THE CONFUSION OF HEBREW NUMBERS
Numbers in the Bible
Commentators agree that biblical numbers can easily be misread by translators, who then pass on incorrect figures. I can exemplify this by quoting from an article called "The Large Numbers of the Old Testament", by John Wenham1): "The Old Testament in various places records numbers which seem impossibly large. It has often been assumed that these figures were simply invented, and are evidence that the Bible is historically unreliable. But who would make up figures which are patently absurd? Would any man in his senses invent a story of a bus crash in which 16,000 passengers were killed? It is much more likely that these Old Testament numbers were faithfully copied out, despite the fact that they did not seem to make sense. Invention does not satisfactorily account for them. The explanation must lie elsewhere. And in fact patient research has gone a long way towards resolving this knotty problem."
The corruption of numbers
There is evidence that the Old Testament text is on the whole marvellously well preserved. There is also evidence from the parallel passages in Samuel, Kings and Chronicles and (especially) in Ezra 2 and Nehemiah 7 that numbers were peculiarly difficult to transmit accurately. We have instances of extra noughts being added to a number:
"But they fled before Israel, and David killed '700 of their charioteers' and fourtythousand of their foot soldiers". [2.Samuel 10:18 NIV; As to `700', some Septuagint manuscripts; `charioteers' Hebrew `horsemen'. ]
But elsewhere we read:
"But they fled before Israel, and David killed `7000 of their charioteers' and 40,000 of their foot soldiers." [1.Chronicles 19:18]
"A digit can drop out: 2 Kings 24:8 gives the age of [King] Jehoiachin on accession as 18, whereas 2 Chronicles 36:92) gives it as 8. An entire numeral can drop out: 1 Samuel 13:1 says 'Saul was 30 years old'.3) In Ezra 2 and Nehemiah 7 the digits often vary by one unit. And there are other errors of copying, many of which are easily explained.
The confusion of words
In the modern Hebrew Bible all numbers are written out in full, but for a long time the text was written without vowels [which] made it possible to confuse two words which are crucial to this problem: 'eleph and 'alluph. Without vowel points these words look identical: 'lp. 'Eleph' is the ordinary word for 'thousand', but it can also be used in a variety of other senses: e.g. 'family' (Judges 6:15, Revised Version.) or 'clan' (Zechariah 9:7; 12:5,6, RSV) or perhaps a military unit. 'Alluph' is used for the 'chieftains' of Edom (Genesis 36:15-43); probably for a commander of a military 'thousand'; and almost certainly for the professional, fully-armed soldier. [Click Here]
Military statistics
At certain periods warfare was conducted by two sharply distinguished types of fighting men - the Goliaths and the Davids - the professional soldiers who were fully armed, and the folk army, whose only weapons were those of the peasant shepherd. It seems clear that in a number of places the word for professional soldier has been misunderstood as meaning 'thousand'. Take, for example, the attack on the little town of Gibeah in Judges 20. Verse 2 says that 400,000 foot-men 'that drew the sword' assembled. If these were in fact 400 fully-armed foot-soldiers, the subsequent narrative makes excellent sense.
[Comment: What Wenham is referring to here, by the way, is a civil war between the tribe of Benjamin and the rest of the tribes of Israel].
The Benjam[in]ite forces (verse 15) consist of 26 soldiers armed with swords, together with 700 men armed only with slings. At the first attack (verse 21) the Israelites lose 22 of their crack soldiers, the next day (verse 25) they lose a further 18; on the third day (verses 29,34) an ambush is set, consisting of, or led by, 10 of them. (Could 10,000 men take up their positions undetected?). The losses begin again (verse 31) 'as at other times' - and in this case the scale of loss has been clearly preserved, for about 30 Israelites (not apparently sword-armed soldiers), 25 Benjam[in]ite soldiers and 100 others are killed. Eighteen of them were killed in the first stage of the pursuit, 5 were later 'cut down in the highways' and 2 more at Gidom. The remaining 600 slingers took refuge in the rock of Rimmon".
"Similarly, in the assault [by Joshua] on Ai (Joshua 7-8) the true proportions of the narrative become clear when we realize that the disastrous loss of 36 men is matched by the setting of an ambush, not of 30,000 men of valour, but of 30.
David's feast in Hebron in 1 Chronicles 12 appears to be attended by enormous numbers, not of ordinary men, but of distinguished leaders - some 340,800 of them. In this case it looks as though in fact there were 'captains of thousands' and 'captains of hundreds', and that by metonomy or by abbrevation 'thousand' has been used for 'captains of thousands' and 'hundreds' for 'captains of hundreds'. 'Thousand' and 'hundred' have been treated as numerals and added together. When these figures are unscrambled, we get a total of roughly 2,000 'famous men', which seems eminently reasonable.
Along these lines most of the numerical problems of the later history fall into place.
In 1 Kings 20:27-30, the little Israelite army killed 100 (not 100,000) foot-soldiers, and the wall of Aphek [when it fell] killed 27 (not 27,000) more.
The Ethiopian invasion had a thousand, not a million, warriors (2 Chronicles 14: 9).
10 (not 10,000) were cast down from the top of the rock (2 Chronicles 25:12).
However there are some Precautions about Denying Hebrew Numbers
Several other examples may support Hebrew numbers as stated in the scriptures.
1. One example has to do with David fighting the Mesopotamien kings. Here, apparently, two independent sources verify each other as to the number of troops used in battle.
2. In 2.Samuel we learn that David took an unknown quantity of `shields of gold' from the Mesopotamien kings. In 2.Chronicles we learn that Pharaoh Thutmoses III. took 300 `shields of gold' plus `200 targets of gold' from Jerusalem. The 300 `shields' are represented at Karnak.
