2 Samuel 24:9: What Was Israel's Population?

The problem is this: 2 Samuel 24:9 has 300,000 less fighting men in northern Israel than 1 Chronicles 21:5. And 2 Samuel has 500,000 fighting men from Judah while 1 Chronicles states there were only 470,000. What is the explanation for these statistical inconsistencies?

As if this were not enough to deal with, both Josephus and the Lucianic texts (a recension of the Greek Septuagint) of Samuel record the number as 900,000 for Israel and 400,000 for Judah.

The solution proposed by J. Barton Payne seems best. He proposed that 2 Samuel 24:9 refers simply to "Israel" (that is, the northern ten tribes), but that 1 Chronicles 21:5 covers "all Israel," including the regular army of 288,000 (1 Chron 27:1-15), a figure when rounded out comes to 300,000.

The difference between 470,000 of Chronicles and 500,000 of 2 Samuel can be explained much the same way: it is a rounding off of the numbers.

But what about the problem of such huge numbers? If taken at face value, this would imply that Israel and Judah had a combined population at this time of something like three to six million people. However, all attempts to size down these numbers runs into the further problem of creating new dilemmas. For example, to say that the word for "thousand" (Hebrew 'elep) here means "tribal unit, contingent," as it sometimes does in other contexts, or even that 'elep had other vowels put with the constant consonants to read 'allup, "specially trained warriors," leaves us with pondering the question as to why it took three hundred days to conduct a census of 1,570 outstanding military figures. Either someone was unusually slow in math, lazy, or the numbers are what they present themselves to be.