Did the bronze sea hold 2,000 baths or 3,000?

The most likely answer is a copyist’s slip in Chronicles. Keil and Delitzsch thought that ‘three thousand’ arose from confusing two Hebrew letters used as numerals, gimel (ג, 3) and beth (ב, 2). They also cite the calculation of Thenius that a basin of the stated size, ten cubits across and five deep (1 Kings 7:23), could not hold more than about two thousand baths. Both books describe the same vessel in almost the same words, and if one figure was altered in copying, it is the smaller one that fits the dimensions.

Usual and full capacity

Chronicles uses two verbs, ‘received and held’ (machaziq … yakhil), where Kings has one. Some, as Apologetics Press notes, following Haley and Albert Barnes, take this to mean that the sea usually contained two thousand baths but could take three thousand when filled to the brim.

A smaller bath

Adam Clarke suggested that Chronicles, written after the exile, may reckon in a smaller Babylonian bath, so that three thousand later baths equalled two thousand of Solomon’s.

The size of the bath and of the cubit, and the exact shape of the basin, are uncertain, so its capacity cannot be worked out precisely. Christian scholars are divided between these explanations; Apologetics Press, for example, prefers one of the other two.