Were the capitals on the temple pillars three cubits or five cubits high?

Three passages give five cubits: the account of the capitals being made (1 Kings 7:16), the account in Chronicles (2 Chronicles 3:15), and Jeremiah’s account of their destruction (Jeremiah 52:22). Only 2 Kings 25:17 has three. Jeremiah 52 and 2 Kings 25 are almost word for word the same passage, so they plainly describe the same capitals in the same words, and one of them has suffered in copying. The weight of the evidence favours five.

Keil and Delitzsch explain the slip as the confusion of two Hebrew number-letters, gimel (3) and he (5). Barnes’ Notes simply says that ‘three cubits’ must be corrected to ‘five’, and Haley lists the case among number differences best explained by a copyist’s error. Keil and Delitzsch reject the idea that the capitals had been cut down by two cubits over the years; the text gives no hint of it.

A slip of this kind is just what we should expect in long passages full of measurements, copied by hand for centuries. It is a matter of one figure in the copying, not a disagreement between the writers about what Solomon made.

Only the ornamented part

John Gill reports an old Jewish answer: that the capital as a whole was five cubits high, but only its upper three cubits carried the network and pomegranates, and 2 Kings 25:17 measures that ornamented part. 1 Kings 7:19 does show that the capitals had distinct parts, with ‘lily work … four cubits’ at the top, but the text of 2 Kings 25:17 gives three cubits as the height of the whole chapiter.