Bible Synapse

Did Solomon have 40,000 stalls for horses or 4,000?

Hard question · Israel’s history: Joshua to Esther · raised by 3 of the lists sceptics circulate

A copyist’s slip
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The passages

1 Kings 4:26

“Solomon had forty thousand stalls of horses for his chariots, and twelve thousand horsemen.”

And Solomon had forty thousand stalls of horses for his chariots, and twelve thousand horsemen.

2 Chronicles 9:25

“Solomon had four thousand stalls for horses and chariots, and twelve thousand horsemen”.

And Solomon had four thousand stalls for horses and chariots, and twelve thousand horsemen; whom he bestowed in the chariot cities, and with the king at Jerusalem.

1 Kings 10:26

Solomon had 1,400 chariots and 12,000 horsemen, kept in the chariot cities and at Jerusalem.

And Solomon gathered together chariots and horsemen: and he had a thousand and four hundred chariots, and twelve thousand horsemen, whom he bestowed in the cities for chariots, and with the king at Jerusalem.

The objection

1 Kings 4:26 says that Solomon had forty thousand stalls for his chariot horses; 2 Chronicles 9:25 says four thousand.

The answer

The best answer is a copyist’s slip in 1 Kings 4:26, where ‘forty’ was written for ‘four’. In Hebrew the two words are close: arba‘im (‘forty’) and arba‘at (‘four’, in Chronicles) differ only in their endings. Four thousand is the figure that fits the rest of the record. Solomon had 1,400 chariots and 12,000 horsemen (1 Kings 10:26; 2 Chronicles 1:14), and Keil and Delitzsch note that 4,000 stalls allows two horses for each chariot with some in reserve, while 40,000 would be far out of proportion. The Greek Septuagint of Kings itself has ‘four thousand mares for chariots’ in its summary of Solomon’s horses at 1 Kings 10:26, though its version of 4:26 keeps forty thousand. Many modern translations, such as the NIV and BSB, read 4,000 in 1 Kings 4:26.

Other answers Christians give

Stalls and stables

Gill reports a Jewish explanation, from Levi ben Gershom, that Kings counts 40,000 single stalls and Chronicles 4,000 stables of ten stalls each; he notes that the word in Chronicles is spelt with an extra yod, the letter for ten. Keil and Delitzsch thought each horse had its own crib, which makes this less likely.

From the classic commentators

For 4000 horses are a very suitable number for 1400 chariots, though not 40,000, since two draught horses were required for every war chariot, and one horse may have been kept as a reserve.Keil & Delitzsch, Commentary on 1 Kings 4

Sources

Further reading

Raised by: Shabir Ally, 101 Clear Contradictions in the Bible, Infidels.org (Jim Meritt’s list), The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible. Only the verse references come from these lists.

Checked 2026-10-22. All hard questions