How many of Zattu'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.

The Zattu entry shows one of the larger individual gaps in the Ezra 2 / Nehemiah 7 parallel: 945 (Ezra 2:8) against 845 (Nehemiah 7:13), a clean hundred-man difference. Like the other family totals in this dataset, the divergence sits inside a single document copied twice: the two chapters share the same clan names in the same order and close with the same grand total of 42,360, marks of a common Persian-period Vorlage rather than two independent counts. The hundred-unit size of the Zattu gap is notable because it points to corruption in the hundreds digit specifically — exactly the kind of single-position error that misreading a numerical sign or a written-out hundred could produce.

The apologetic response is again the registration-versus-arrival theory of Archer and Haley, and it fails here for the reasons established across this group: both list-headings (Ezra 2:1; Nehemiah 7:6) describe completed returnees who "came again unto Jerusalem," not two snapshots at different stages, and the divergences across the full list run in both directions, which no single attrition narrative can generate. Ralph Klein and Hugh Williamson both note that the agreement of the round total alongside inconsistent sub-totals is itself diagnostic of transmission divergence rather than two genuine censuses.

A more candid apologetic move, associated with Edwin Yamauchi in the Expositor's Bible Commentary, concedes that the individual numbers have suffered textual corruption but argues that this is a minor matter not undermining the lists' general historical reliability. This is the most honest of the conservative responses, and on the narrow question of historical reliability it has a point — the broad shape of the return is not at stake in a hundred-man variance. But the concession is decisive for the contradiction question. Once one grants that the numbers are corrupted in transmission, one has already agreed with the critical position: two copies of the same source in the same canon report different figures, and at least one is wrong. Whether the phenomenon is labeled a "contradiction" or a "transmission variant" is a matter of nomenclature; the underlying fact — divergent, non-reconcilable numbers — is identical, and it is incompatible with the claim that both figures are inerrant as written.

The critical reading, found in Williamson, Blenkinsopp, and Batten's ICC catalogue of the discrepancies, and undergirded by Klein's account of numerical corruption, treats the hundred-man Zattu gap as ordinary copyist drift in the hundreds position of a numeral. Lester Grabbe, in his history of the Second Temple period, situates the whole list within the broader uncertainty of early-return demography and cautions against pressing either figure as a recoverable datum; the most that can be said is that the archive once carried a single number for Zattu now preserved in two corrupted forms.

The verdict: the harmonization either invents a census-timing distinction the texts explicitly deny, or — in Yamauchi's franker version — concedes textual corruption, which is already the critical conclusion. The 945/845 split cannot be both plainly accurate; one witness has lost a hundred men to a scribe's pen.

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