When I run the following code it returns "pointer expected" error.
function main(){
static char a[2][500];
strcpy(a[0],"string");
strcpy(a[1],"string1");
printf("%s %s",a[0],a[1]);
}

Anyway to copy strings to a 2 dimension character array so that I can later retrieve them by referencing the first dimension of that array?

No, but you can either define a struct containing your 500 chars array, or simply:

char a[1000];
strcpy(a+0*500,"string0");
strcpy(a+1*500,"string1");