On what day did the temple burn?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

The two notices describe a single event — the burning of Solomon's temple by Nebuzaradan, captain of Nebuchadnezzar's bodyguard, in the fifth month of the nineteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar — and disagree only on the day of the month. 2 Kings 25:8-9 dates it to the seventh; Jeremiah 52:12-13 to the tenth. The disagreement is a controlled experiment in textual transmission, because Jeremiah 52 is not an independent witness. Critical scholarship since Bernhard Duhm has recognized that the chapter is an appendix drawn from the closing material of the Deuteronomistic History (2 Kings 24:18-25:30), appended to the Jeremiah scroll to round it off — note that Jeremiah 51:64 ends 'Thus far are the words of Jeremiah,' after which chapter 52 follows as an editorial supplement. When a passage that is reproducing the same source diverges from it on a discrete number, the parsimonious explanation is a copyist's slip in the numeral, not two genuinely different traditions.

The leading harmonization, associated with Gleason Archer, posits a multi-day conflagration: Nebuzaradan arrived and set the fires on the seventh (Kings), and the structures were fully consumed by the tenth (Jeremiah), so both dates record a real moment. The proposal deserves a fair hearing because protracted destruction of a large complex is historically plausible. But the texts do not cooperate. Both use the same verb of arrival and burning (Hebrew boʼ, 'came,' followed by the burning notice), and both attach a single dated action to Nebuzaradan's coming. Neither verse describes a process spanning days; each gives one date for one act. Reading a multi-day burn into one verse to absorb the other supplies a detail the narrative never offers — a textbook post-hoc reconciliation.

The versional evidence confirms that the tradition was already unstable. The Lucianic recension of the Septuagint reads 'ninth' at 2 Kings 25:8, a third figure that no harmonizer defends, while the Syriac Peshitta of Jeremiah 52:12 reads 'seventh,' pulling the Jeremiah date back toward the Kings figure. When the ancient translators and recensions scatter the number across the seventh, ninth, and tenth, they are reacting to a Hebrew Vorlage whose digit was uncertain. This is the signature of an early numerical corruption, not of an inerrant double-attestation. It is also worth noting that the book of Jeremiah survives in two ancient editions — the shorter Old Greek (LXX) and the longer Masoretic form — so the transmission of Jeremiah 52 specifically was layered and editorially active, exactly the environment in which a numeral can drift.

Later Jewish tradition felt the tension and resolved it homiletically rather than text-critically: the Babylonian Talmud (b. Taanit 29a) reasons that the Gentiles entered the temple and ate and drank in it on the seventh and eighth, set it ablaze toward evening on the ninth, and it burned through the tenth — a rabbinic blend designed to reconcile both biblical dates and to anchor the fast of the Ninth of Av. That this harmonization had to be constructed centuries later, and required inventing a day-by-day itinerary absent from both verses, is itself evidence that the plain texts disagree.

The historical question — what day did the temple actually burn — is unanswerable from these data with certainty, though the convergence of the Masoretic Jeremiah (tenth) with the Talmudic memory may give it a slight edge. What is clear is methodological: two passages drawn from one source preserve two dates, the early versions preserve a third, and the only way to make all of them 'correct' is to manufacture a multi-day event neither author describes. The simpler and better-attested account is that a scribe miscopied a single Hebrew numeral early enough that the corruption propagated into the Greek and Syriac traditions.

Where the critical reading lands: genuine textual variant; the harmonization is ad hoc and unsupported by the wording.