Were five or seven of the king’s advisers taken from Jerusalem?

As with the day of Jehoiachin’s release in the same chapter, Jeremiah 52 here repeats the account of 2 Kings 25 almost word for word. Both list Seraiah the chief priest, Zephaniah the second priest, three doorkeepers, an officer over the soldiers, the king’s advisers, the army’s scribe, and sixty men of the people. Everything matches except the one number. That points to a slip in the copying of one book, not to two writers with different information.

The men in question are described in Hebrew as those ‘who saw the king’s face’: his closest counsellors, with the right of entry to him. Esther uses the same phrase of the Persian king’s inner council: “the seven princes of Persia and Media, which saw the king’s face” (Esther 1:14). Whether five or seven of them were caught, the point of both passages is the same. Those who had led Judah’s resistance were singled out and executed, and so “Judah was carried away captive out of his own land” (Jeremiah 52:27).

Keil and Delitzsch list this among the numeral differences in the chapter which they explain by the confusion of similar numeral signs (with the height of the capitals, the day the temple was burned and the day of Jehoiachin’s release). Ellicott thought that ‘five’ was original, and that the sign for 5 had been partly worn away in the copy used for Jeremiah 52.

Two more men found later

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown suggest that five were taken at first and two more found afterwards, and Gill, following the medieval Jewish commentator Rashi (Jarchi), that two of the seven were of lower rank and so not counted in Kings. These are possible, but the two lists are otherwise identical, which makes a simple copying slip more likely.

Counting the officers in

Adam Clarke wondered whether Jeremiah counted the officer over the soldiers and the army’s scribe with the five, to make seven. Jeremiah, however, lists those two men separately as well, so this does not fit the text well.

Which number is original cannot now be settled. The early translations divide along the lines of the books: Kings has five in the Greek, Syriac and Latin, and Jeremiah has seven.