Did Solomon have forty thousand stalls or four thousand?
Forty thousand stalls for horses, in four thousand stables for horses and chariots.
The Passages
1 Kings 4:26
2 Chronicles 9:25
The Difficulty
“And Solomon had forty thousand stalls of horses for his chariots, and twelve thousand horsemen” (1 Kings 4:26). “And Solomon had four thousand stalls for horses and chariots, and twelve thousand horsemen” (2 Chronicles 9:25). Some modern versions change Kings to “four thousand” (NIV), and others note that a scribe may have miscopied it.
The Answer
The verses don’t count the same thing. Kings counts “stalls of horses,” the places for each horse; Chronicles counts “stalls for horses and chariots,” buildings that held both. Forty thousand horse stalls in four thousand stables is ten to a stable. The Hebrew marks the difference too: Kings has urwot, Chronicles uryot, with an added yod, the Hebrew letter for ten, as Gill noticed.
Gill, after Ben Gersom, gives this answer “without supposing” a copyist’s mistake. He also gives another: Kings counts all the stalls in the kingdom, Chronicles only those at Jerusalem and the chariot cities (“whom he bestowed in the chariot cities, and with the king at Jerusalem”).
Sources
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Here he numbers the stalls, which were 40,000, and there the stables, which were 4000, there being ten stalls in each; and the word there has the letter “yod” in it more than here, which is the numerical letter for “ten”.
Checked against: Internet Archive scan of the first edition, 2026-10-23 -
אֻרְוֺ֥ת סוּסִ֖ים … אֻֽרְי֤וֹת סוּסִים֙
Checked against: Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible, 2026-10-19
