The time appointed - Perhaps "the time of the assembly," meaning the time of the evening sacrifice, at three o'clock, when the people assembled for prayer, more commonly described as "the time of the evening oblation" Daniel 9:21; 1 Kings 18:29, 1 Kings 18:36; Acts 3:1; Luke 1:10.

Seventy thousand - It is the most destructive plague recorded as having fallen upon the Israelites. In the plague that followed the rebellion of Korah there died 14,700 Numbers 16:49; in the plague, on account of Baal-Peor, 24,000 Numbers 25:9; 1 Corinthians 10:8.

From the morning - to the time appointed - That is, from the morning of the day after David had made his election till the third day, according to the condition which God had proposed, and he had accepted: but it seems that the plague was terminated before the conclusion of the third day, for Jerusalem might have been destroyed, but it was not. Throughout the land, independently of the city, seventy thousand persons were slain! This was a terrible mortality in the space of less than three days.

So the Lord sent a pestilence upon Israel,.... Upon the land of Israel, the people of the land, directly employing an angel to go through the coasts of it, and empowering him to inflict a pestilential disease:

from the morning even to the time appointed: from the morning the prophet Gad came to David with a message from the Lord; that very morning the plague began, and lasted to the time set for it, the three days, or at least unto the beginning of the third, when reaching Jerusalem, the Lord repented of it, and stayed his hand; though many think a much shorter time is intended; some think it lasted no more than half a day, if so much; some say but three hours (f); the Septuagint version, until dinnertime; and the Syriac and Arabic versions, until the sixth hour of the day, which was noon; and so Kimchi says, some of their Rabbins interpret it of the half or middle of the day; the Targum is,"from the time the daily sacrifice was slain until it was burnt;''and it is the sense of several learned men that it was only from the morning until the time of the evening sacrifice, or evening prayer, about three o'clock in the afternoon, and so lasted about nine hours:

and there died of the people, from Dan even to Beersheba, seventy thousand men; so that there was a great diminution of the people in all places where they were numbered; and David's sin may be read in the punishment of it; his heart was lifted up by the numbers of his people, and now it must be humbled by the lessening of them.

(f) Pirke Eliezer, c. 43.

God then gave (sent) a pestilence into (upon) Israel, "from the morning till the time of the assembly;" and there died of the people in the whole land (from Dan to Beersheba) seventy thousand men. "From the morning:" on which Gad had foretold the punishment. The meaning of מועד ועד־עת is doubtful. The rendering "to the time appointed," i.e., "till the expiration of the three days," in support of which the Vulgate (ad tempus constitutum) is wrongly appealed to, is precluded not only by the circumstance that, according to 2 Samuel 24:16, the plague was stayed earlier because God repented Him of the evil, so that it did not last so long as was at first appointed, but also by the grammatical difficulty that מועד עת has no article, and can only be rendered "for an (not for the) appointed time." We meet with two different explanations in the ancient versions: one in the Septuagint, ἕως ὥρας ἀρίστου, "till the hour of breakfast," i.e., till the sixth hour of the day, which is the rendering also adopted by the Syriac and Arabic as well as by Kimchi and several of the Rabbins; the other in the Chaldee (Jonathan), "from the time at which the sacrifice is commonly slain until it is consumed." Accordingly Bochart explains מועד את as signifying "the time at which the people came together for evening prayers, about the ninth hour of the day, i.e., the third hour in the afternoon" (vid., Acts 3:1). The same view also lies at the foundation of the Vulgate rendering, according to the express statement of Jerome (traditt. Hebr. in 2 libr. Regum): "He calls that the time appointed, in which the evening sacrifice was offered." It is true that this meaning of מועד cannot be established by precisely analogous passages, but it may be very easily deduced from the frequent employment of the word to denote the meetings and festivals connected with the worship of God, when it generally stands without an article, as for example in the perfectly analogous מועד יום (Hosea 9:5; Lamentations 2:7, Lamentations 2:22); whereas it is always written with the article when it is sued in the general sense of a fixed time, and some definite period is referred to.

(Note: The objections brought against this have no force in them, viz., that, according to this view, the section must have been written a long time after the captivity (Clericus and Thenius), and that "the perfectly general expression 'the time of meeting' could not stand for the time of the afternoon or evening meeting" (Thenius): for the former rests upon the assumption that the daily sacrifice was introduced after the captivity, - an assumption quite at variance with the historical facts; and the latter is overthrown by the simple remark, that the indefinite expression derived its more precise meaning from the legal appointment of the morning and evening sacrifice as times of meeting for the worship of God, inasmuch as the evening meeting was the only one that could be placed in contrast with the morning.)

We must therefore decide in favour of the latter. But if the pestilence did not last a whole day, the number of persons carried off by it (70,000 men) exceeded very considerably the number destroyed by the most violent pestilential epidemics on record, although they have not unfrequently swept off hundreds of thousands in a very brief space of time. But the pestilence burst upon the people in this instance with supernatural strength and violence, that it might be seen at once to be a direct judgment from God.

So the LORD sent a pestilence upon Israel from the morning even to the time appointed: and there died of the people from {h} Dan even to Beersheba seventy thousand men.

(h) From the one side of the country to the other.

2Sa 24:15-25. His Intercession to God; the Plague Ceases.

15. from the morning-rather that morning when Gad came [2Sa 24:18], till the end of the three days.

there died of the people . seventy thousand men-Thus was the pride of the vainglorious monarch, confiding in the number of his population, deeply humbled.

24:10-15 It is well, when a man has sinned, if he has a heart within to smite him for it. If we confess our sins, we may pray in faith that God would forgive them, and take away, by pardoning mercy, that sin which we cast away by sincere repentance. What we make the matter of our pride, it is just in God to take from us, or make bitter to us, and make it our punishment. This must be such a punishment as the people have a large share in, for though it was David's sin that opened the sluice, the sins of the people all contributed to the flood. In this difficulty, David chose a judgment which came immediately from God, whose mercies he knew to be very great, rather than from men, who would have triumphed in the miseries of Israel, and have been thereby hardened in their idolatry. He chose the pestilence; he and his family would be as much exposed to it as the poorest Israelite; and he would continue for a shorter time under the Divine rebuke, however severe it was. The rapid destruction by the pestilence shows how easily God can bring down the proudest sinners, and how much we owe daily to the Divine patience.