HOW MANY YEARS OF FAMINE WAS DAVID THREATENED WITH? (II SAMUEL 24:13; I CHRONICLES 21:12)

I just ran into another interesting source on the internet criticizing the Bible. It contains a post titled “101 Contradictions in the Bible.” Many of these have been addressed in some of my earlier blogs, But I ran into some new ones here that I will be responding to in the future. Today, I would like to concentrate on its Contradiction #4: God sent his prophet to threaten David with how many years of famine? II Samuel 24:13 says “seven” while the parallel passage in I Chronicles 21:12 has “three” instead. I enjoy queries such as this one because they bring out some important points one should realize when reading the Bible.

The passage in question reads roughly as follows: “So the prophet Gad visited David and told him, 'The LORD offers three things for you to choose between as punishment: three [seven in I Chronicles] years of famine on the land, three months of fleeing before your enemies, or three days of pestilence. Consider and decide what answer I shall relay to God.'”

First, let me make two general comments regarding suspected numerical errors in the Bible. The most important thing to note is that virtually none of these errors or contradictions is of any real significance to our understanding of God or his will for our life, or even for understanding the meaning of the particular passages in question.

Secondly, there are likely to be many more accidental errors in the transmission of numerical information over the years than with repeated copying of words. This is due to the concept of redundancy in language. We can usually understand what a sentence means even if it is filled with grammatical errors, poor punctuation, missing words and transposed letters. Why? Because there is built-in redundancy to words in any language. Words contain a lot more information than we really need. And if all else fails, we can guess at the author's meaning from the context in which a given dubious word appears. But, for example, what if in the course of generations of copying and recopying a text, the number 717 is mistaken for 771 by a scribe? Without any real manuscript evidence, there will be no way to recapture the original number. For more on this subject, see my post “Mathematical Objections to the Bible.”

This second principle, however, usually applies to larger numbers in the Bible, not smaller ones such as 3 and 7. Here it is more doubtful that accidental errors are at play to cause the difference in reading between these two parallel accounts. Since the main uncertainty concerns the II Samuel passage, let us concentrate on it, looking first at what translations and other respected sources have to say.

Arguments in favor of “seven years” in II Samuel 24:13 are as follows:

    1. The number “seven” in 2 Samuel 24:13 is present in all the known Hebrew manuscripts, and therefore it is chosen by the KJV and Living Bible, for example.

    2. In addition, the ancient commentator Josephus (Antiquities, 7.13.2) opted for “seven.”

    3. A second approach might be to look at any possible preferences in wording elsewhere that the respective authors of Samuel-Kings and Chronicles might have had that would influence which particular time period they used in these parallel passages. But here we run into conflicting data which gets us nowhere since Samuel-Kings shows a propensity to utilize both the phrases “three years” and “seven years” much more often than either time period appears in I-II Chronicles.

    4. Textual critics are quick to point out that often it is the most difficult reading that is to be preferred. The reason is that a scribe is not going to be inclined to alter a smooth reading (with three time periods defined by “three”) into a more awkward one (7-3-3) without very good reason, whereas the temptation to do the opposite is much more likely. So if purposeful alterations are at work here, one should actually be more suspicious of the I Chronicles wording, assuming this principle is at work.

Countering the above are those arguments for “three years” in II Samuel 24:13:

    1. Most modern English translations go with “three,” which is the reading in the Greek Septuagint instead and is also in agreement with I Chronicles 21:21 (see RSV, NEB, NRSV, TEV, NIV, JB, AB). So this majority view merely states that the Septuagint must have retained the original meaning whereas the Hebrew text became corrupted somewhere during the process of transmission over the years. This view is, of course, devoid of any real concrete manuscript proof that I Chronicles has the more accurate reading.

    2. A literary approach might get us somewhere if we look at the verse as a whole. From that viewpoint, it would seem highly unlikely that we would encounter three options for punishment with time periods of, respectively, “seven-three-three.” A much more likely and smoother series would have “three” in all three options.

