22. Both Ezra 2:64 and Nehemiah 7:66 agree that the totals for the whole assembly was 42,360, yet when the totals are added, Ezra - 29,818 and Nehemiah - 31,089?

(Category: copyist error)

There are possibly two answers to this seeming dilemma. The first is that this is most likely a copyist's error. The original texts must have had the correct totals, but somewhere along the line of transmission, a scribe made an error in one of the lists, and changed the total in the other so that they would match, without first totaling up the numbers for the families in each list. There is the suggestion that a later scribe upon copying out these lists purposely put down the totals for the whole assembly who were in Jerusalem at his time, which because it was later would have been larger.

The other possibility is forwarded by the learned Old Testament scholar R.K. Harrison, who suggests that at any rate the figure of 42,000 may be metaphorical, following "...the pattern of the Exodus and similar traditions, where the large numbers were employed as symbols of the magnitude of God, and in this particular instance indicating the triumphant deliverance that God achieved for His captive people" (Harrison 1970:1142-1143).

Such errors do not change the historicity of the account, since in such cases another portion of Scripture usually corrects the mistake (the added totals in this instance). As the well-known commentator, Matthew Henry once wrote, "Few books are not printed without mistakes; yet, authors do not disown them on account of this, nor are the errors by the press imputed to the author. The candid reader amends them by the context or by comparing them with some other part of the work."

(Light of Life II 1992:201, 219)

Out of approximately thirty-five subclans listed over half of the numbers are in disagreement. Furthermore, Ezra 2:64 says "The whole congregation together was 42,360," when adding the figures together totals 29,818. Nehemiah 7:66 also says, "The whole congregation together was 42,360" when adding those figures totals 31,089.

It should be immediately recognized that both the authors of Ezra and Nehemiah are aiming to convey exact figures. It would be unfaithful to the intended meaning of the text to state that we are merely dealing with round figures. Both Ezra and Nehemiah are referring to the same event here, the return from the Babylonian Captivity. This event is not punctiliar but is an event that was realized in an interval and not a point of time. If it is reasonable to conjecture that perhaps the lists in Ezra and Nehemiah reflect the counts at different times during the time interval in which the return took place, then we have a reasonable possibility for explaining some of the divergent numbers. Higher totals might reflect clans who added people along their journey, lower totals might reflect deaths or certain types of attrition on the journey. Most of the divergences are fairly small.