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" As Joab now reflected, however, much time had passed since David lived in that natural God-state and treated his devoted people with that kind of tender loving care. Nowadays, with his ego having taken over his life, David was a different machine. He had become callused, manipulative, and greedy. It was all about money, power, and control. He was now easily threatened, even by what seemed like small insignificant things. Disagreement with him in any form was dangerous.
It didn’t take much to set him off, and when it did, anything might happen. "
― Marco Raye ,
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" But in Hebrew scripture David is not just the “sweet singer of Israel,” the chiseled poet who plays a harp and composes the Psalms. After he makes his name by killing Goliath, David recruits a gang of guerrillas, extorts wealth from his fellow citizens at swordpoint, and fights as a mercenary for the Philistines. These achievements make Saul jealous: the women in his court are singing, “Saul has killed by the thousands, but David by the tens of thousands.” So Saul plots to have him assassinated.19 David narrowly escapes before staging a successful coup. When David becomes king, he keeps up his hard-earned reputation for killing by the tens of thousands. After his general Joab “wasted the country of the children of Ammon,” David “brought out the people that were in it, and cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes.” 20 Finally he manages to do something that God considers immoral: he orders a census. To punish David for this lapse, God kills seventy thousand of his citizens. "
― Steven Pinker , The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
