Araunah

Araunah (also called Ornan in Chronicles) was a Jebusite who owned a threshing floor on the summit of Mount Moriah in Jerusalem. When a plague struck Israel following David's census, the prophet Gad instructed the king to erect an altar on Araunah's threshing floor. Araunah offered the site freely, along with oxen for sacrifice and threshing sledges for fuel, but David refused the gift, declaring, “I will not offer burnt offerings to the LORD my God that cost me nothing” (2 Sam. 24:24; 1 Chr. 21:24). David paid the full price—fifty shekels of silver, or according to Chronicles six hundred shekels of gold—and built the altar there.

This purchase became the site of Solomon's temple, and 2 Chronicles 3:1 explicitly identifies Mount Moriah, the location of Araunah's threshing floor, with the place where Abraham had been commanded to offer Isaac. The convergence of these three narratives—the Abrahamic sacrifice, David's purchase, and Solomon's temple—makes the site of Araunah's threshing floor one of the most theologically laden locations in the entire biblical narrative.