3. Gideon's call for arms against their enemy brought initially at least over 30,000 personal together. (Judges 7)
4. The size of the Assyrian army approximates the number of troops stated in 2.Kings.
5. Later, Persian armies were also of great size in their conquest of the west. In biblical times, Kings were absolute rulers, they could muster the entire nation to participate in wars as Xerxes did when he `emptied the whole of Asia' to fight against Greece.
These facts we also should keep in mind when considering the number problems. While it is possible that some numbering inconsistencies crept into biblical accounts, we probably should not flatly declare all figures found in the Bible as unreliable.
The size of the Israelite nation
The most interesting, most difficult and (from the historian's point of view) the most important question is the size of the Israelite population at the different stages of its history. The present texts indicate that the 70 souls of Joseph's day had risen to two or three million at the time of the Exodus (Numbers 1) and to at least five million in the time of David (2 Samuel 24:9; 1 Chronicles 21:5). With regard to the latter, R. de Vaux rightly says: '(2 Samuel) lists 800,000 men liable for military service in Israel, and 500,000 in Judah ... The lower total, in 2 Samuel, is still far too high: 1,300,000 men of military age would imply at least five million inhabitants, which, for Palestine, would mean nearly twice as many people to the square mile as in the most thickly populated countries of modern Europe'.4) The solution to the problem of the Exodus numbers is a long story. Suffice it to say that there is good reason to believe that the original censuses in Numbers 1 and 26 set out the numbers of each tribe, somewhat in this form:
Simeon: 57 armed men; 23 'hundreds' (military units).
This came to be written: 57 'lp; 2'lp 3 'hundreds'.
Not realising that 'lp in one case meant 'armed man' and in the other 'thousand', this was tidied up to read 59,300. When these figures are carefully decoded, a remarkably clear picture of the whole military organization emerges. The total fighting force [of the Exodus Israelites] is some 18,000 which would probably mean a figure of about 72,000 for the whole migration".
With this important explanation by Wenham, we can now begin to query whether the number of Israelite men on the march during the Exodus, given as "about 600,000" (Exodus 12:37) - making an overall total of some 2-3 million people - may be a gross over-estimate. I am not saying that the inspired writer got it wrong; but only that a copyist's mistake with numbers may have crept in. It had previously occurred to me in fact that so many fighting men as 600,000 would unlikely have been scared of Egypt's royal force of 600 chariots; especially considering that in Exodus 13:18 we read: "The sons of Israel went out from Egypt fully armed". Though perhaps this last description may apply only to Israel's shock troops; for according to Yahuda, in both Exodus 13:18 & 14:8 (op. cit., 96-97): "... it is emphasized ... that the Hebrews in leaving Egypt went out proudly and triumphantly having troops armed with lances, a well disciplined host. That in Egypt there were troops armed with lances is shown on various Egyptian bas-reliefs ..., and such troops would have formed the advance section at the head of the army". (Emphasis added).5)
We read in II Chronicles about Zerah's invasion of southern Judæa: "Zerah the Ethiopian [Cushite] and an army of one million strong with three hundred chariots made an incursion, and penetrated to Maresha. [King] Asa [of Judah] marched out to intercept him and drew up his battle line in the Valley of Zephathah, at Maresha. He called on Yahweh, his God. 'Yahweh', he said, 'no one but you can stand up for the powerless against the powerful. Come to our help, Yahweh our God! We rely on you, and confront this horde in your name. Yahweh, you are our God. Let man leave everything to you!' Yahweh defeated the Ethiopians before Asa and the Judaeans, the Ethiopians fled, and Asa pursued them with his army as far as Gerar. So many of the Ethiopians fell that recovery was impossible, for they had been shattered before Yahweh and his army" (2.Chronicles 14:8-13).
Two chapters further on, we read that Zerah's Ethiopian army was also composed of Libyans (16:8).
Thanks to Wenham, we can now estimate that this foreign army was more likely 1,000 strong, rather than a most unlikely 1 million. The latter figure is made even more implausible considering that the main Egyptian army apparently did not take part, but only foreign mercenaries, Ethiopians & Libyans, from within the empire. A few years after Solomon's death (c.920 BC), the divided kingdom in Palestine was absorbed into the Egyptian empire by the mighty Pharaoh Thutmose III, and it generally remained so (though apparently the pious king Asa managed to shake off the Egyptian overlordship) until the Assyrians took control of that region in the C8th. That Egypt, during her supremacy, was wont to send into Palestine highly efficient squadrons, at the behest of beleaguered vassal kings (who, in turn, were under Egyptian governors), is attested by the el-Amarna [EA] letters of Pharaoh Akhnaton and his father (a few decades after Asa's time, according to Velikovsky). These government troops were most valued as support by the Syro-Palestinian vassal kings during their interminable conflicts.
Damien Mackey
References and Notes
1) John Wenham, `The Large Numbers of the Old Testament', Tyndale Bulletin 18 (1967): 19-23.
2) One Hebrew manuscript, some Septuagint manuscripts and Syriac; most Hebrew manuscripts use `8'.
3) A few late manuscripts of the Septuagint; Hebrew does not have `thirty'. KJV does not mention 30 years, NIV does mention 30 years.
4) Figuring population density naturally depends on how many square miles the writer credits Israel to have inhabited at the time. We show in our paper on Jeroboam that the Israel of the time of Solomon may have been quite a bit larger than most historians seem to visualize it.
5) As to the size of the Israelite nation, the figure of 600,000 is not impossible considering that it was not so much the lances of the Egyptians they feared but rather the arrows of their bowmen against which they had little defense. Egyptian bowmen were always the most feared military units of the ancient literature. The estimate of the number of Israelites also should take into account the vast construction projects they took part in during their years of slavery down to the last day of servitude.
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