Did the ships bring Solomon 420 talents of gold from Ophir or 450?

The two passages tell of the same voyage in almost the same words, and both say the gold was brought to king Solomon, so the most likely answer is that one figure was miscopied. Numbers suffer in hand-copying far more than words, because a number gives the copyist no sense to check it by. Here the two texts differ in a single place, twenty or fifty. Ellicott suggests that the Hebrew letters kaf (20) and nun (50) were confused; Barnes and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown also judge that one of the two texts has been miscopied. Haley lists this case among number differences that the copyist explanation accounts for simply.

The ancient versions show how easily such figures drifted. The Greek Septuagint has 450 in Chronicles, but ‘a hundred and twenty talents’ in 1 Kings 9:28, a third figure. Every other detail of the voyage agrees: the port at Ezion-geber, Hiram’s skilled seamen, the gold of Ophir.

Which figure is original cannot now be known. What the case shows is a slip of a scribe in one numeral, not two writers who disagreed about what happened.

Gross and net

John Gill reports two older suggestions: that thirty talents went on the costs of the voyage or the wages of Hiram’s sailors, so that 450 were obtained and 420 reached the treasury; or (Grotius) that 450 talents of ore yielded 420 of refined gold. Both texts, however, say the gold was brought to Solomon, which makes these answers less likely.

Two voyages

Some have thought the passages describe different voyages. But they are told at the same point in Solomon’s story, with the same details, and read most naturally as one.