How many of Delaiah, Tobiah, and Nekoda'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.

The combined entry for the sons of Delaiah, Tobiah, and Nekoda is doubly interesting because of where it sits in the roster. According to both Ezra 2:59-60 and Nehemiah 7:61-62, these three families were among those "who came up from Tel-melah, Tel-harsha, Cherub, Addan, and Immer, but could not prove their fathers' houses or their descent, whether they belonged to Israel." They are a flagged, liminal group whose membership in the returnee community was genealogically disputed. The framing is identical in both recensions; only the number differs. Ezra 2:60 gives 652 (*shesh me'ot chamishshim ushenayim*); Nehemiah 7:62 gives 642 (*shesh me'ot arba'im ushenayim*).

That the editorial framing held perfectly stable while the figure drifted is itself a significant datum. Prose is redundant and self-correcting under copying; a scribe who garbles a clause usually produces detectable nonsense, whereas a misread numeral produces a different but perfectly plausible number that no proofreader would flag. The Delaiah/Tobiah/Nekoda entry displays exactly this asymmetry: the descriptive sentence about contested ancestry is reproduced essentially word for word, while the count slipped by ten.

Ten is, again, the awkward mid-range gap. It is too large for one-person attrition and far too small for a hundreds-digit miscopy. The most economical scribal mechanism is a tens-digit corruption — the confusion of *chamishshim* (fifty) with *arba'im* (forty), forms that share a morphology and, in the later numeral-letter notation, involve adjacent values (נ = 50, מ = 40) that are graphically and phonetically liable to interchange. Williamson and Blenkinsopp both regard a tens-digit slip as the likely diagnosis here.

The most interesting harmonization specific to this entry exploits the disputed-descent framing itself: because this was precisely the group whose right to be counted as Israelite was contested, perhaps different scribes legitimately included or excluded a marginal sub-group depending on their judgment of the genealogical claims, so that 652 and 642 reflect two defensible reckonings of a genuinely ambiguous body. Lester Grabbe's social history of Persian-period Yehud documents that the boundaries of "who belonged" to the restored community were in fact actively negotiated and politically charged, which lends the suggestion some real-world plausibility. But it shares the weakness of the guild-membership argument used for the singers: the text nowhere signals that the two recensions are applying different inclusion criteria. It gives one inherited number, transmitted two ways. An explanation that the source itself never voices cannot be elevated above the simpler diagnosis the manuscript behavior already supplies.

The critical conclusion is therefore the same as for the rest of the chapter: two transmissions of a common archival document, diverging by an amount fully consistent with tens-digit scribal slippage. The Delaiah/Tobiah/Nekoda case adds the instructive detail that the contested-ancestry prose survived intact while the numeral did not — precisely the pattern a human-transmission model predicts and a model of inerrant identical reproduction does not.

Where the critical reading lands: genuine numerical divergence, most economically a tens-digit scribal corruption; the boundary-dispute harmonization is plausible context but unsupported by the text.