Were the bronze pillars 18 cubits high or 35?

Chronicles does not give the same measurement as Kings. 1 Kings 7:15 gives each pillar’s height (Hebrew qomah, ‘height’), eighteen cubits “apiece”, and Jeremiah 52:21 speaks of “one pillar”. 2 Chronicles 3:15 gives a single figure for the two pillars together, and the word it uses is ’orek, ‘length’, not the qomah, ‘height’, of Kings. Read as it stands, the verse may give the length of the pair: thirty-five cubits of bronze pillar in all, seventeen and a half for each, which Kings, measuring one standing pillar, gives as a round eighteen. The BSB translates it this way, “which together were thirty-five cubits high”, and Haley mentions the idea that the bronze was cast as one long piece and then cut in two.

Many conservative scholars prefer another answer: that a copyist slipped. Keil and Delitzsch think the combined-length reading strained, and hold that ‘thirty-five’ arose from confusing two pairs of Hebrew number-letters: yod-heth (18) and lamed-he (35). On that view the true figure, eighteen, stands three times in Scripture, and the error came in only with the later copying of Chronicles.

Either way, the writers did not disagree about the pillars. One answer finds a different measurement; the other a slip in copying a single number.

Christian scholars are divided between the two main answers. Modern versions such as the BSB follow the combined-length reading, while Keil and Delitzsch thought it very improbable. The ancient Greek translation does not help it: the Septuagint renders 2 Chronicles 3:15 as a height, and in Jeremiah 52:21 it gives thirty-five cubits for one pillar. That shows the larger figure was known early, but not where it came from.