Bible Synapse
How much gold, silver and how many priests’ garments were given for the work: Ezra’s figures or Nehemiah’s?
Hard question · Israel’s history: Joshua to Esther · raised by 1 of the lists sceptics circulate
See the passages joined in the interactive mapThe passages
The heads of families gave “threescore and one thousand drams of gold, and five thousand pound of silver, and one hundred priests’ garments”.
And some of the chief of the fathers, when they came to the house of the Lord which is at Jerusalem, offered freely for the house of God to set it up in his place: They gave after their ability unto the treasure of the work threescore and one thousand drams of gold, and five thousand pound of silver, and one hundred priests’ garments.
The governor, some heads of families and the rest of the people each gave: in all 41,000 drams of gold, 4,200 pounds of silver, fifty basins and garments.
And some of the chief of the fathers gave unto the work. The Tirshatha gave to the treasure a thousand drams of gold, fifty basons, five hundred and thirty priests’ garments. And some of the chief of the fathers gave to the treasure of the work twenty thousand drams of gold, and two thousand and two hundred pound of silver. And that which the rest of the people gave was twenty thousand drams of gold, and two thousand pound of silver, and threescore and seven priests’ garments.
The objection
Ezra 2:69 says that the returning exiles gave 61,000 drams of gold, 5,000 pounds of silver and 100 priests’ garments for the rebuilding of the temple. Nehemiah 7:70–72, which reproduces the same record, lists gifts that come to 41,000 drams of gold, 4,200 pounds of silver and 597 garments. The two copies of one record disagree on all three figures.
The answer
Nehemiah’s account is the fuller one. It names three groups of givers, the governor (the ‘Tirshatha’), some heads of families, and the rest of the people, and gives each group’s gift. Ezra gives one total for everything, in round numbers.
Two of the three differences disappear once one awkward line in Nehemiah is read with care. In Hebrew, Nehemiah 7:70 says that the governor gave a thousand drams of gold, fifty basins, and ‘priests’ garments thirty and five hundred’. Hebrew normally puts hundreds before tens, so Keil and Delitzsch, with Bertheau, conclude that a word has dropped out: the governor gave thirty garments and five hundred pounds of silver. The silver then comes to 500 + 2,200 + 2,000 = 4,700 pounds, which Ezra rounds to 5,000. The garments come to 30 + 67 = 97, which Ezra rounds to 100.
The gold remains: 1,000 + 20,000 + 20,000 = 41,000 drams in Nehemiah, against 61,000 in Ezra. Here Keil and Delitzsch and Haley conclude that a copyist’s slip has entered the figure in Ezra. Long lists of figures, copied by hand over centuries, are where such slips gather; the same register’s family figures show many of them (see the question on the lists of returning exiles).
Other answers Christians give
Two different collections
John Gill held that Nehemiah records a different donation from Ezra’s, made at a different time by different givers, perhaps when Nehemiah himself was governor (Nehemiah 8:9 calls him ‘the Tirshatha’). But Nehemiah says he is quoting the register of those “which came up at the first” (Nehemiah 7:5), and the gifts follow the list in both books, so most read it as the same record.
From the classic commentators
Keil and Bertheau think that, in the seventieth verse from Nehemiah, the Hebrew for pounds of silver has dropped out, so that, as assumed in the above reckoning, the passage would stand, "five hundred pounds of silver and thirty priests' garments."J. W. Haley, Alleged Discrepancies (1874), p. 381