1 KINGS—NOTE ON 1 Kings 4:26 40,000 stalls of horses. Although most Hebrew manuscripts place this number at 40,000, a Greek Septuagint manuscript and one Hebrew manuscript say 4,000, which is also the number indicated in 2 Chronicles 9:25. So the number here could possibly be a copying error. Compare the 1,400 chariots in 1 Kings 10:26, which would suggest fewer than 40,000 horse stalls. In either case, such a large number of stalls (even 4,000) would violate the prohibition in Deuteronomy 17:16 that the king “must not acquire many horses for himself.”

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