Alleged Biblical Number Discrepancies
by Mike James
One area of supposed Bible discrepancies pertains to numbers. We will investigate one today.
Look at these two scriptures pertaining to the same event.
2 Samuel 8:4: "And David took from him a thousand chariots, and seven hundred horsemen, and twenty thousand footmen: and David houghed all the chariot horses, but reserved of them for an hundred chariots" (KJV).
1 Chronicles 18:4: "And David took from him a thousand chariots, and seven thousand horsemen, and twenty thousand footmen: David also houghed all the chariot horses, but reserved of them an hundred chariots" (KJV).
Both of these scriptures pertain to David defeating Hadarezer and then taking booty from him.
There appears to be a difference of opinion in the two scriptures on how many horsemen David seized—seven hundred versus seven thousand. Some translations list 1,700 horsemen in 2 Samuel 8:4.
One of the reasons why we may have different numbers here is likely due to a copyist error. Some of the numeral letters in Hebrew are very similar, and an honest mistake could have been made. One problem in copying Hebrew is the copying of numbers. The Jews used a system of numbering, something like Roman numerals. They used letters for numbers. The letters, which were used for numbers, were similar. So, if copying errors were to be made, numbers would be a likely candidate.
For example, suppose I wrote the word peatr. You would easily tell from the context of the sentence, "Yesterday I picked a pear from the tree," the likely word was pear. With numbers, the context does not matter as much. If I told you that David's men killed 70 men when the actual number was 700, how could you know this was an error without any other information? This is why the most common copying error in the OT is with numbers.
Is the exact number of horses and footmen important to the meaning of the text? What matters is the meaning of the story God wanted to provide. I believe the original scripture that was written down was perfect and inspired. However, we did not have printers and photocopy machines back then to record the original script. Humans had to copy the manuscripts over a long time. Humans make mistakes, and our Bibles do have some mistakes. But based on evidence like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the mistakes do not impact any important doctrine of the Bible.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient Jewish manuscripts written from about the 200s BC to about AD 100. These scrolls included some manuscripts of Old Testament (OT) books. These manuscripts were older than anything we had up until the time they were discovered (the 1940s). The oldest OT manuscripts we had were dated around AD 900. Some of the Dead Sea manuscripts went back to about 250 BC. This got us much closer to when the original manuscripts were written. The important point here is that nothing significant was different in the Dead Sea manuscripts from the newer manuscripts. However, there were some slight variations in spelling, word order, and words lost or added.
Others say the number given in Samuel represents the initial capture, while the number given in Chronicles represents the total.
Another possible way of looking at this is that "horsemen" and "footmen" were not exclusive categories. In other words, the total of the men was 20,000, and of that number, a certain number were horsemen.
The use of the term "horsemen" could be used when a man is on a horse and could be different when a man is no longer on a horse. Chariots can always be called "chariots" (thus, 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles both agree that there were a thousand chariots). Footmen can also always be called "footmen" since all chariot riders were trained with the basics of ground infantry (thus, 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles both agree that there were 20,000 footmen). However, horsemen are not always horsemen. When their chariot gets destroyed, they become footmen in battle.
Let's say when a battle started, there were 7,000 men on horses, so one historian can say that David captured 7,000 horsemen in battle. But if at the end of the battle, 6,300 horses go out of commission and only 700 men remain on horses, then another historian can say that David captured 700 horsemen in battle. The difference in numbers could be due to the different views of historians. The author of 1 Chronicles still referred to the men who lost their horses as "horsemen," and the author of 2 Samuel only referred to the men still on horses as "horsemen." This difference could have arisen if the historian of 1 Chronicles got his number from a count of horsemen before battle and the historian of 2 Samuel got his number from an after-battle count. Both accounts are correct according to their own perspectives.
We don't know for sure which of these explanations is correct, but this does not diminish the inspiration of the Bible.
Sources: Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible, by John W. Haley, (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House), p. 382.
Mi Yodeya, https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/121036/2-samuel-84-vs-chronicles-184
"700, 7000 or 1700 Horsemen in 2 Samuel 8:4?" by Lana Vrz, March 31, 2022, https://www.kjvtoday.com/700-7000-or-1700-horsemen-in-2-samuel-84/
"How do you explain the apparent inconsistency in the versions of 2 Samuel 8:4" by Dr. John Oates, January 23, 2009, Bible Manuscripts and Textual Questions, General, Supposed Inconsistencies in the Bible, https://evidenceforchristianity.org/how-do-you-explain-the-apparent-inconsistency-in-the-versions-of-2-samuel-84/
"Dead Sea Scrolls," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls