1 Samuel 6:19, did God strike down 50,070 men?
1 Samuel 6:19 has both a reading with seventy and fifty thousand men, which can be read as 50,070, and a reading with seventy alone. The APB retains both figures in the account of men struck for looking into the ark.
The APB text at this verse
The manuscripts, editions, and versions
The committee record at this verse
The APB is translated by a committee of language models that works blind. The translators are never told they are translating the Bible, never given a book name or a verse number, and never shown the witnesses listed above. Where the manuscripts disagree, the choice between readings is made before translation by the same kind of translator working the same way: it sees the competing readings and the witnesses by age and class, but never a reference or a manuscript name. There are 14,877 such places. For APB 4.0 every one was decided again in October 2026. GPT-6.1 Sol decided every one first. Claude Fable 5.1, from another model family, decided 2,483 of them second, including every place where the first translator left the base text. A departure from the base text needs both translators to agree and the first to be at least 0.8 confident. There is no third translator, so the base text stands when the two disagree. APB 4.0 is translated over those decisions. Whatever was done at this verse was done on the language and the evidence alone, and the record is public.
“Both adjacent quantities are retained without imposing an unstated numerical relationship.”
The APB committee's printed text retains both quantities: "seventy men, fifty thousand men". Its note states: "Both adjacent quantities are retained without imposing an unstated numerical relationship." The committee therefore preserves the two figures separately rather than expressing them as a single total of 50,070. Its record gives no further explanation for retaining the larger number.
The argument for each reading
If seventy
The case for seventy rests on Josephus and the difficulty of the longer Hebrew wording. Josephus, in Antiquities of the Jews VI, counts seventy people struck down when he retells the story. His account therefore supports the smaller number, though a retelling does not establish the exact wording of the text he used.
The received Hebrew places seventy men beside fifty thousand men without a connecting word. The larger figure also strains the scale of a town that could scarcely have held fifty thousand. Reading seventy alone removes both difficulties. Those difficulties give reasons to consider the shorter reading, but they do not establish how the longer wording arose.
If 50,070
The case for retaining both numbers rests on the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint. The Hebrew contains seventy men followed by fifty thousand men. The Greek also preserves both figures and adds a conjunction between them. The larger number thus appears in both the received Hebrew and the Greek translation.
Retaining both figures preserves wording supported by these two witnesses. Their agreement on the numbers does not remove the difficulty of relating them: the Hebrew leaves that relationship unstated, while the Greek supplies a connection. A total of 50,070 combines the quantities, but the Hebrew itself places them side by side without an explicit connector.
The relationship between the two Hebrew quantities remains uncertain. Josephus's smaller count does not establish whether his text omitted the larger number or whether his retelling shortened the account. The variant changes the scale of the deaths. It does not change the stated reason for the blow or the people's mourning, and the choice between these numbers alone does not settle a doctrine about divine judgment.
Related entries
Witness readings for critical editions are quoted from the SBLGNT apparatus (CC BY 4.0); Hebrew text from the Westminster Leningrad Codex (Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible). Readings of ancient manuscripts and versions are cited from the sources linked above.