2 Samuel 8:4
And David took from him a thousand chariots, and seven hundred horsemen, and twenty thousand footmen: and David houghed all the chariot horses, but reserved of them for an hundred chariots. And David took from him a thousand chariots, and seven hundred horsemen, and twenty thousand footmen: and David houghed all the chariot horses, but reserved of them for an hundred chariots.
2 Samuel 8:4 belongs to the narrative of David's rise to rule Israel, presenting his victories as part of his eventual triumph and kingship over all the tribes. It records part of his victories over surrounding enemies, which subdued his enemies and greatly enlarged Israel's dominion under him. In that expansion he extended Israel's territory eastward to the Euphrates, though he may not have ruled beyond it. Together with chapter 7, the verse marks the time when God gave David rest from his enemies, and that peaceful setting led him to turn his attention to providing a permanent dwelling-house for the ark of God.
The verse differs from 1 Chronicles 18:4 in the numbers it reports, as one of the number discrepancies in the historical books of the Old Testament where corruption of numbers is greater than in any other portion of the Bible and comes from mistakes of transcribers. The difference in numbers can be explained by confusion between similar Hebrew letters, since a small dot distinguishes the letters for 700 and 7,000, so one could have been written or read for the other. The seven hundred horsemen taken from Hadadezer mean seven hundred companies of ten horsemen, equaling seven thousand individual horsemen, and if not counted that way the difference comes from careless copying by transcribers.