For today’s post we will tackle the question the Skeptic Annotated Bible asked: On what day of the month was Jehoiachin released from prison?
Here are the two answers which the skeptic believes indicate a Bible contradiction:
On the 27th day of the month.
“Now it came about in the thirty-seventh year of the exile of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the twelfth month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, that Evil-merodach king of Babylon, in the year that he became king, released Jehoiachin king of Judah from prison” (2 Kings 25:27)
On 25th day of the month.
“Now it came about in the thirty-seventh year of the exile of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the twelfth month, on the twenty-fifth of the month, that Evil-merodach king of Babylon, in the first year of his reign, showed favor to Jehoiachin king of Judah and brought him out of prison.” (Jeremiah 52:31)
(All Scriptural quotation comes from the New American Standard Bible)
Here’s a closer look at whether or not there is a contradiction:
- When dealing with skeptics’ claim of Bible contradictions it seems one can never be reminded enough of what exactly is a contradiction. A contradiction occurs when two or more claims conflict with one another so that they cannot simultaneously be true in the same sense and at the same time. To put it another way, a Bible contradiction exists when there are claims within the Bible that are mutually exclusive in the same sense and at the same time.
- One should be skeptical of whether this is a Bible contradiction given the Skeptic Annotated Bible’s track record of inaccurately handling the Bible. See the many examples of their error which we have responded to in this post: Collection of Posts Responding to Bible Contradictions. Of course that does not take away the need to respond to this claim of a contradiction, which is what the remainder of this post will do. But this observation should caution us to slow down and look more closely at the passages cited by the Skeptic Annotated Bible to see if they interpreted the passages properly to support their conclusion that it is a Bible contradiction.
- This might be one of the more technical posts with my refutation of alleged Bible contradictions. I think we don’t have a contradiction here if we consider the issue of textual criticism. What is textual criticism? In another post I quoted someone giving the definition of textual criticism as the following: “The primary goal of textual criticism has traditionally been to establish the actual text that the author wrote, so far as this is possible.”
- I believe God gave us both 2 Kings 25:27 and Jeremiah 52:31 to help preserve and discover what the text should really say.
- An important method of textual criticism is also noting scribal errors in copying manuscripts. Knowing the types of errors scribes can make in copying manuscripts can help us better to solve what is the wordings of the original text. As we shall see I think 2 Kings 25:27’s “27th day” should be corrected to “25th day” and thus in agreement with Jeremiah 52:31.
- I know what I’m saying might sound new to some and even foreign. I still believe God’s Word is inerrant (in its autograph) and that we can reconstruct God’s Word for what it really says because of God’s sovereignty and also the tools he gave us of textual criticism. By the way this is not the only case where there’s an alleged Bible contradiction that is resolved by textual criticism. See Bible Contradiction? Who was Samuel’s firstborn son?
- Both 2 Kings 25:27 and Jeremiah 52:31 have a lot in common.
- Both passage talks about “Jehoiachin king of Judah,” and how “about in the thirty-seventh year of the exile” there reign an “Evil-merodach king of Babylon” who released Jehoiachin from prison.
- When did this take place if we think about it in terms of the calendar? Both 2 Kings 25:27 and Jeremiah 52:31 agree that this during the first year of the reign of “Evil-merodach king of Babylon.” Both passage agree that this took place “ in the twelfth month.” Both passage agree that this was during the twenty-ish something day of the month but what is different is whether it is the 27th day of the month of the 25th day of the month.
- The Hebrew way of conveying “27” is the use of the Hebrew word meaning “twenty” + Hebrew letter meaning “and” attached to the Hebrew word meaning “seven.”
- The Hebrew way of conveying “25” is the use of the Hebrew word meaning “twenty” + Hebrew letter meaning “and” attached to the Hebrew word meaning “five.”
- Thus the words that are different between 2 Kings 25:27 and Jeremiah 52:31 is the word “seven” and “five.”
- The Hebrew word for “seven” is שִׁבְעָ֖ה.
- The Hebrew word for “five” is חָמֵשׁ.
- In 2 Kings 25:27 the phrase חֹ֔דֶשׁ בְּעֶשְׂרִ֥ים וְשִׁבְעָ֖ה transliterated means “month on the twenty and seven.” Knowing the Hebrew explains why the scribe accidently wrote “seven” instead of “five.” Again the Hebrew word for seven is שִׁבְעָ֖ה. The constant for the word look like this: שבעה. “Seven” seems to arise from a scribal type of error called Dittography (for more on this and other scribal error click here). This is “where the letter, series of letters, or words, was written twice when it should have been written only once.” Seven (שבעה) arose from the accidental mistake of the scribe not looking carefully and rewriting words again; notice how the first three of the four characters in seven (שבעה) is found in the phrase right before the appearance of the Hebrew word for seven (I have it in bold): חדש בעשרים ושבעה.
