The Sum Total Of The Returnees (Nehemiah 7:66).
‘The whole assembly together was forty two thousand, three hundred and sixty.'
The sum total of the returnees who represented Israel comes to 42,360. The adult male returnees enumerated above come to 31,089 (Ezra 29,818), plus whatever number the defrocked priests came to. That leaves just over 11,000 to be accounted for. They may have been made up of the under age males. But in view of the fact that in the next verse female slaves and female singing women are counted, and in the following verses domestic animals are numbered, it would be quite remarkable if the female members of Israel were ignored. Indeed it would have been a direct insult. Thus we may see them as represented in the remaining 11,000 (with under age children being ignored). If it then be argued that 11,000 females hardly suffices when there are 31,000 males we can reply, firstly that many of the males might well have left their families behind, intending to bring them to Judea once they had satisfactorily settled and were confident that they would be able to feed them, and secondly that many of the males who made the decision to come might well have been unmarried. It was the unmarried ones who would be more prepared to take the risks involved in returning. Indeed this lack of females might well have been part of the cause of a number of them marrying foreign wives. But, of course, there would also be Israelite women who had remained in the land who would also be available, who were, however, mainly syncretistic.
Both this list in Nehemiah and the list in Ezra, in spite of its differences, give the same total. But that is probably because the number of returnees in the initial immigration having been fixed, that was the number that was retained as having become sacrosanct. It is probable that in the second list the women were not specifically counted, but simply allowed to make up the number.