How many men were in the king's presence?

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.

This is the third numerical disagreement in the tight band of parallel material at 2 Kings 25 // Jeremiah 52, and the cumulative pattern is itself part of the evidence. In the roundup of officials after Jerusalem's fall, Nebuzaradan seizes Seraiah the chief priest, Zephaniah the second priest, three keepers of the threshold, a court officer over the men of war — and then a count of royal courtiers 'who were in the king's presence.' 2 Kings 25:19 gives five; Jeremiah 52:25 gives seven. Everything else in the two lists matches almost word for word, which makes the lone numeric divergence look like exactly what it is: a discrepancy introduced in copying.

The classic harmonization, found in John W. Haley's nineteenth-century Alleged Discrepancies and echoed by Archer, proposes that the two additional men in Jeremiah were apprehended in a different location or at a different stage of the operation, so that Kings counts only those taken 'in the city' while Jeremiah's seven include two seized elsewhere. The reconstruction is internally coherent and would dissolve the tension if the texts supported it. They do not. Both verses describe the same category — men 'in the king's presence' / 'near the king's person' — and both situate the action in the single sweep through the conquered city. There is no second location and no temporal staging in either narrative; the distinction is invented to absorb the difference, which is the mark of post-hoc reconciliation rather than exegesis.

The text-critical picture shows the divergence is old. The Septuagint of Jeremiah 52:25 reads seven with its Masoretic parent, and the Septuagint of 4 Kingdoms (2 Kings) 25:19 reads five with its parent. In other words, the two numbers were already fixed in the respective Hebrew Vorlagen before the Greek translators worked, so the variant predates the third-to-second century BCE. That is precisely what one expects when a numeral is miscopied early and then propagates undisturbed through both the Hebrew and Greek lines. Numbers are the most volatile element in any ancient list: in the Hebrew square script and still more in the older paleo-Hebrew hand, several numeral forms are easily confused, and a single stroke separates some figures. Tov's survey of transmission errors places numerical variants among the most common precisely because they carry little contextual redundancy to catch a slip.

The honest limit of the analysis is that one cannot recover whether the historical count was five or seven; the original is irretrievable from these witnesses. But the apologetic move does more than pick a number — it supplies a second arrest site and a separate group of captives that neither verse mentions, in order to make both totals simultaneously true. That maneuver is available for almost any numerical discrepancy and is therefore unfalsifiable; it explains everything and so explains nothing. The simpler account, and the one the versional evidence favors, is that a scribe wrote a wrong digit somewhere upstream of the Septuagint, and both communities preserved their inherited reading.

Where the critical reading lands: genuine scribal variant; the 'caught elsewhere' harmonization is unsupported by the wording and ad hoc.