Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/201

Rh given the number of the congregation as 42,462, he now makes it amount to nearly 5,000,000, with the correct number of servants 7337, but with the remarkable addition of another number of 40,742 for the "women and children mixed together." The statement of the 5,000,000 may be an error of the transcribers, for which Josephus should not be considered responsible, and it is possible that he may be correct in enumerating the women and children separately, as it is not inconsistent with the statement in Ezra of the whole congregation, if that is to be understood as consisting of the males only. In this case the gross amount would give us a total of 90,439 souls returning with Zerubbabel, being the first portion of those who took advantage of the decree of Cyrus, seventy-eight years before the coming of Ezra.

If however this aggregate should not be allowed us as correct, and if the number of 42,360, with the servants 7337, be considered to include the whole number of souls that returned with Zerubbabel, still it is manifest that it is double the number of those whom we can estimate as having been carried away to Babylon at the least, even if we grant that double the number of 10,000 captives mentioned in the book of Kings had been taken away by the Babylonians, while it is ten times greater than the numbers given in Jeremiah as actually carried away. The latter account, as given with so much particularity by one who was evidently a contemporary writer, must be acknowledged to be the most trustworthy, and in that case we cannot suppose the 4600 to have increased to upwards of 42,000 under the circumstances above stated, during the seventy years of their captivity. To reconcile the numbers with probability therefore, we must consider the congregation of 42,360 to include a large portion of the Assyrian captivity also, especially when we remember that other bodies of the captives seem to have been returning from time to time, besides those who came afterwards with Ezra and Nehemiah, who would swell those numbers considerably still further.

We have already observed that in the enumeration of genealogies in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, the several parties of those who returned seem to be mentioned more as with reference to places from which they reckoned their origin than to families, while another portion was found who were not able to show their father's house, or their tribe, and yet were allowed to join the nation as Israelites. But in this enumeration we have also another circumstance worthy of notice. Though Ezra and Nehemiah both state the number of the congregation to have been 42,360, yet the former in