The word “inerrancy means,” “incapable of making mistakes, or containing no mistakes.” Men for hundreds of years have sought to find errors or mistakes within the pages of the Sacred Volume, but none have been found. Several books have been written alleging that there are errors, mistakes and contradictions in the Bible, but these books have been found to be in error because the authors did not carefully read their Bibles before beginning their critical work. In this brief article, we propose to look at one or two of these so-called mistakes of the Bible and demonstrate that if men had only read their Bibles more carefully, they would not have found themselves in the foolish position of affirming the existence of something that does not exist.
In 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, the amicable apostle Paul was urging the Corinthian church to greater faithfulness in its service to Christ, by reminding Christians of the mistakes of the Jewish people in the past. One incident to which he made reference is recorded in Numbers 25, and speaks of a plague that came on the Israelites because they committed harlotry with the people of Moab. The plague came to an end when Phinehas, grandson to Aaron, and son of Eleazar, followed an Israelite man and a Moabite woman into a tent and killed them both with a javelin. The number of people who died in that plague, according to the Book of Numbers was twenty-four thousand (25:9).
When Paul made reference to this event in 1 Corinthians 10:8, he said, “in one day twenty-three thousand fell.” Those who are critical of the Bible are very quick to jump on this incident and declare that there is a contradiction between the writer of the Book of Numbers and Paul, in that Paul mentioned a thousand less people dying in the plague than did the writer of Numbers. However, a little careful reading will clear the problem immediately. Moses recorded in the Book of Numbers that there was a total of twenty-four thousand people who died, and Paul reported that twenty-three thousand of them died in one day. Consequently, there is no contradiction or mistake, because one writer reported the total number of people who died, while the other reported the number who died in one day.
Another example of this sort of thing is found in differences in the years ancient kings of Israel and Judah reigned. By combining the numbers of 1 Kings 15:10; 16:29; and 22:41, the author of these passages alleges that King Ahab of Israel died in the 19th year of the reign of King Jehoshaphat of Judah. Yet, 1 Kings 22:51 says that he died in the 17th year of Jehoshaphat’s reign. Again, it is claimed there is an error, a contradiction between these two passages. By observing other passages of Scripture, we learn that parts of years were counted as whole years in the reigns of kings. That being the case, if one king began to reign in the last month of a year, reigned the whole of the next year, and one month of the third, he was said to have reigned three years rather than the fourteen months he actually reigned. Thus, so far as actual time was concerned Ahab died in the 17th year of Jehoshaphat=s reign, but counting parts of years for whole years because these men were kings, Ahab died in the 19th year of the reign of Jehoshaphat. Consequently, there is no contradiction. We have the reporter of the incident referring once to regal years and a second time to actual years. Even if there was a mistake here, which there is not, one could easily explain it by a copyist’s error, since letters were used for numbers in the Hebrew language. The error would be in copying rather than in revelation. Furthermore, such numbers as these are of no consequence when considering the overall story of the events of that time, and the goal of the Bible, which is to reveal to us God=s dealing with man in order to bring about his redemption from sin. There are no alleged errors in the Bible that cannot be easily explained as we have explained those above. The problem is not that the Bible is full of errors, but that feeble men have no confidence in what God has written for their salvation.
