How many of Pahathmoab, Jeshua, and Joab's offspring returned from Babylon?

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 one in a sustained series of small numerical discrepancies between the parallel returnee registers in Ezra 2 and Nehemiah 7. Across the family list the divergences range from zero through one, two, six (the Pahath-moab case here, 2,812 versus 2,818), twenty-three, fifty, ninety, and on up to differences of several hundred. The point of interest is not any single gap but the pattern: when one source document is copied twice, the copies accumulate independent numerical errors, and that is exactly what the two chapters display. The shared family names and order, and the identical grand total of 42,360, establish that the two lists derive from a common Vorlage rather than recording two separate events.

The apologetic harmonization for this entry is the same registration-versus-arrival theory advanced by Archer and Haley and treated under the related Arah entry: Ezra supposedly counts the returnees at one stage and Nehemiah at another, the six-man difference for Pahath-moab reflecting deaths, defections, or late additions. The same objection applies and applies decisively. Both list-headings (Ezra 2:1; Nehemiah 7:6) describe their contents identically, as those who "came again unto Jerusalem" — completed returnees, not a registration roster versus an arrival roster. Moreover, a six-man difference for one clan against a ninety-man or several-hundred-man difference for others cannot be reduced to a single coherent attrition story; the differences run in both directions, with Ezra higher for some families and Nehemiah higher for others, which no linear narrative of deaths-in-transit can produce.

The critical reading, articulated by Williamson in the Word Biblical Commentary and Blenkinsopp in the Old Testament Library volume, treats the two lists as copies of a Persian-period archival census with numerical drift from scribal transmission. Loring Batten's ICC commentary catalogued the divergences family by family and demonstrated their non-systematic character — the random-walk signature of copyist error in numeric data rather than the directional signature of real-world population change. Ralph Klein's handbook on Old Testament textual criticism explains the mechanism: Hebrew numerical notation, whether spelled out or rendered with signs and letter-abbreviations, was vulnerable to corruption when small strokes were misread or damaged, and figures in the tens and units positions were especially prone to drift. A six-unit discrepancy of the Pahath-moab kind is exactly the magnitude one expects from a single misread sign.

Lester Grabbe, who is broadly skeptical of the historical value of the census figures altogether, situates the lists within the wider problem of reconstructing the demography of the early return; he notes that the totals cannot be pressed for precision in either witness. That skepticism is worth flagging because it cuts against any attempt to treat either number as a recoverable historical datum: the most we can say is that the underlying archive reported a figure for Pahath-moab that one or both copies have since corrupted.

The verdict: the harmonization invents a census-timing distinction the texts themselves rule out, and it cannot explain the bidirectional scatter of the divergences. The transmission-error reading explains both. The two figures for Pahath-moab, Jeshua, and Joab cannot both be plainly accurate; the six-man gap is small but, set within the systematic pattern, demonstrably real.

Where the critical reading lands: genuine numerical discrepancy, scribal corruption in parallel copies of one census.