    3. One might next take a more historical approach and investigate the duration of other famines occurring during biblical times in biblical regions to see which time period is the most likely. But this again causes us to run into a brick wall since the Egyptian famine during Joseph's time lasted seven years while two other famines occurring in Samuel-Kings lasted only three years (see II Samuel 21:1 and I Kings 18:1).

But if we ignore the Egyptian famine since it occurred during another time period and in another land, we are left with a situation in which “three years” appears to be the most likely historical duration for the II Samuel 24:13 famine also. Tsumura makes the same deduction and additionally points to the three-year famines mentioned in II Kings 19:29 and Isaiah 37:30. Besides, he says, “Probably even two years of famine would cause real suffering.”

    4. Then there is the logical approach which reasons that God was likely to have presented David with three choices of punishment which were somewhat comparable in terms of lives lost. Hertzberg and others point to the obvious fact that “the shortening of the duration...corresponds with an intensification of their content. Myers speaks to this issue: “The choice...was equally severe, three days of pestilence being about equivalent to three years of famine...as the number of unfortunate victims indicates.”

Another way of viewing the three choices has been mentioned by some scholars: God presents two options to David which he had already encountered in his life – a time of fleeing from his enemies (time unknown) and precisely three years of famine earlier (II Samuel 21:1). David does not want to undergo either of those disasters again and so he throws his fate and the fate of the people into God's hands (God was widely felt to be behind pestilences, as in the plagues of Egypt).

Solution: Both Are Correct

Thus, there are equally strong arguments for either three or seven years in II Samuel 24:13. It appears that the critic I quoted to start this discussion may be correct in labeling this a true biblical contradiction. But, in fact, we don't have to make a choice between options the way David did. The reason is that both “7” in II Samuel 24 and “3” in I Chronicles 21 can both be correct at the same time, as Tsumura hints in his comment: “It seems that while the Books of Samuel reflect the epic style that adopts the perfect number 'seven' to describe a severe famine (cf. Gen 4:1), the Chronicler is more realistic in describing the length of famines in general.”

To paraphrase his words, when II Samuel 24 speaks of “seven years of famine,” it is using “seven” in its known figurative meaning of “completion” or “a complete and perfectly fitting punishment.” By contrast, the Chronicler expresses the time of famine in literal language.

Let me elaborate on this possibility by pointing to two additional Old Testament passages:

    “If thieves are caught they will pay sevenfold;

    they will forfeit all the good of their house.” (Proverbs 6:31)

This form of Hebrew poetry is called Symbolic Parallelism, meaning that the two lines express exactly the same idea, however in one of the lines it is given literally (line 2 in this case) while in the other (line 1 in this case) it is expressed using figurative language. In fact, the actual punishment for a thief was literally fourfold restitution of property (Exodus 22:1), not seven-fold.

With that in mind, we can now turn to another statement of punishment involving David, this one found in II Samuel 12. After Nathan describes the fictional case of a rich man taking a poor man's only pet lamb from him (alluding to David taking Bathsheba away from her husband), David becomes enraged and proclaims in verses 5-6, “The man who did this thing deserves to die; he shall restore the lamb fourfold...”

This reading fits with the literal punishment outlined in Exodus 22:1. However, the textual evidence in the Hebrew manuscripts is mixed, with some reading “seven” instead. Translations such as RSV and NRSV read “fourfold” while AB chooses “sevenfold.” Apparently some scribes felt that complete punishment, including death for the offending party, was better expressed by the figurative number “seven” than with the literal “four,” as specified elsewhere.

So here we have an almost perfect analogue between the case at hand and this earlier one:

    1. Both involve punishments to be meted out on David for his sin.

    2. In each case, it is David himself who determines the appropriate punishment.

    3. There is mixed manuscript evidence between “7” and a lower number (“3” or “4”). In the case of II Samuel 24:13 it is caused by the differences between the Hebrew and Greek texts of the verse. In the case of II Samuel 12:5-6, the differences between the two options appear in different Hebrew manuscripts of the same passage.

    4. In each case, there is another pertinent passage of Scripture which would appear to support the lower number. For II Samuel 24:13 it is the parallel passage in I Chronicles 21:12. For II Samuel 12:5-6 it is specified in the legal section of the Pentateuch at Exodus 22:1.