Jim Goad must feel that the following two “contradictions” are important enough to be listed in his top 30 contradictions in the Bible even though they both concern differences in numbers that have no effect on the meaning of the passage. Since this issue involves textual criticism, I will remind the reader that the abbreviation MT indicates the Masoretic Text (the standard form of the Hebrew Bible) and LXX stands for the Septuagint (the early Greek translation). Also, since the problems involve numbers, it is probably appropriate for me to reiterate here two points I have stressed in other posts:
1. In general, words and sentences have a certain amount of redundancy built into them. This means that a careless scribe may make any number of accidental mistakes in copying a biblical text, but most of them can be easily cleared up by subsequent scribes to restore the original wording. As a simple made-up example, what does the following highly corrupted text mean?
I GDSLVE
With a little thought, one can probably figure out that it should read: “I am God's slave.” The missing verb must agree with the singular first-person “I.” And since there is no word in English which contains all the letters “gdslve,” it should be divided into two different words. If the context is a religious one, then it is natural to assume that “gd” stands for God or god. If gdslve did not have “I” preceding it, then it could possibly stand for “God's love” instead, but “God's slave” makes more sense in this case.
Now consider this hypothetical case instead:
I BEGAN MY SCHOOLING WHEN I WAS 16 YEARS OLD.
This sentence appears to be complete, but it brings up the logical question as to whether the person speaking was severely retarded or perhaps a very bright student who entered college at that age. In either case, we would need much more information before knowing if “16” was correct or not. In lieu of that extra information, we would be rightly suspicious that a mistake in copying had occurred.
2. The second principle we must always keep in mind comes into play when two parallel passages in the Bible are present, such as occurs between Samuel-Kings and Chronicles, or between the four Gospel accounts. When one reads two versions of the same event and comes across minor discrepancies (such as we will discuss below) between the two, there are two reactions we can have toward that problem. The skeptical reader, Jim Goad in this case, will latch on to the difference and make the blanket statement that it just goes to show that we can't trust anything in the Bible to be factual. But interestingly, that is not at all how real Bible scholars view the situation.
These scholars rightly point out that the important thing is whether the event actually took place or whether it was simply created by the author to make some theological point he had in mind. And when you get two different authors relating the same event but using somewhat different wording or even including minor details which are in conflict with one another, that is a powerful piece of evidence indicating that actually two entirely different ancient traditions have captured the same historical event, not just one. So such minor differences should actually strengthen our confidence in the text as a witness to real, not created, events.
With that background in mind, here are two sets of parallel passages to examine:
II Kings 8:26 vs. II Chronicles 22:2
The II Kings passage reads, “Ahaziah was 22 years old when he began to reign.”
II Chronicles reads instead, “Ahaziah was 42 years old when he began to reign.”
Although there is no doubt that Azahiah became king, we are left in some confusion as to how old he was when he began to reign. Obviously, there as been a mistake made by a scribe somewhere early in the process of the ancient texts being copied. But which version is correct and how did the other one arise in the first place?
The first of these questions is by far the easiest to answer due to the additional information we have in the Bible. As most commentators will point out, we know that Ahaziah inherited the throne when his father died at age 40 (see II Chronicles 21:20). So if II Chronicles 22:2 were correct, that would make Ahaziah two years older than his own father.
Early scholars such as Keil and Rudolph treat the II Chronicles version as “a simple case of scribal error, for which various explanations are possible, depending on what system of recording numerals is presupposed.” (Williamson)
But there is a more generally accepted explanation for how the error arose. Myers presents the most complete likely scenario: “II Kings viii 26 has '22 years.' The chief LXX witnesses have '20,' while there is some minor support for '22,' which may be due to the influence of MT of II Kings viii 26. The MT of Chronicles may represent the conflation of two traditions and exhibits a striking example of the effort to preserve two divergent traditions. Originally the numbers were kept separate, e.g. 22 or 20, and only later added together [i.e. accidentally].” Thus, we may have an interesting case in which the extreme care the scribes took to preserve all available traditions actually boomeranged, resulting in a clear contradiction between the two parallel accounts.
II Kings 24:8 vs. II Chronicles 36:9
Here is a somewhat similar question involving the correct age at which a certain Israelite man became king.
II Kings reads, “Jehoiachin was eight and ten years old when he began to reign. He reigned three months in Jerusalem”
II Chronicles has, “Jehoiachin was eight years old when he began to reign. He reigned three months and ten days in Jerusalem.”
There are good reasons for supposing that II Kings has again preserved the most likely text. As Hulst points out, II Kings 24:15 informs us additionally that Jehoiachin was married at the time, highly unlikely if he was only eight years old!
And to answer the question as to how the error in II Chronicles might have crept in accidentally, Williamson says, “The present text has arisen by a simple scribal error....It has probably arisen by mistake from a marginal correction of the error earlier in the verse.” Thus, scribe #1 began with a faulty text like that in II Kings but accidentally leaving out “and ten.” So he amended it by placing those missing words in the margin. Then scribe #2 saw those words in the margin of the text he was working from and proceeded to insert it into his own copy. But he didn't know where “and ten” properly belonged and wrongly inserted it after “three months,” adding “days” to make sense of it. Then that error was perpetuated by subsequent generations of scribes.
In both of the examples above, you can see how the scholars called textual critics use all of the information at hand in preparing the most accurate translations from the original languages when there appears to be a discrepancy. And those resources include: (a) comparison of all ancient manuscripts, (b) using common sense to eliminate patent impossibilities in the text, (c) employing pertinent information found elsewhere in the Bible, and (d) figuring out what the most likely scenario was for errors to have arisen in the first place.
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