Footnote

“Seventy men​—⁠fifty thousand men.” In M “fifty thousand men” is not connected with “seventy men” by the conjunction waw, “and,” as is the case with numbers elsewhere, as in Nu 1:21-46. This might suggest that “fifty thousand men” is an interpolation. Sy, “And Jehovah struck down among the people five thousand and seventy men”; the Arabic agrees. T^J, “And he struck down seventy men among the older men of the people, and fifty thousand among the congregation”; LXX, “And he struck down seventy men among them, and fifty thousand of the men”; Josephus (Jewish Antiquities, Book VI, chapter 1, ¶4) mentions only 70 men as killed and omits any reference to 50,000.