2 Chronicles 22:2 (KJV)

Age at start of Ahaziah's reign: 22 years old in the New International Version (NIV); 42 years old ("forty and two") in the King James Version (KJV).

In KJV, 2 Chronicles 22:2: Says Ahaziah was "forty-two" when he began to reign, but 2 Kings 8:26 says "twenty-two." If Ahaziah was 42, he would be older than his father Jehoram, who died at age 40 (2 Chronicles 21:20) — a biological impossibility. This is almost certainly a scribal error (Hebrew letters for 20 and 40 are similar). VPP's insistence on "forty-two" because every Hebrew manuscript says so makes Scripture contradict itself.

The discrepancy you’ve identified is real and well-documented. The Hebrew text of 2 Chronicles 22:2 reads “forty and two years old,” while 2 Kings 8:26 states twenty-two[1]. The biological problem is insurmountable: if Jehoram began to reign at thirty-two and reigned eight years, dying at age forty, his son could not have reached forty-two before his father’s death[1].

Scholars have reached consensus on the explanation. The number 42 is an orthographical error for 22, with the Hebrew letter ב (bet) having been changed into ם (mem)[2]—a plausible scribal mistake since these letters are visually similar. Scholars agree that the copyediting error appears in 2 Chronicles[3], not in Kings. The Greek Septuagint version of 2 Chronicles also agrees with the reading in 2 Kings 8:26[1], suggesting the error originated in the Hebrew manuscript tradition after the Greek translation was made.

This isn’t an instance where “every Hebrew manuscript” preserves the correct reading—rather, the error became standardized across Hebrew manuscripts at some point in transmission history. Ancient versions (Greek, Syriac) and logical consistency all point to twenty-two as original. The discrepancy demonstrates how scribal errors can become embedded in textual traditions, not that Scripture contradicts itself, but that our manuscript copies sometimes do.

[1] Gary H. Everett, The Books of 1 and 2 Chronicles, Study Notes on The Holy Scriptures (Gary Everett, 2011), 111–112.
[2] Carl Friedrich Keil and Franz Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996), 3:648.
[3] Tremper Longman III, ed., 1 Chronicles Thru Job, Layman’s Bible Commentary (Barbour Publishing, 2009), 4:88.