Four parallel-passage numeric discrepancies between Samuel/Kings and Chronicles describing the same events: the famine offered to David is 'seven years' (2 Sam 24:13) versus 'three years' (1 Chron 21:12); Ahaziah's age at accession is 22 (2 Kings 8:26) versus 42 (2 Chron 22:2); horsemen captured from Hadadezer are 700 (2 Sam 8:4) versus 7,000 (1 Chron 18:4); and David's fighting-men census counts 800,000 (2 Sam 24:9) versus 1,100,000 (1 Chron 21:5).

Be honest and precise: this is a genuine, well-recognized scribal-transmission phenomenon, not a fabricated excuse. Ancient Hebrew numerals in this period were often written using archaic numeral signs or letter-value/abbreviated notations, both documented as highly susceptible to miscopying of a single similar-looking sign, silently producing large numeric swings from what began as a minor visual confusion. This is not special pleading for the Bible -- Emanuel Tov's standard handbook, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, treats numeral corruption as one of the most common, well-attested categories of scribal error across the whole Hebrew Bible manuscript tradition, and comparative ANE textual criticism documents the identical vulnerability in Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Greco-Roman numeral transmission generally; Gleason Archer's Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties catalogues these four cases among the classic instances. Notably, this class of error is narrowly confined to bare numerals -- it does not produce analogous confusion in the surrounding names, narrative sequence, or theological content of the same passages, exactly the pattern predicted by a numeral-specific vulnerability rather than general unreliability. In addition, Chronicles demonstrably draws on written source documents beyond, and sometimes different from, Samuel-Kings (1 Chron 9:1, 'all Israel was enrolled by genealogies... recorded in the Book of the Kings of Israel'; further citations at 1 Chron 29:29 and repeatedly through Chronicles' regnal formulas), so some divergence may reflect independent archival data with its own transmission history rather than mere miscopying of Samuel-Kings. Honesty requires distinguishing the cases: 700/7,000 horsemen and 7/3-year famine are exactly the scale of single-character Hebrew numeral confusion well documented elsewhere; the fighting-men figures and Ahaziah's age are larger swings, harder to reduce to one-character error alone, and represent the harder end of this phenomenon -- the same general transmission-vulnerability explanation, combined with likely divergent source traditions for parts of Chronicles' material, remains the best available account, but it is more secure for the smaller discrepancies than the larger ones.

The consistent confinement of this error-class to numerals specifically, never bleeding into wholesale alteration of the historical narrative, chronology of major events, covenant theology, or moral and prophetic content, is itself evidence for careful transmission overall: a genuinely careless or theologically manipulated textual tradition would be expected to show corruption spreading into substantive content, not neatly confined to the single category of text most mechanically vulnerable to miscopying.