How many were in Jacob's family when they came into Egypt?

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: Usually considered reconciled

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.

Three Hebrew-text passages — Genesis 46:27, Exodus 1:5, and Deuteronomy 10:22 — fix the number of Jacob's household that came into (or sprang from) Egypt at seventy. Stephen's speech in Acts 7:14 says Joseph summoned his father and kindred, "threescore and fifteen souls" — seventy-five. The five-person gap is not random; it has a precise text-critical genealogy.

The explanation that critics and careful apologists share is that the higher figure derives from the Septuagint. The Greek Genesis 46:20 expands the notice about Joseph's sons to include grandsons and a great-grandson born in Egypt — adding Manasseh's and Ephraim's descendants — and the Greek totals at Genesis 46:27 and Exodus 1:5 read seventy-five rather than seventy. The Dead Sea Scrolls corroborate this as a genuine ancient Hebrew variant rather than a Greek translator's invention: the fragment 4QExod-b (and the related 4QGen-Exod-a material) reads seventy-five at Exodus 1:5, agreeing with the Septuagint against the Masoretic seventy. Luke, composing Acts in Greek and citing Israel's scriptures in their Greek form, naturally reproduces the seventy-five he found there. That is the textual resolution, and it is well grounded.

What the resolution does *not* do is make the underlying numbers agree. It relocates the disagreement from "Acts versus the Old Testament" to "one ancient edition of the Old Testament versus another." Emanuel Tov's analysis of the Pentateuch's textual history shows that Genesis-Exodus circulated in at least three editions — proto-Masoretic, Septuagintal, and Samaritan — that differ precisely in such numerical and genealogical details, each reflecting a distinct editorial layer. The Masoretic text itself preserves internal layering here: Genesis 46:26 counts sixty-six "that came with Jacob into Egypt" (excluding Jacob, Joseph, and Joseph's two Egypt-born sons), while 46:27 rounds the total to seventy by adding them back. Eugene Ulrich's work on the Qumran biblical manuscripts frames exactly this kind of variation as evidence of the "developmental composition" of the biblical books — the text was still pluriform when both the Masoretic and Septuagintal numbers were live.

The commentators on Acts read Luke accordingly. C. K. Barrett and Richard Pervo note that Stephen's seventy-five is simply the Septuagint figure and that Luke is not independently miscounting; he is faithfully transmitting his scriptural source. The point of friction, then, is canonical rather than arithmetic on Luke's part: the New Testament author is quoting a recension of the Hebrew Bible whose numbers differ from the recension that later Judaism and most of Christendom enshrined as authoritative, and the two recensions cannot both be the precise truth about how many souls entered Egypt. Calling the matter "no contradiction" requires choosing which Hebrew text counts as the standard and then noticing that the inspired New Testament author did not use it.

This is therefore a model case of a tension that genuinely dissolves at one level (Luke is internally consistent with his Vorlage; the variant is documented in Hebrew at Qumran) while exposing a deeper one at another level (the scriptural text itself is pluriform on a matter of plain fact). For a reader who treats canonical authority as residing in a single fixed text, the seventy/seventy-five split is awkward precisely because the New Testament endorses the non-Masoretic reading.

Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable as a known Septuagint/Qumran textual variant — but the resolution concedes that the scriptural text is pluriform on a numerical fact.