On what day of the month was Jehoiachin released from prison?

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 fourth numerical divergence within the parallel block 2 Kings 24:18-25:30 // Jeremiah 52, and by now the data form a coherent pattern rather than a series of isolated puzzles. The closing scene reports the elevation of the exiled Judahite king Jehoiachin by Evil-Merodach (Amel-Marduk), Nebuchadnezzar's successor, in the twelfth month of the thirty-seventh year of Jehoiachin's exile. 2 Kings 25:27 dates the act to the twenty-seventh of the month; Jeremiah 52:31 to the twenty-fifth. The surrounding text is near-verbatim in both books, leaving the date as the single point of friction.

Both passages employ the same Hebrew idiom, nasaʼ et-roʼsh, literally 'he lifted up the head of' Jehoiachin — a court formula for granting amnesty and restoring status, paralleled in the cupbearer's reinstatement in Genesis 40:13. The idiom names a single juridical act of release, not a process. The standard harmonization, offered by Archer and Walter Kaiser, accordingly splits that act in two: the decree of amnesty was issued on the twenty-fifth, and the king was physically brought out of confinement on the twenty-seventh, so each book records a different administrative moment. The reconstruction is plausible as bureaucratic procedure and would resolve the difference if the texts marked such a gap. But both verses attach the same single verb of elevation to a single date; neither distinguishes a decree from an exit, and the supposed two-day interval is supplied entirely from outside the narrative to make both numbers true.

The versional evidence again indicates an early Hebrew variant rather than a complementary double record. The Lucianic (Antiochene) recension of the Septuagint at 4 Kingdoms (2 Kings) 25:27 preserves 'twenty-fifth,' agreeing with Jeremiah and against the Masoretic Kings — a sign that the twenty-seventh in MT Kings is the deviating reading and that the divergence arose within the Hebrew transmission of Kings before being partly leveled by Greek revisers. William Schniedewind's account of the textualization of ancient Israel frames Jeremiah 52 as a deliberate scribal appendix lifted from the Deuteronomistic conclusion; once a block of text is copied between scrolls maintained by different scribal circles, small numeric drift of exactly this kind is the expected by-product, not an anomaly.

The broader significance is that this date sits at the theological hinge of the Deuteronomistic History. The release of Jehoiachin closes 2 Kings on a deliberately ambiguous note of hope for the Davidic line in exile, and the same scene closes the Jeremiah scroll. Both editors valued the episode enough to transmit it carefully, yet the digit still slipped — which underscores that even theologically weighted material was subject to ordinary copying error. One cannot recover the historical date from these witnesses, though the Lucianic agreement with Jeremiah gives 'twenty-fifth' a modest edge. What is methodologically clear is that the harmonization manufactures a decree-then-release sequence absent from both texts, a move that can rescue any date discrepancy and is therefore unfalsifiable, while the text-critical reading points to a single miscopied numeral traceable through the Greek tradition.

Where the critical reading lands: genuine scribal variant; the administrative-delay harmonization is ad hoc and unsupported by the wording.