Was the temple burned on the seventh or the tenth day of the fifth month?

Jeremiah 52 is a near copy of the last chapters of 2 Kings (24:18–25:30), taken from the same record and added at the end of Jeremiah’s book. The two passages tell this event in almost the same words, and both tie the date to the same moment: Nebuzaradan came to Jerusalem and burned the house of the Lord. They differ only in one numeral, the seventh day against the tenth. The most likely explanation is that a scribe miscopied that number in one line of copies.

The same chapter has three more differences of exactly this kind between the two books: the height of the pillar capitals (three cubits or five, 2 Kings 25:17 and Jeremiah 52:22), the number of the king’s advisers (five or seven, 2 Kings 25:19 and Jeremiah 52:25) and the day of Jehoiachin’s release (the twenty-seventh or the twenty-fifth, 2 Kings 25:27 and Jeremiah 52:31); see those questions. Keil and Delitzsch put all of them down to the confusion of similar numeral signs, and Haley lists this date with them, citing Bähr. Which of the two dates is original, Keil and Delitzsch say, cannot be decided.

A slip of this kind is what we should expect in a long passage full of numbers, copied by hand for centuries. It concerns one figure in the copying, not a disagreement between the writers about what happened to the temple.

Several days of destruction

An older answer reads the two dates as different points in the same work. The Talmud (Ta‘anit 29a) says that on the seventh day the Babylonians entered the temple and desecrated it on the seventh and eighth, that towards evening on the ninth they set it on fire, and that it went on burning through the whole next day. Adam Clarke has Nebuzaradan enter the city on the seventh and set the fire on the tenth, and John Gill gives several answers of this kind. Keil and Delitzsch mention this view and reject it, since both books join the date to Nebuzaradan’s coming.

Christian scholars are divided between the two answers. The copyist answer cannot say which date is original; the reading of stages has to suppose that each writer’s summary covers several days.