probable Old Testament contradiction — Is King Ahaziah age 22 or 42?

[bbyrd009]

You may be right, but I’ve just never thought about it that way.

Somewhere I heard that they didn’t want Benjamin Franklin to write and/or print the actual United States Constitution because they were afraid he might put a joke in it! Maybe in a certain part the 3rd letter of every line and once you know it, it’s a zinger that just jumps out at you. And Franklin could do something like this because, besides being a smart and clever person, he also started out as a printer!

Okay, about the Bible . . .

I think a lot of it was scribes that aren’t very good, or aren’t very sophisticated, taking different versions and just cutting and pasting them together. For example, the two creation stories the beginning of Genesis.

Or two stories of the Flood. In one story, there’s a pair of every type of animal. In the other, 7 pairs of the “clean” animals. Now, someone could reconcile this by saying, well, the second version is just more detailed than the first. But I think there are other details such as the days the flood lasted which can’t be reconciled. Just two versions pasted together.

might be interesting to get a rabbis take here, i mean they all more or less memorize the torah

 

[AgnosticBoy]

Bible Gateway passage: 2 Kings 8 - New King James Version

The King Restores the Shunammite’s Land - Then Elisha spoke to the woman whose son he had restored to life, saying, “Arise and go, you and your household, and stay wherever you can; for the Lord has called for a famine, and furthermore, it will come upon the land for seven years.” So the woman...

www.biblegateway.com

2 Kings, chapter 8,

verse 26:

“Ahaziah was twenty-two years old when he became king, and he reigned one year in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Athaliah the granddaughter of Omri, king of Israel.”

(New King James Version)

One of my go-to sites for Bible questions is open to calling this a contradiction. In fact it provides support for that view more than the other alternative explanations that it lists:

The books of Kings and Chronicles cover much of the same history of God’s chosen people. The books of 1 and 2 Kings take the perspective of the northern kingdom of Israel, and the books of 1 and 2 Chronicles focus more on the southern kingdom of Judah. But the same kings are mentioned in both histories. There is some question about King Ahaziah’s age when he started to reign (this is King Ahaziah of Judah, not King Ahaziah of Israel). One record (2 Kings 8:26) says Ahaziah was 22 years old at the start of his reign, but the other record (2 Chronicles 22:2) says he was 42 years old—at least in some translations.

4. Somewhere in the centuries-long copying process, a scribe made an error, changing the “22 years” of 2 Chronicles 22:2 to “42 years.” Not all the Hebrew manuscripts reflect the error, as a couple of ancient translations, the Syriac and the Arabic, each have “22 years,” thus bringing 2 Chronicles 22:2 and 2 Kings 8:26 into perfect agreement.

Adding support to this fourth theory is the biblical historian’s note in 2 Kings 8:17 that Ahaziah’s father, Joram, died at the age of 40. Therefore, Ahaziah could not have been 42 years old when he took over. Joram could not have had children before he himself was born, and so Ahaziah’s age when he began to reign must have been 22.

Source: GotQuestions

I'm honestly sold on the idea that it was a copyist error. In second place, the following might be worth looking into if I understood Hebrew:

2. The 42-year age is that of Ahaziah’s mother, Athaliah. This theory is based on the peculiar wording of the Hebrew in 2 Chronicles 22:2, which literally says that the king was “a son of forty-two years.”

Source: same as above