MATHEMATICAL OBJECTIONS TO THE BIBLE

In discussing this subject we must first keep in mind that most of the objections you will find on-line are really examples of internal contradictions rather than poor arithmetic, and they are a little more challenging to explain for a number of reasons.

Let's start out this section with a general summary of the basic problem, taken directly off the internet: WHY MATHEMATICAL ERRORS IN YOUR WORDS OF GOD?, AUTHOR OF BIBLE WHO IS PRESUMED TO BE GOD DOESN'T KNOW SIMPLE MATHEMATICS?, THIS IS NOT MISTAKE OF GOD IT IS MISTAKE OF PEOPLES, BIBLE IS NOT WORDS OF GOD , ITS WORDS OF SOME, UNEDUCATED,ILLITERATE, ILLOGICAL,UNSCIENTIFIC PEOPLES AND MADE YOU TI BELIEVE THAT IT IS WORDS OF GOD

I suspect that the author used all capital letters because he didn't really know which letters should be capitalized. It is rather interesting that he has the nerve to call the authors of the Bible uneducated and illiterate.

Many of the inconsistencies in the Bible are due to the concept of redundancy in language. We all understand what this anonymous person on the internet was trying to say even with the grammatical errors, atrocious punctuation, missing words and transposed letters. Why? Because there is built-in redundancy to words in any language. Words contain a lot more information than we really need.

Here is a slightly more complicated example: “THS SENETNSE CONTAN 7EORRS.” What did I mean to say? Letters are transposed, missing or incorrect, and the word division is wrong. But remember that written Hebrew of the time did not include any vowels and often they crammed their words together to save space on a scroll. But we can still almost always reconstruct the original wording of a given passage even if scribes over the ages may have made a number of accidental errors in copying them. But to accurately reconstruct it, we may have to compare the variations found among all the early manuscripts we have. This process is called textual criticism, and it is discussed a little more in other postings.

Unfortunately, textual criticism doesn't work quite as well when it comes to numbers because unlike words, numbers possess virtually no redundancy. For example, what if early in the history of transmitting this sentence, someone confused 7 with 2? There would be no way to recapture the original number unless, as in this case, the text itself provided a clue as to the actual number. Here, for example, we could count the obvious errors to determine that at least #2 can't be correct.

Here is a concrete example of this concept from I Samuel 13:1, which in the Hebrew says literally, “Saul was...years old when he began to reign; and he reigned...and two years over Israel ” KJV attempts to make sense of this by saying, “Saul reigned one year; and when he had reigned two years over Israel...” while modern translations either note that some numbers are missing here or they provide the missing numbers by comparing chronologies found elsewhere in the Bible.

Some other things to keep in mind when looking at numbers in the Bible:

    1. The Bible also uses numbers in a symbolic sense: 3 (God) + 4 (creation) = 7 (completeness). Or if you multiply the two numbers you get 12 as a symbol of God's chosen people (tribes of Israel, judges, or apostles).

    2. And remember that the Hebrew language uses letters for numbers just like Roman numerals where X = 10, etc. So some of the seemingly impossible numbers of soldiers in various OT historical accounts have been explained as confusing a word for a number. 'lp = 1,000 or tribal unit or military leader, so that an army of 10,000 might also be translated as 10 military leaders and their soldiers. Also, the Hebrew word for cubit and 100 is the same if you happen to transpose two letters, which may explain some additional inconsistencies in the text.

    3. Approximate numbers are given quite often in the Bible. Here are two numbers which pop up in the Bible many more times than we would expect by accident: 40 = one generation; 70 = a lifespan. And in a few cases you can actually demonstrate that they were rounded off from the literal numbers. For example, Exodus 12:40 is probably literal while Acts 7:6 apparently uses a round number for the same time span. Another example is found in I Kings 6:1 where the stated time of 480 years is too long by archeological findings. The number probably stands for 12 generations.

    4. Confusion in transmission may have arisen in cases where a second method of counting was used, such as we see on jars and weights of the time. In those cases, a vertical stroke meant a digit and a horizontal stroke meant tens. Similar strokes were also used for hundreds and thousands.

    5. Often when numbers in the Bible are suspected as being improbably high, we must admit that we have no independent measure of what is actually “improbably” high.

