How many children of the porters 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.

The gatekeeper (porter) entry is the cleanest diagnostic case in the entire Ezra 2 / Nehemiah 7 parallel, because here the two recensions agree on everything except the bottom line. Ezra 2:42 and Nehemiah 7:45 both enumerate exactly the same six gatekeeper families, in the same order — the sons of Shallum, Ater, Talmon, Akkub, Hatita, and Shobai — and both then give a single grand total. Ezra reads 139 (*me'ah sheloshim vetish'ah*); Nehemiah reads 138 (*me'ah sheloshim ushemonah*). The constituents are identical; only the sum differs, and only by one.

This configuration is decisive for diagnosis. Where the constituent names match perfectly and only the total diverges, the error must lie in the summation step, not in the membership of the list. Two mechanisms account for it. Either a copyist miscopied the written total — *tish'ah* (nine) and *shemonah* (eight) differ by a single consonantal cluster and are easily confused, and in the later system of numeral letters the values nine (ט) and eight (ח) are adjacent and graphically similar — or a compiler re-tallied the family figures independently from a source that listed them and arrived at a slightly different sum. Williamson and Blenkinsopp both treat this entry as a textbook instance of low-level numerical corruption in transmission, precisely because there is nothing else for the divergence to attach to.

The standard apologetic move on a one-person gap is attrition or late arrival: someone in the gatekeeper contingent died on the journey, or someone joined after the first count was taken, so the two figures simply reflect two moments. That defense, plausible in the abstract, is specifically undercut here. Crucially, neither text supplies family-by-family subtotals for the gatekeepers; both give only the lump sum of 139 versus 138 against an identical roster of six named houses. There is therefore no slot in which a single individual could have entered or left a particular family without altering a family figure — because no family figures are given. The entire divergence is located in the one arithmetic operation that produces the total, which is exactly where a scribal slip would land and exactly where a demographic change would not show up neatly. The attrition story explains a change that the text's own structure gives it no room to register.

Emanuel Tov's standard treatment of textual criticism documents how numerals are among the most corruption-prone elements in Hebrew manuscript transmission: they are short, semantically isolated (a misread digit rarely produces nonsense that a copyist would catch), and were at various stages written both as words and as letters susceptible to graphic confusion. A single-unit divergence in a summed total is the paradigm case of exactly this phenomenon.

The critical verdict on this entry is uncontroversial across the commentary tradition: this is textual drift in a single arithmetic step, the routine residue of hand-copying numerical lists in antiquity. It carries no theological weight, requires no historical reconstruction, and is not in serious dispute. It demands only the admission that the transmitted text contains arithmetic errors — an admission that is unremarkable on any human-transmission model and is the entire difficulty only for a doctrine of numerical inerrancy.

Where the critical reading lands: genuine but trivial divergence, a textbook scribal slip in the total.