All the King’s Horses —

In reality, many of the supposed errors and inconsistences in the Bible that unbelievers point to are really just minor scribal slips like these. Remember, the Bible as we have it now is a copy, of a copy, of a copy, of a copy, etc. of the original. And copying mistakes are inevitable since “It is beyond the capability of anyone to avoid any and every slip of the pen in copying page after page from any book—sacred or secular.”[5] But just as with other books, an error in the copy of it isn’t the same as an error in the original. So these copying mistakes do not undermine the perfection of the original Biblical autographs. But does this call into question the reliability of the Bibles that we hold in our hand today? Not at all. We have thousands of ancient Biblical manuscripts (including the Dead Sea Scrolls) to compare our modern copies to. And they reveal that all the scribal slips are minor (mostly involving numbers and names) and do not alter any Biblical doctrine whatsoever.

As the late Old Testament scholar Gleason Archer explained, when it comes to scribal slips, “numerals and proper names are always more liable to copyist errors than almost any other type of subject matter.”[6] This is due to the nature in which this information was transmitted. For example, in the system developed for recording numerals, “Thousands were indicated by supralinear dots appearing over the digit letter. (Thus an aleph with two dots over it indicated one thousand.) As a manuscript became worn, brittle, or moth-eaten, it would be difficult to tell whether the multiplying dots were over the letter or not.”[7] Thus, it’s very possible that this is what happened to the copyist of 2 Kings. Either that or he misread the Hebrew word for “four” (‘arbaʿ) for “forty” (‘arbāʿîm) which are very similar.[8] Either way, this scribal slip in no way undermines the divine authority of the Scriptures.

And let’s be sure not to miss the point of these passages! It wasn’t just to demonstrate how wealthy Solomon was. The main reason we’re told the number of stables and horses Solomon had is to show that he had violated God’s command in Deuteronomy 17:16 that Israelite kings were not to multiply horses. Indeed, according to Kings and Chronicles Solomon had 12,000 horses and 1,400 chariots (1 Kings 10:26).[9] “By way of comparison, an Assyrian account of the battle of Qarqar in 853 BC (about a century after Solomon) speaks of 1,200 chariots from Damascus, 700 chariots from Hamath, and 2,000 chariots from [Israel’s northern kingdom].”[10] Horses were animals of war so it seems Solomon was trusting in his own might rather than God’s. That was a mistake on Solomon’s part.