amount of the mass of gold and silver which had been collected by David for the building of the temple cannot with certainty be reckoned, because we are ignorant of the weight of the shekel of that time; and (3) that the correctness of the numbers given is very doubtful, since it is indubitably shown, by a great number of passages of the Old Testament, that the Hebrews have from the earliest times expressed their numbers not by words, but by letters, and consequently omissions might very easily occur, or errors arise, in copying or writing out in words the sums originally written in letters. Such textual errors are so manifest in not a few place, that their existence cannot be doubted; and that not merely in the books of the Chronicle, but in all the historical books of the Old Testament. The Philistines, according to 1Sa 13:5, for example, brought 30,000 chariots and 6000 horsemen into the field; and according to 1Sa 6:19, God smote of the people at Beth-shemesh 50,070 men. With respect to these statements, all commentators are now agreed that the numbers 30,000 and 50,000 are incorrect, and have come into the text by errors of the copyists; and that instead of 30,000 chariots there were originally only 1000, or at most 3000, spoken of, and that the 50,000 in the second passage is an ancient gloss. There is, moreover, at present no doubt among investigators of Scripture, that in 1Ki 5:6 (in English version, 1Ki 4:26) the number 40,000 (stalls) is incorrect, and that instead of it, according to 2Ch 9:25, 4000 should be read; and further, that the statement of the age of King Ahaziah at 42 years (2Ch 22:2), instead of 22 years (2Ki 8:26), has arisen by an interchange of the numeral signs מ and ב. A similar case is to be found in Ezr 2:69, compared with Neh 7:70-72, where, according to Ezra, the chiefs of the people gave 61,000 darics for the restoration of the temple, and according to Nehemiah only 41,000 (viz., 1000 + 20,000 + 20,000). In both of these chapters a multitude of differences is to be found in reference to the number of the exiled families who returned from Babylon, which can only be explained on the supposition of the numeral letters having been confounded. But almost all these different statements of numbers are to be found in the oldest translation of the Old Testament, that of the lxx, from which it appears that they had made their way into the MSS before the settlement of the Hebrew text by the Masoretes, and that consequently the use of letters as numeral signs was customary in the
