Did David kill the men of 700 Syrian chariots and 40,000 horsemen, or 7,000 charioteers and 40,000 foot soldiers?

There are two differences here, and they have different answers.

The first is seven hundred charioteers against seven thousand. The most likely explanation is a copyist’s slip in one of the books. Numbers are the details most often found to differ between Samuel–Kings and Chronicles, as in the parallel account of David’s war with Hadadezer (2 Samuel 8:4; 1 Chronicles 18:4). Ellicott thinks Samuel’s seven hundred is original, since seven thousand chariots would be an almost incredible number; the Pulpit Commentary judges the figures impossible to reconcile. Keil and Delitzsch treat the difference as a miscopied number, like the one in 2 Samuel 8:4, where they think Chronicles has kept the right figure. Gill offered a harmony instead: Samuel counts the chariots and Chronicles the men in them, at ten men to a chariot. Few have followed him: as the Pulpit Commentary objects, there could not be ten fighting men to a chariot.

The second difference, horsemen against foot soldiers, needs no slip at all. Keil and Delitzsch point out that the Syrians fought with chariots, cavalry and infantry together, and that each book names only part of the army: Samuel’s earlier verse mentions only foot soldiers (2 Samuel 10:6), and Chronicles only chariots and horsemen (1 Chronicles 19:6–7), while in reporting the dead each book names the other arm. Gill records two older suggestions: that forty thousand of each fell, each writer naming one group, or that the same men came as horsemen and fought on foot. On any of these readings the two books describe the same battle.

Chariots and their crews

Gill held that both numbers are right: seven hundred chariots carried seven thousand men, at ten to a chariot. Another view, which Gill reports from the Jewish commentator Kimchi and Poole also mentions, is that seven thousand chariots fought, of which seven hundred were the picked ones. Neither view needs a copyist’s slip, but both need more than the texts say.

Which book keeps the original number of charioteers cannot be settled from the manuscripts. Ellicott preferred Samuel’s seven hundred as the more credible figure; Tektonics thinks the seven thousand of Chronicles more likely, and Keil and Delitzsch’s comparison with 2 Samuel 8:4 points the same way.