This may augment the plausibility of the hypothesis.
I bring up these passages to show that the misunderstanding of ’lph and the multiplication of some numbers by ten were not limited to the censuses. Other passages (such as First Samuel 13:5 and First Kings 4:26 ~ compare this to Second Chronicles 9:25) indicate that copyists sometimes multiplied numbers by 10.
20:35 and 20:46 originally meant that 25 Benjamite officers and 100 slingers were killed, leaving 600, not 1,600, whose escape is described in 20:47.Īnd in First Samuel 6:19, God did not strike down 50,070 men at Beth-shemesh a much more likely reading of the text is "70 men and 50 cattle of a man" as noted in the footnote here in the NKJV-"’eleph" being rarely used to refer to cattle. Notice that the third amount is seen to indicate to the Benjamites that they are defeating their opponents as they were on the previous days, in 20:32. Similarly in Judges 20 the scenario is remarkably clarified when one realizes that the Benjamite force consisted of 26 sword-wielding officers (not 26,000 soldiers) with 700 sling-wielding volunteers, and that they kill, in subsequent days of battle, 22 officers, and then 18 officers, and then about 30 men (in Judges 20:21, 20:25, and 20:31. Judges 20:2 describes 400 officers, not 400,000 soldiers. Judges 12:6 refers to 42 officers, not 42,000 soldiers.
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