"Typos" In The Bible

The Old Testament books include statistics on the size of armies and populations. In hundreds of these statistics the numbers agree throughout the Old Testament. In possibly 18 cases there is a discrepancy.

For example, in 2 Samuel 23:8 the Bible says Jashobeam the Hacmonite killed 800 enemy warriors in battle. In 1 Chronicles 11:11 it says that he killed 300 enemy warriors.

Old Testament Hebrew was a language that did not have written characters that represented numbers. Letters were used to represent numbers. For example, the letter a with a dot over it was the number one. Additional dots placed over a letter multiplied the number. For example, the letter a with two dots over it is 100.

As manuscripts became cracked, worn and faded, it is possible that a copyist, sometime over the hundreds of years the Old Testament manuscripts were copied, incorrectly copied the number of dots over a letter.

Does this affect the trutrh of the Bible? No. For example, the point being made concerning Jashobeam the Hacmonite is that he was a mighty warrior. Whether it was 300 or 800 enemies that he killed, we still get the point. The message has not been changed.

Does this mean that we can assume there are other types of "typo" errors in the Bible? No. Knowing whether a small dot over a letter is a speck of dirt or part of the text, may be difficult for an ancient copyist to discern. Copying the correct letters and words is not.