- God allowed what is taught in 2 Kings 25:27 to appear again in Jeremiah 52:31 and when there is a discrepancy it then lead us to look up the Hebrew wording and note the dittography. Its a beautiful image of God’s providence to preserve His Word despite scribal errors.
- Thus we don’t have a contradiction here.
- We shouldn’t miss that worldviews are at play even with the skeptic’s objection to Christianity. The worldview of the author of the Skeptic Annotated Bible actually doesn’t even allow for such a thing as the law of non-contradiction to be meaningful and intelligible. In other words for him to try to disprove the Bible by pointing out that there’s a Bible contradiction doesn’t even make sense within his own worldview. Check out our post “Skeptic Annotated Bible Author’s Self-Defeating Worldview.”
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This man is a contradiction within himself.:(
He is a walking contradiction! How are you doing Bonnie, so good to hear from you!
Doing well and hope you are the same. Back to summer here. lol 77F today.
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Thanks for the reasonable rebuttal to this discrepancy and I appreciate the amount of work this took.
You’re welcome! This one took longer to write and I finished it late and went to sleep at 4:30 AM: so I’m really tired today. When do you normally write your post brother?
I usually write my posts in the AM. I get up around 4:30-5:30 and my wife doesn’t get up until 8 so I have 3 hours of quiet time to read and write. But as I mentioned before, I usually have 7-10 drafts in the queue. Some days I’ll write 1 or 2 and some days I’ll write zero or only a half. But I’ve definitely slowed down over the years. The Arkansas sermons on Tuesdays and the Throwback Thursday reposts are big assists. I haven’t dug into that new Catholic apologetics book yet because of the work I’m going to need to expend. I’ll be done with the leaves soon and will have more time. I did leaf duty today cleaning off the roof and gutters and dragged 4 tarps to the curb today. 11K steps so far. Man, I’m whipped!
I wouldn’t have figured this one out by myself so I’m grateful for textual critics (the good ones) like yourself
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Your response to Bible contradictions are some of my favorite thing about your blog. Good job once again.
That is really interesting. Thanks for sharing this. But I still don’t quite understand. So we’re saying the scribe should have written five, but wrote seven instead?
And it was because he was repeating the seven from thirty seventh?
I think the accidental writing of “seven” arose from the last letter from the Hebrew word for “month” and the next two Hebrew letters for the word for “twenty” can be the first three letter spelling “seven” and that gave the wrong impression for a scribe (or scribes) to write “seven” when they weren’t looking carefully. I suppose an English analogy might be someone transcribing the sentence “God is now here” and in copying that line letter by letter someone wrote down “God is no where.” Does that make sense? Let me know if it doesn’t.
I don’t think the skeptic behind the skeptic website knows Hebrew
I don’t think so either
I thought that it was perhaps a decision that the king of Babylon made on the 25th, and since any bureaucracy has channels to go through in the implementing of any command order (and the recording thereof), it took a couple of days to actually release Jehoiachin.
Wow that would work too. That’s actually helpful and reasonable, so thank you for you sharing your input, I hope others read your comment that really need the help in answering this alleged Bible contradiction. Goes to show there’s more problems with the skeptics trying to force this as a Bible “contradiction.”
Yeah, most of the alleged contradictions seem pretty petty, don’t they?
Grateful for your answer
Well said!
I think if there’s one I learn from reading this is that objections to God’s Word can be answered even though sometimes we have to go deeper and at times Hebrew and Greek is required.
The skeptics are so weird; why focus on the details and then not give attention to details in handling Biblical interpretation?
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Good application of textual criticism!
Your post shows why textual criticism is an important area of Christian scholarship (and not let it run amuck by Bart Ehrman).
Glad there’s Christian textual critical scholars like James White; if you don’t know him yet I recommend him
The Bible doesn’t contradict, if a person thinks it does, that is because he or she haven’t studied it well including diving into textual criticism like you have done here. Very cool explanation, Pastor, thank you!
As I read this I can’t help but to think of the description of fools in the book of Proverbs and how fitting it is to describe the skeptics. I suppose if someone were to use the same method the skeptics use against Scripture to the words of the skeptics say, they’d say they are being misrepresented, yet they do this.
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Scholarship isn’t on the side of the critics