“18.” The Masoretic Hebrew text, which is normally used for the translation of the Old Testament, reads “eight,” but in this instance, as in quite a few in the Old Testament, there was an obvious copyist’s error. The original reading of “18” is preserved in 2 Kings 24:8, as well as in some of the other Hebrew manuscripts, and also in the Septuagint version. Thus, some modern translations read “18” as the REV does (BBE; HCSB; Darby; ESV; NAB; NET; NIV; NLT). There was no apparent good reason to preserve the reading in the Masoretic text when there was such weighty evidence that it was a scribal error and it caused a contradiction between the books of Kings and Chronicles. For another example of a scribal error involving numbers, see 1 Samuel 6:19, where the Masoretic text reads 50,070 people, when the actual reading was no doubt just 70 (see commentary on 1 Sam. 6:19).