Monday, June 23rd
Reading for today: 2 Chronicles 8 and 1 Kings 9
This is the account of Solomon building up the rest of the kingdom, after he built the temple and his own home.
I mentioned this blog during our church service yesterday, and I am curious to know how many people are making use of it. Leave a name or a comment so we know that you are reading along....or at least checking up on us!
This passage, among other things reveals a discrepancy between accounts. There are several of these in the Bible, primarily in the Old Testament. In this case, it's the number of supervisors. In one place it says 250 supervisors, in another it says 550. Is one wrong? And if it is, then can we believe the rest of what is written? How do we know there aren't other transcription errors?
Before you panic, and abandon your faith....this can be fairly easily explained. We believe there are different levels of supervisors, and one author includes both upper and middle levels, and the other is counting only the highest level. The reason for this is that the total number of supervisors listed in 1 Kings 5 is 3400, but in 2 Chronicles 2:2 the number is 3600. Either way, using the numbers given you come up with a total of 3, 850 people who were directing the work in some way. It really doesn't seem important, but I pause to mention it because the devil will attempt to exploit any opportunity to introduce doubt into your belief system. I cannot say that the Bible is 100% error free. Perhaps it is, and I simply don't understand how two differing accounts could both be true. It does appear in some places that a tally, or some other small detail is in conflict. However, nothing we believe about who Christ is, what he does for us, the presence of the Holy Spirit, the eventual second coming of Christ, the judgment, etc. are affected by these discrepancies. If they weren't mentioned at all, it wouldn't change a thing that we believe.
Perhaps there's more to see in this passage than the number of supervisors. (of course there is!). Solomon appears to be a good diplomat... what do you see?
PR
I think the number issue is easily explained that way. depending on how you do your accounting your results will be different some companies do last in first out (LIFO) and some do first in last out (FILO), both of these practices are right and accepted but will yield different results. This is what I think happend here.
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