the particular enumeration of the families or parties returning, respectively gives account of only 29,818 persons, and Nehemiah of 31,031. This makes a discrepancy of one-fourth, and to explain it, Dean Prideaux says, "The meaning is, they are only the tribes of Judah, Benjamin, and Levi that are reckoned by their families in both these places; the rest, being of the other tribes of Israel, are numbered only in the gross sum, and this is that which makes the gross sum so much exceed the particulars in both computations."
There may be another way of explaining the discrepancy by supposing that the three-fourths particularized as having returned, consisted of portions of all the twelve tribes, though principally of Judah, Benjamin, and Levi, and the other fourth of the remnant left in their own land, descendants of those who had not been carried away captive and then present in Jerusalem. But whatever may be the more probable explanation, it is clear from the above passage that Dr. Milman is mistaken in representing Prideaux to have supposed the Israelites of the ten tribes to have been "totally lost and absorbed in the nations among whom they settled." On the contrary, he supposes, as above shown, that a large portion of them returned and became absorbed among their brethren of Judah and Benjamin, though he at the same time concluded that "many more remained in Chaldea, Assyria, and other eastern provinces than those who settled again in Judæa."
It must be with great distrust of his individual opinion that any one may now venture to express a dissent from the conclusions of so eminent an authority; but if the computations above detailed be correct of those taken away captive, and of those who returned, the inference rather seems to be, that a much larger portion returned than what could or would have remained. Still more so when we consider that the numbers of those who returned as above-mentioned with Zerubbabel, must have been vastly increased by those who escaped before or returned afterwards in a desultory manner at different intervals, besides by those who came in a more authorized and systematic manner with Ezra, seventy-eight years after Zerubbabel, or with Nehemiah twelve years after Ezra, or under similar auspices. If we take all these questions into consideration, we cannot come to any other conclusion than that a vast majority of those who had been carried away captive, or of their descendants, must have returned on the permission given them, to the land of their fathers, and that the numbers that returned must have consisted of members of the ten tribes, as well as of those of
