Seven hundred chariots or seven thousand; horsemen or footmen?
Seven hundred chariots carried seven thousand men; forty thousand horsemen and forty thousand footmen both fell.
The Passages
2 Samuel 10:18
1 Chronicles 19:18
The Difficulty
“David slew the men of seven hundred chariots of the Syrians, and forty thousand horsemen” (2 Samuel 10:18). “David slew of the Syrians seven thousand men which fought in chariots, and forty thousand footmen” (1 Chronicles 19:18).
The Answer
The KJV marks how the two verses count. In Samuel “the men of” is in italics: the Hebrew counts seven hundred chariots. In Chronicles “men which fought in” is in italics: it counts seven thousand of chariots. Samuel numbers the chariots, and Chronicles the men who fought in them and with them, ten to a chariot, as Gill reckons.
Of the forty thousand, Gill gives Kimchi’s answer as “perhaps the best”: both are true, forty thousand horsemen (Samuel) and forty thousand footmen (Chronicles) were slain, each book recording one. Or the same men are meant, horsemen who came to the field mounted and fought on foot.
Sources
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Here the chariots that held the men are numbered, there the number of the men that were in the chariots given, and reckoning ten men in a chariot, 700 chariots held just 7000 men.
Checked against: Internet Archive scan of the first edition, 2026-10-23 -
Kimchi makes use of another way of removing this difficulty, and which perhaps is the best, that here only the horse are numbered that were slain, and there the foot only, and both true; an equal number of each being slain.
Checked against: Internet Archive scan of the first edition, 2026-10-23