Much of the above is totally foreign to scientists for whom numbers are almost sacred. That is also a general mindset that has rubbed off on some Christians who might reluctantly admit that words may have different meanings, but numbers are only to be understood one way -- literally. You will especially see this in the way prophetic passages in the Bible are sometimes interpreted. For example, those who feel that Satan has to be chained for exactly 1,000 years would usually admit, if pressed, that it might not be with literal chains or in an actual locked pit in the ground.

So with that background, here are some mathematical objections to the Bible that you might run into on the internet. They involve differences between some numbers in Samuel-Kings and those found in the parallel passages in Chronicles. Actually there are about 20 such examples, but we will only go through the few here as pretty typical of the rest.

A. God sent his prophet to threaten David with how many years of famine?

Seven in 2 Samuel 24:13 (Hebrew) followed by KJV and Living Bible

but three in LXX (Greek translation) followed by RSV, NEB, NRSV, TEV, NIV.

Three in 1 Chronicles 21:12

"Seven" in 2 Samuel may actually be a symbolic number indicating that the devastation from the famine will be complete, rather than indicating the literal number of years. This is similar to Jesus saying to forgive people 7 x 70 times (i.e., completely).

 

B. How old was Ahaziah when he began to rule over Jerusalem?

22 in 2 Kings 8:26 (LXX, Syriac) followed by KJV, RSV, NIV.

20 in some Greek manuscripts followed by Jerusalem Bible.

42 in 2 Chronicles 22:2, which would make him older than his father.

“The MT [standard Hebrew text] of Chronicles may represent the conflation of two traditions and exhibits a striking example of the effort to preserve two divergent traditions.” Jacob B. Myers, II Chronicles, p. 125 

In other words, Chronicles may have included both 20 and 22 in the text, perhaps with one in the margin, and a later copyist mistakenly felt that the two numbers were meant to be added together.

A skeptic in one internet picture complains, “The hardest things about being an atheist is the time it takes to explain basic science exceeds the attention span of who I'm talking to.” I'm afraid that the explanation of this next one may exceed the attention span of the atheist who proposed it (He also needs a lesson in basic English grammar.) The Bible is not a simple-minded children's book any more than an upper level science book is. Both need careful study to be fully comprehended.

C. How many fighting men were found in Israel?

“2 Samuel 24:9 says that it is Eight hundred thousand mens were fighting and 1 Chronicles 21:5 says that it was One million, one hundred thousand mens were fighting.” (another literary gem found on-line)

D. How many men were found fighting in Judah?

Five hundred thousand (2 Samuel 24:9) or

Four hundred and seventy thousand (1 Chronicles 21:5)

                                                    Census of Fighting Men

Reference                                              Israel                                                     Judah

2 Samuel 24:9                                      800,000                                                  500,000

1 Chronicles 21:5                              1,100,000                                                 470,000

We approach this contradiction between two different traditions and books of the Bible by utilizing the same approach that textual critics use when they see discrepancies in details in an individual verse when comparing different ancient copies. You basically try to reconstruct the most logical way the copying errors in the two different traditions could have arisen in the first place, and here are two different possibilities.

   (1) The Chronicler added the numbers for both kingdoms since he used the term “Israel” in the larger sense to refer to the combined 13 tribes (The Chronicler always counts the twin tribes of Joseph as two). That gives an average of 100,000 men from each of the 13 tribes. Then he subtracted 100,000 each for the tribes of Levi and Benjamin, which Joab refused to number (I Chronicles 21:6) to get 1,100,000 for all Israel. And the differences between the two numbers for Judah are due to the fact that 2 Samuel counts in Benjamin as part of the Kingdom of Judah while the Chronicler is only counting the men in the tribe of Judah (excluding Benjamin). (Jacob M. Myers, I Chronicles, p. 147)

    (2) An alternative, and somewhat simpler, scenario is explained by Payne. First, the Samuel account simply rounded off the number for Judah, which is given more precisely in I Chronicles. Then he gave the census figure for Israel where all able-bodied men subject to being drafted were counted. The Chronicler, however, included into his figure the standing army of almost 300,000 (I Chronicles 27:1-5) to get 1,100,000.

                        (J. Barton Payne, quoted in Hard Sayings of the Bible, pp. 226-227)