Wednesday Bible Study: Transcription error

Nehemiah 7 reveals the accretionary history of Ezra-Nehemiah. It ' s essentially a faulty transcription of Ezra 2, but the lists of the returnees from exile contradict each other in 15 places, mostly in the numbers of people. I won ' t bother to list all of the contradictions, but just so you get the idea, in Ezra 775 children of Arah returned, while here there were only 652. The numbers of the various other clans also generally differ by similar amounts, as do the number of singers and porters, and the amount of gold, silver and priestly garments the people give. So this is obviously the same story, probably copied several times in which numerical errors crept in (transcription of numbers seems to be a consistent problem in the Tanakh), and with the name of the protagonist changing. There is also a contradiction with Joshua 8:28, which says that Ai was destroyed and never reoccupied; but here it is one of the hometowns of the returnees. Oh, by the way, the numbers don ' t add up. The total if you use your calculator is 31,089, but verse 66 gives it as 42,360. Arithmetic just wasn ' t their foYou will note at the end that the translators of NIV have introduced a subheading with the name of Ezra, who actually shows up in the next chapter, apparently because they find the chapter division faulty. How it is that somebody named Ezra shows up here, in the same time and place as Nehemiah but in a different role from the Ezra of the eponymous book, is an interesting problem.7&n...
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