"CONTRADICTIONS" in the KING JAMES BIBLE - 05

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Joshua 15:21-32: HOW MANY CITIES - 29 or 36 or 38?

Joshua 15:21-32 says there are 29 cities on the list which actually contains 36 (or 38) names. How many citites were there?

1. The phrase "with their villages" appears 21 times in the bible; all of which occur in Joshua chapters 15-19. I have examined and counted the names and numbers of every city listed in these chapters, and have compared them with the summary of each list - specifically those listed in all 21 occurrences of the phrase "with their villages". Without pasting the entire results, this is what I found.

2. There is no contradiction.

3. In EVERY case (in EVERY list of places named), there are as many or MORE places in the list of cities than in the summary (of "X cities with their villages, or "X cities with their towns and villages"). This is important because if the bible had random errors of counting in it then, statistically, some totals should have erred higher and some should have erred lower.

4. But ALL totals have an equal or greater number of places named in the actual lists of cities than in the summaries at the ends of the lists. It is reasonable to conclude then that the summary is only specifying a subset of all the places listed before it.

5. If so, then we need to examine the 38 cities named in the list of cities in Joshua 15:21-32 and consider whether the 29 cities in the summary could be a subset of that list. (There are actually 39 names in the total list which represent 38 places, because Hezron and Hazor are the same place and count as one. Hazor itself is mentioned three times, but there are many cities named "Clinton" in the U.S.A., all being distinct cities, so it is reasonable to conclude that there were several named "Hazor" in biblical times and that the total number of cities is 38, not 36).

6. Amongst all the lists of cities that include the 21 occurrences of the phrase "with their villages" is a list that specifies a single city along with her towns and her villages, "Ekron, with her towns and her villages:" in Joshua 15:45-46. This would suggest that some of the cities listed had their towns and/or villages included along with them and that others did not. Or, alternatively, that some cities simply did not have towns and/or villages at all.

7. There were other examples of this, but to keep this brief, Joshua 15:21 leads us to believe that all of the included cities will be listed in the verses following it (and they all are included - all 38 of the cities are listed); and Joshua 15:32 leads us to believe that only 29 of those 38 cities listed included their villages, or perhaps that only 29 of those cities even had villages that could have been included - and were, in fact, included when the land was distributed amongst the tribes.

8. So, it appears that the summaries at the end of these lists (and the list in this passage in particular) are subsets of the total number of cities named in the list, and consist only of those cities that had towns and villages - or consist only of those cities whose towns and villages were included in the distribution of land.

9. This conclusion is consistent with all of the lists between Joshua chapters 15-19, which constitute ALL of the passages in the bible in which the phrase "with their villages" is mentioned.

10. You can TRUST every word in God's Word, the King James Bible!