Were there 70 or 75 who went down to Egypt with Jacob?

Both numbers are ancient. Neither is a mistake. And the difference between them is completely transparent once you see how each tradition counts.

Genesis 46 gives two subtotals. Verse 26 counts those who came directly from Canaan — sixty-six souls. Verse 27 adds Joseph's sons already in Egypt and arrives at seventy. That is the Hebrew Bible's (Masoretic Text) number, and it is consistent across three references: Gen 46:27, Exo 1:5, and Deu 10:22.

But Stephen, speaking before the Sanhedrin in Acts 7:14, says seventy-five. And he is not the only ancient voice who does.

The Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint, compiled c. 250 BC) adds five extra names to Joseph's family in LXX Gen 46:20 — sons and grandsons of Ephraim and Manasseh — making nine people in Joseph's Egyptian line instead of two. Add nine to sixty-six and you get seventy-five. The LXX at Gen 46:27 and at Exo 1:5 both read seventy-five, internally consistent with their own expanded list.

Then there are the Dead Sea Scrolls. Two pre-Christ Hebrew manuscripts at Exo 1:5 — 4Q1 (dated c. 150–100 BC) and 4Q13 — both read seventy-five: יצאי ירך יעקב שבעים וחמש נפש ('those who came from the thigh of Jacob: seventy-five souls'). These are Hebrew witnesses, not Greek, and they predate the surviving complete manuscripts of the Masoretic Text by roughly a thousand years.

Here is the evidence laid out honestly:

The pre-Christ witnesses do not agree with each other. At Exo 1:5, the older evidence favors 75 — two Dead Sea Scrolls and the LXX all say so. At Deu 10:22, the older evidence favors 70 — eight Dead Sea Scroll fragments and the LXX Deuteronomy all say so. Even the Greek Old Testament is internally inconsistent: 75 in Genesis and Exodus, 70 in Deuteronomy. There is no forced winner here.

Stephen's 75 is not a slip of memory. He is following the Greek Bible he would have known — the same LXX that a Greek-speaking Jewish audience in Jerusalem would have recognized. His number is as well-grounded as the Hebrew Bible's 70.

The one thing neither number changes is what the narrative is actually saying. The word Genesis 46 uses for each person in that household is נֶפֶשׁ (nephesh, H5315) — not bodies or heads but souls, the same word used when the first man 'became a living soul' (Gen 2:7). This is a census of life. And the refrain is: the whole household of Jacob went down together, every named nephesh, by every reckoning.

There is one further resonance. The round number seventy maps onto the seventy nations of the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 — one family going down among the nations to become one nation among them. That connection is a structural observation, not a direct textual claim, and it should not be pressed harder than it bears. But it is worth noticing.

The full study lays out the counting mechanism and the manuscript evidence in I Will Go Down With You.