Every now and then, I run into someone who believes that every word in the Bible is true. If the Bible says that men lived for 900 years and that 5 linear miles of water fell on the earth, then it must have happened. There is really no way to prove that these events did not happen, since by definition, a "miracle" is something extraordinary.
However, sometimes the Bible writers slipped up. When they told a story, nothing but superlatives would do. More than anything else, the numbers that are tossed around in the bible show this to be true. Apparently, mathematics was not their strong point, because on numerous occasions, the Bible writers made statements that simply could not have happened. The following are some of the Bible’s numerical claims that are physically impossible.
Solomon and the Israelite Abattoir: King Solomon was a very devout man. He also liked to do things in big ways. Take, for example, the sacrifice that he offered up during a festival: "Then the King and all the people offered sacrifice before the LORD. King Solomon offered as a sacrifice twenty-two thousand oxen and a hundred and twenty thousand sheep" (2 Chron. 7:4-5).
Now, let’s pause for a moment and let these numbers sink in. According to verse 9, this festival lasted seven days. That means that one animal was killed every 4.3 seconds, day and night, for a week.
Let’s look at it another way. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, an adult sheep would weigh between 80 and 400 pounds. Let’s take an average size of 200 pounds. Oxen come it at around 900 pounds. This means that Solomon slaughtered 43.8 million pounds of animals. This would be a pretty big pile of animals. If the animal carcasses were stacked, with no wasted space, it would make a pile of 3.9 million cubic feet, or, a pile 5 feet high, covering 18 acres.
And what did he do with this meat? Well, according to verse 7, he tried to put it on the altar, along with a cereal grain offering: "For there he offered the burnt offering and the fat of the peace offerings, because the bronze altar Solomon had made could not hold the burnt offering and the cereal offering and the fat" (2 Chron. 7:7).
Talk about an understatement. I could picture Solomon, looking at that mountain of meat, and saying to his attendant, "Gee, do you think that’s too much to put on the altar?" The sheer volume of meat involved is enough to convince anyone that this passage is grossly exaggerated. I will not even attempt to calculate the economic impact of this slaughter on a relatively poor group of desert herdsmen.
The Magnificent Temple: Solomon’s temple was a lot smaller than most people picture it. First Kings 6:2 tells us that it was 60 cubits long, 20 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high. In a rare example of biblical harmony, 2 Chronicles 3:3 gives exactly the same measurements. A cubit is 17.5 inches, so the temple would have been 87.5 x 29 feet, and about 4 stories high. It would have totaled 2,552 square feet in area. To put this into perspective, its dimensions would have been less than twice the size of my house, but four stories high. This number is very important, so keep it in mind.
The total temple area was larger than simply the "house of the LORD." There was a courtyard, a palace, and other buildings. However, as we will soon see, the contents and value were off by at least a factor of a thousand, so, a few extra buildings are hardly significant.
The Gold and Silver: "With great pains I have provided for the house of the LORD, a hundred thousand talents of gold, a million talents of silver, and bronze and iron without weighing, for there is so much of it; timber and stone, too, I have provided" (1 Chron. 22:14).
Since 1 talent = 75.5 pounds, this means that 7.55 million pounds of gold and 75.5 million pounds of silver went into the temple–a total of 83.05 million pounds of precious metal. Now, remember the size of the temple. To get this much gold and silver into the temple, there must have been 32,543 pounds of it per square foot. The priest must have had to crawl over the heaps of gold to get to the altar.
In addition to the gold and silver, there was apparently so much bronze and iron that it could not even be weighed. Since the gold and silver weighed in at 83 million pounds, that means that the bronze and iron must have weighed considerably more. If we assume that it was double, we are now looking at somewhere in the range of 100,000 pounds of metal per square foot of the temple. That is the equivalent weight of 60 full-sized cars per square foot. And we haven’t even gotten to the rock and timber yet.
The gold and silver equates to a dollar value of $54 billion today. Even given the inflated population figures of Israel that are recorded in the Bible, it still means that every man, woman, and child in the nation contributed almost $20,000, or 40 pounds of gold and silver. In all likelihood, the population of Israel was only about one tenth of the Biblical figures, so the contribution per person would have been approximately 10 times higher. And, of course, we have not calculated the cost of the iron, bronze, rock, timber, and labor. Not bad for a group of poor desert farmers.
The labor force: "King Solomon raised a levy of forced labor out of all Israel; and the levy numbered thirty thousand men. And he sent them to Lebanon, ten thousand a month in relays; they would be a month in Lebanon and two months at home; Adoniram was in charge of the levy. Solomon also had seventy thousand burden bearers and eighty thousand hewers of stone in the hill country, besides Solomon’s three thousand three hundred chief officers who were over the work, who had charge of the people who carried on the work" (1 Kings 5: 13-16).
By my count, this comes to 183,300 persons who worked on this temple. To put this into perspective, it took 1,283,000 man-years to build the temple, or 503 man-years to build each square foot of it. If I apply this rate of construction to my living room, which is 20 x 12 feet, it would have taken over 120,000 man-years to build it. To put it yet another way, if a construction team of 100 persons (which is too big to function on such a small job) had worked on building my living room, it would have taken them 1,200 years to build it. If 183,000 people really worked for seven years to build a 2,552-square-foot temple, they must have worked at a snail’s pace. Their progress could only be measured at the molecular level.
