Did Joab count 800,000 men in Israel and 500,000 in Judah, or 1,100,000 and 470,000?

The two books are not quoting one exact official total, because there never was one. Chronicles says that Joab left out Levi and Benjamin (1 Chronicles 21:6), that he “began to number, but he finished not”, and that the number was never entered in the official chronicles of King David (1 Chronicles 27:24). What survived were round figures from an unfinished count, and the two writers report them by different categories.

For Israel, a long-standing explanation (Gill gives it from a Jewish writer) is that Chronicles includes David’s standing army and Samuel does not. 1 Chronicles 27:1–15 describes twelve divisions of 24,000 men, one on duty each month: 288,000 men, about 300,000 with their officers. Samuel’s 800,000 “valiant men” from the tribes, with the standing army and its officers added, comes to Chronicles’ 1,100,000. For Judah the gap is smaller, 30,000. Gill took Samuel’s 500,000 as a round number; another suggestion (below) is that it includes the men of Benjamin, Judah’s neighbour, whom Chronicles says Joab did not count. Keil and Delitzsch point out that all these figures are round numbers, so neither book claims a precision that the other contradicts.

Seasoned troops and reserves

Gleason Archer suggested that Samuel’s 800,000 “valiant men” were experienced soldiers and that Chronicles counts every man of fighting age, including some 300,000 reserves. For Judah he took Samuel’s figure to include about 30,000 men of Benjamin and Chronicles’ figure to leave them out.

A copyist’s slip

Adam Clarke held that one set of figures had simply been miscopied, since numbers in the historical books suffered most in copying, and he declined to force a harmony.

Which reconstruction is right cannot be settled from the texts, since Scripture itself says that the count was never finished or recorded.