Pelican,
I'm going to quote from another blogger, Chris Heard. It's a bit long, but worth reading:
"The problem is the Hebrew word שטן or satan, pronounced sah-TAHN. In the Christian tradition, “Satan” becomes a synonym for “the devil,” and this happens in Judaism too. But there is no “devil” in the Tanak (a.k.a. Hebrew Bible, a.k.a. to Christians as [part of] the Old Testament). The Hebrew word satan means thinks like “opponent, enemy, adversary.” In a courtroom context, the satan is the prosecutor or plaintiff, and hence the “accuser.” But it isn’t an enemy of God, and it definitely isn’t “the devil.” Satan is a common noun, not a proper noun, in Biblical Hebrew, and it’s important to note that satan appears without a definite article in 1 Chron 21:1. In other words, “Satan rose up against Israel” is a horrible translation of 1 Chron 21:1; it should be, “an opponent rose up against Israel.”
The translation makes a huge difference. According to the dilemma into which your English translation has misled you, there is a major contradiction between 2 Sam 24:1, which has God motivating David to take the census, and 1 Chron 21:1, which has Satan/the Devil motivating David to take the census. But once you understand the point made in the previous paragraph, a devilish Satan disappears from 1 Chron 21:1, to be replaced by two different possibilities.
1. A human satan. A substantial fraction of the few appearances of satan in the Bible concern human enemies or opponents. In 1 Sam 29:4, the other Philistines oppose Achish when he tries to take David into battle with him: “might he not defect from us … and become our enemy (satan) during the battle?” In 2 Sam 19:22 (v. 23 in Hebrew), David asks Abishai and his allies, “What conflict is there between us … that you should become my enemy (satan) today?" (By the way, note that satan here is not just a common noun referring to a human, but a collective noun referring to a whole group of humans.) I 1 Kings 5:4 (v. 18 in Hebrew), Solomon expresses gratitude that he has “no enemy (satan),” but after Solomon gets into idolatry in 1 Kings 11, God “raised up an enemy (satan) against Solomon: Hadad the Edomite” (v. 14).
2. A heavenly satan. In the story of Balaam and his donkey, the “angel of the Lord,” a.k.a. just “the Lord” in the same chapter, stands in the road “as an adversary (satan)” to Balaam. That story has all sorts of interesting “problems” of its own, but this usage establishes that an angel sent by God, or God himself, can be a satan.
So it turns out that, if you read 1 Chronicles 24:1 like a fourth- or fifth-century BC Judean instead of like a modern Western Christian, there is no contradiction between that verse and 2 Samuel 24:1. 1 Chron 24:1 could indicate that a human enemy arose against Israel—and this could even be another nation, like Moab or Edom or whatever—which prompted David to take the census (which is for military, not administrative, purposes). Or 1 Chron 24:1 could indicate that a divine enemy arose against Israel—not the Devil, who is otherwise unknown in the Old Testament, but God himself, as in the story of Balaam. If you go with a human enemy, the author of Chronicles might be trying to tone down God’s involvement by adding a second layer of causality—a proximate cause, if you will, that any reader familiar with 2 Sam 24:1 (of which there would have been very few at the time Chronicles was composed) could accept while still holding to God as the ultimate cause. (This is the same maneuver that allows a person to be an “evolutionary creationist” or “theistic evolutionist”—God as ultimate cause and evolutionary processes as proximate causes.) If you go with a divine enemy, then the two verses make exactly the same claim, with 1 Chronicles 24:1 expressed in a more circumspect way.
Again, I do not offer this explanation as a way to defend inerrancy. I don’t advocate that term or champion its cause. But there is such a thing as drawing a good conclusion from poor data, and I think you’ve stumbled into that thicket here. In fact, I’d suggest that the differing numbers for the census figures pose a bigger problem for “inerrancy” than the use of the term satan in 1 Chron 24:1, which as I’ve already said is only an illusory problem caused by English.
For the cognoscenti reading this comment, I should perhaps add that the Septuagint of 1 Chronicles translates שטן as διαβολος, diabolos—which is also a common noun rather than a proper noun here, “an adversary, an opponent.” (It’s just diabolos, not ho diabolos—no definite article). It’s a fine translation, as long as readers aren’t misled by the later history of the word diabolos through a kind of reverse etymology.
Finally, a parting shot: if either book was written as an apology for David's reign or the Davidic dynasty, it would have been 1–2 Samuel, not 1–2 Chronicles. Some scholars have argued that substantial parts of 1–2 Samuel were written during the 10th century BC as an apology for David, though to other scholars pushing the composition of these books so early seems quaint. But 1–2 Chronicles couldn’t have been written (or at least finished) before about 500–450 BC, since a few of the genealogies in the book go down that far. Its composition belongs to a time when David and his lineage were a treasured memory, but when in real life the temple, not the royal palace, stood at the center of civic organization. David didn’t need defending by the time 1–2 Chronicles was written. Defending him was irrelevant because there was no monarchy to defend."