The lumber: According to the above quotation, 10,000 laborers at a time brought lumber from Lebanon. There were a total of 30,000 laborers rotating on three shifts. Assuming that each laborer brought back 100 pounds of lumber on each trip, that means that one million pounds of lumber arrived at the temple every month. Don’t forget that the temple was only 2,552 square feet, and it was already piled with gold, silver, bronze, and iron. That’s almost 400 pounds of lumber per square foot, coming in every month. Every year, the equivalent of 240 semi-trailer loads would have arrived. Where did they put it all?
The staff: When the temple was finished and put into operation, a staff was required. King David outlined the staffing requirements: "‘Twenty-four thousand of these,’ David said, ‘shall have charge of the work in the house of the LORD, six thousand shall be officers and judges, four thousand gatekeepers, and four thousand shall offer praises to the LORD with the instruments which I have made for praise’" (1 Chron. 23:4-5).
So, 24,000 persons were to work in the house of the Lord. This must have been a pretty slack job. Based on the size of the temple and courtyard, and considering that access to certain parts of the temple was restricted to the priests and high priest, there couldn’t possibly have been room for more than about 100 people at a time. This means that each Levite would have worked for only about one day per year. Where can I apply?
Holy Quail: An unusual account is recorded in Numbers 11. It begins with the Israelites short of food, and looking for a little meat: "Therefore the LORD will give you meat, and you shall eat. You shall not eat one day, or two days, or five days, or ten days, or twenty days, but a whole month, until it comes out at your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you" (Num. 11: 18-20).
So God sent them a little meat: "And there went forth a wind from the LORD, and it brought quails from the sea, and let them fall beside the camp, about a day’s journey on this side, and a day’s journey on the other side, round about the camp, and about two cubits above the face of the earth" (Num. 11:31).
Now let’s calculate just how many quail were involved here. Most bible dictionaries consider a day’s journey to be approximately 20 miles, so a circle with a radius of 20 miles would have an area of 1,256 sq. miles. The quail filled this area to a depth of 2 cubits, or 35 inches. This makes 102 billion cubic feet of quail. The quail is a fairly small bird, averaging one pound in weight, and 13 inches in height. Based on this size, each quail would occupy 0.72 cubit feet. Therefore, God must have blessed the Israelites with approximately 142 billion quail. That's over 47,000 quails for every Israelite. It must have been like an early version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
Before I finish with the quail, I must point out the end result of the meat harvest: "While the meat was yet between their teeth, before it was consumed, the anger of the LORD was kindled against the people, and the LORD smote the people with a very great plague" (Num. 11:33). I thought God said that they would get to eat the quail for a whole month.
Just How Big Was Nineveh? "So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now, Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days journey in breadth. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s journey" (Jonah 3:3-4).
As noted above, a day’s journey in ancient times was approximately 20 miles, so Nineveh would have been 60 miles in diameter. It would have occupied 2,826 square miles. That’s one big city.
Let’s make a few comparisons. New York City occupies only 304 square miles. In that area, 7,322,564 people are housed. This gives a population density of 24,000 people per square mile. By contrast, I live in a small city of 195,000, which occupies 42 square miles, for a density of 4,600. Most ancient cities were fairly dense, because of the logistical difficulties in feeding, watering, and cleaning up after large numbers of people before the age of mass transportation systems, not to mention the cost of building the city walls. For example, ancient Pompeii had a population of 20,000, inside walls with a circumference of 2 miles, for a density of 62,500 persons per square mile. If Nineveh had an average density of 50,000 people per square mile, it must have had a population of 141,300,000. Since New York is considered to be a "great city" by most standards, Nineveh must have been stupendous. It was 9 times larger than New York in land area, and 19 times larger in population.
But wait, the bible gives us the population of Nineveh: "And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle"(Jonah 4:11)? One hundred twenty thousand persons, spread over 2,826 square miles is only 42 persons per square mile–that’s 15 acres per person, or 60 acres for a family of four. That’s not a city.
Some think that the 120,000 who did not know their right hand from their left referred to the number of children in Nineveh, but even if we double this figure to allow for an equal number of adults, that would have made the population density only 84 per square mile.
Realistically, we could expect Nineveh to have a walled circumference of approximately three miles, assuming that the population figures are accurate. Interestingly, archeologists have found walls that likely were Nineveh, and they were about three miles around. So, Nineveh was not a three-day journey in breadth, unless Jonah was a really slow walker, so slow, in fact, that he could have gotten a job working on the temple.
The Really Big Wall: Another biblical story tells about Syrians who fled from a decisive defeat in battle only to be killed after they were safely back at their city: "And the rest fled into the city of Aphek; and the wall fell upon twenty-seven thousand men that were left" (1 Kings 20:30).
That must have been a pretty big wall. To calculate the precise way that this happened, we must first of all calculate the size of Aphek. The above discussion outlined the sizes of various walled cities. Nineveh, a "great city," had a circumference of about three miles. Pompeii’s was about two miles. Aphek is barely mentioned in the Bible and is never referred to as being great, so we can assume that it was likely smaller than either of these two cities. That would give it a circumference smaller than two miles.
Let’s use 1.5 miles for this discussion. This size would be on the upper limit of what would be reasonable. If these men were standing against the wall, shoulder to shoulder, they would each occupy about two linear feet. That means that there would have been seven concentric circles of men, standing against the wall when it fell. The entire wall must have fallen simultaneously, with none of the men getting out of the way, or shielding themselves. As well, the wall must have fallen outward in all places, as if there had been a great explosion.
Conclusion: So when the Bible says that Methuselah lived to be 969 years old, can we really take it at face value? In fact, if it can be conclusively proven that the Bible is filled with exaggerations, we have to wonder what else it lied about.
(Fred Titanich, 200 Albert Street N, Regina, SK, Canada S4R
5E2: e-mail, titanich@caasask. sk.ca)
