth surface on high ground where grain was beaten and winnowed, and the choice of such a site for the temple mount is consistent with the topography of Jerusalem. The identification of that Moriah with the mountain of Genesis 22 is a traditional one rather than something the text of Chronicles states.

The traditions read the episode with different emphases. Jewish interpretation has long treated the purchase as the legal foundation of the temple site, the Jebusite's free offer declined so that the ground would belong to Israel by full purchase — a point reinforced, though the texts give different figures, by the silver named in 2 Samuel and the gold in 1 Chronicles. Christian preaching has often taken David's refusal to offer "a burnt offering that costs me nothing" (1 Chronicles 21:24) as a picture of costly worship or of atonement accomplished at cost, and has read the altar on the threshing floor as a type pointing forward to the temple and its sacrifices. Historical-critical scholarship tends to treat the two accounts as variant traditions of one event, noting the differing name forms and purchase prices without treating either as an error to be harmonized. These are readings of the same verses, not competing reports of what the verses say.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.