How many of Adonikam'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: Widely regarded as 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.

On a percentage basis the Adonikam entry is the smallest of the Ezra 2 / Nehemiah 7 family discrepancies: Ezra 2:13 reads 666, Nehemiah 7:18 reads 667 — a difference of one person. The triviality of the gap is exactly what makes it instructive. The issue is not magnitude but the existence of any disagreement at all in a list that both books claim to transmit from a single source. Nehemiah 7:5 explicitly frames the chapter as a reproduction of "the book of the genealogy of those who came up at the first." One register, two copies, two totals that fail to match even by a single unit.

The traditional harmonization, deployed by Keil and Delitzsch in the nineteenth century and carried forward by Gleason Archer, holds that the two figures are snapshots taken at different times — one person died on the road, or one joined late, and the lists record different moments. The defense has two structural weaknesses. First, it must be invoked dozens of times across the chapter, with the numbers drifting in both directions, which strains any single demographic explanation past credibility. Second, and decisively, it conflicts with Nehemiah's own claim. Nehemiah does not present himself as updating the figures to reflect later demographics; he presents himself as transmitting an older document. A copyist reproducing a register does not silently re-poll the population. The time-snapshot theory thus supplies a story the text itself does not authorize.

The controlling mechanism is far simpler. Single-unit divergences are the classic fingerprint of scribal slips in the units position of a numeral, the most error-prone slot in any number because it carries no semantic constraint. Even where numbers are written out as words, a scribe working from a damaged exemplar or from dictation can drop or add a unit without any contextual check to catch it. The versional evidence here aligns 1 Esdras with Nehemiah rather than Ezra: in the standard versification of 1 Esdras 5:14, the sons of Adonikam are given as 667, matching Nehemiah's figure against Ezra's 666, while the broader list shows the same instability across MT, LXX, and the 1 Esdras tradition that characterizes every entry in these parallel rolls. The caveat from the other entries holds — 1 Esdras's own numerals are not uniform across its copies — so the alignment is an indicator, not a proof, of which side carries the slip. Williamson, Blenkinsopp, and Klein all classify these single-digit divergences as ordinary transmissional noise rather than theological signal or demographic record.

The figure 666 occasionally gets pulled into popular numerology, and it is worth addressing only to set it aside. Because Ezra 2:13 reads 666, some popular writing has noted the coincidence with the "number of the beast" in Revelation 13:18. There is no documented interpretive tradition tying the two together; it is a passing observation, not an exegetical lineage. And it is coincidence and nothing more: the Greek apocalyptic figure of Revelation has no literary or historical relationship to a Persian-period family roster, and the very instability of the datum — appearing as 666 in Ezra and 667 in both Nehemiah and 1 Esdras — undercuts any claim that the precise value carries hidden significance. A theology built on a textually unstable number is built on sand.

For the inerrantist even a one-person gap is a problem in principle, because the doctrine asserts precision to the individual and both books claim the same source. The critical reading needs only a human document copied imperfectly, which is exactly what the three-witness evidence shows.

Where the critical reading lands: genuine discrepancy, minor scribal slip in the units position, with 1 Esdras aligning the variant with Nehemiah.