By this, I'm referring to the book of Numbers in the Old Testament and a debate that has a long and complicated history. (The debate is not nearly as complicated as that over the definition of the Bible's "inerrancy" but is often used as an example therein.) So let's walk through all of the concerns that some people have with the numbers in the book of Numbers and see what we can make of them. Let's start with the primary numbers in the book--the narrative driver--the census. And let's just start compiling numbers. We start with a list of the adult males eligible for military service in each tribe in chapter 1 (I'll also include the generational census of chapter 26):
The "Problems" with Those NumbersPeople bring up various complaints when it comes to the numbers in Numbers. Although they tend to overlap, I believe they require separate categories.
The Total Population of Israel Is Too Large for This Trip to Make Sense If the potential military force of Israel is 603,550 (not including 22,300 Levites), that would imply that the total population of Israel is greater than 2,000,000 at the time of exodus. The world population is estimated to be 41,000,000 then (of course, nobody really knows); mighty Egypt's being maybe 3,000,000. (Sadly, most ANE groups did not keep census numbers, and if they did, I'm sure we would have the same complaints about them that people have about the Israelite's.) The Roman Census reports between 200,000 and 300,000 between 300 and 100 BC (assumed to mean adult males). Some historians estimate that the Roman Empire was comprised of as many as 65,000,000 in 150 BC; the city of Rome itself may have had 1,250,000 living in it during the time of Augustus (with an extremely high population density). According to the Jewish Virtual Library, the population of Israel/Palestine in 1800 was only 275,000(!). In 1915 it had grown to 690,000. It took the post-WWII immigration to push the population back to 2,000,000 in the 1950s. (Of course, today Israel is in a bit of an overpopulation crisis, having about 9,000,000 people in it with no slowdown of growth). In other words, based on these potential circumstances, some believe that there is no possible way Israel had a population of 2,000,000 at that time and place. Marching Logistics. Moses offered to pass through Edom by means only of the King's Highway (Num 20:14-19; he made the same offer to Sihon king of the Amorites in 21:21). Roads would have been constructed by hand and paid for out of the king's treasury, so they would not have been larger than our highways today! Our 4-lane freeways (with median and shoulder) are about 80 feet wide. Carrying everything they own and being accompanied by lots of livestock (let's use the 4'-wide wagon from American history just as a model/a family of 8 people, 20' in length), let's do the math...20 columns...100,000 per column...8 people per 20 feet...that's a 47 mile column of people, Indeed, even those scholars who don't worry about the possible width of an ancient freeway still come up with a column length of 22 miles. Traveling at 2 miles per hour, it would have taken more than a day just to arrive at or embark from a location, and they would have arrived at most of their destinations before everyone had left camp! (see below). The complaint is that they did not have the technology to maintain control over such an immense procession (particularly if only 2 trumpets are mentioned as the only summoning instruments! see Numbers 10). Greater Nations. I'll address this more in the next section about the military. God told the Israelites that they would encounter greater nations in their exodus (He said this to them multiple times in Deuteronomy, specifying 7: Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, 7:1). That certainly does not have to mean larger in population, but there must have been enough of them to be frightening to a group of 2,000,000. In Numbers 13, when the spies report back on the Canaanites, the 10 say that the people in the land are too great and powerful to be conquered. Each one of those separate groups being too great? That would put the population of the Near East as nearly 1/3 that of the entire world! (Today, the entire Middle East and North Africa contains approximately 6% of the world's population.) Those numbers simply don't make sense. Indeed, some historians put the population of the entire region of Canaan at about 500,000. That would make the largest people groups of the region no more than 50,000. How could a nation of 2,000,000 be afraid of someone 2.5% their size? That would be like America (pop 324,000,000) fearing Switzerland (pop 8,300,000) by virtue of their greatness. The Military Force Is Inconceivably Large A related problem is the simple description of the army. If they had a force of 600,000, how could so many nations have a "greater" army than that? In the passage in Numbers 20 I mentioned above, it says that the Edomites came out with a large and powerful army and scared the Israelites away. Let's dive into that. China produced the first army of 10,000+ around 2000 BC; at that time, an army of 4,000 Uruks was able to completely dominate the entire Near East. Ramses the Great (Egypt) supposedly fielded the first army greater than 100,000 in 1250 BC (this would be after the Exodus; some historians peg Egypt's army at only 20,000 during the Exodus era). Cyrus the Great put 500,000 men on the field at the height of the Persian Empire in 500 BC. The Roman army never exceeded 475,000 men. And yet seven nations in the Ancient Near East would be greater than the 600,000-strong Israelite army. Some Bible readers are skeptical of that. And then let's play that forward. Mighty Jericho was a few acres large--maybe a few thousand people in it when the Israelites attacked. How could that have been so daunting? In the attack on Ai, the death of 36 men was treated as catastrophic and disastrous. That's 0.006 of 1% of the so-called army. There's no way the army could have been so large for that loss of life to have had the effect it had. Then, just a generation later in the time of the judges, Dan could only muster an army of 600 (Judg 18). That's a shrinking of 99% in a generation or two! Were things that bad under the judges, or was the army not that large to begin with? The Campsite Would Be Impossibly Large This concern is similar to the length of the marching column. 2,000,000 people would take up so much space as to make any logistics inconceivable based on the technology of the day. And the modern explanations that point to the population density of large cities is inapplicable because there would be no high-rises or infrastructure! (As an aside that follows the previous argument, the current population density of Israel is less than 1,000/sqmi. For groups like the Hivites and Jebusites [which had far less than 1,000 sqmi in territory] to be rivals in strength to the Israelites, their population density would have to be significantly higher than what it is today in the region, and the technology of the day could not sustain that; remember that God supernaturally provided for Israel). So let's consider another temporary, transient group that can be measured today: refugees. The UN Refugee Agency offers a student activity based on their observations from the refugee crisis in Tanzania in 1996. They pointed out that the world's largest cities have a population density of 145 people/ha (Tokyo), 95 people/ha (NYC), and 69 people/ha (Mexico City). (FYI: ha=hectare; 258 ha/sqmi. In other words Tokyo = 37,410 people/sqmi; NYC = 24,510; Mexico City = 17,802.) The refugee camps they studied had population densities ranging from 14 - 273 people/ha, with two big ones being in the range of 80 people/ha. Of course, their primary exercise is to try to make students imagine living in an area more densely populated than Tokyo without high rises or utilities. Yikes! I found a map from 2013 of a camp just inside the border of Jordan south of Syria which had a large area of 500 people/ha. (If you're at all interested in this topic, there are lots of UN resources. One I found particularly useful gives an overview of the entire process from setup to optimization: http://www.dam.brown.edu/siam/2015/Syrian_Refugee_Camps.pdf.) So let's arbitrarily pick 80 people/ha as a population density, realizing that they would have possessions and livestock, so it would be intensely crowded and uncomfortable. We can round that off to 20,000 people/sqmi, which gives a nice round number of 100 sqmi, or a campsite 10 miles by 10 miles. (Remember, I haven't been an engineer for many years, so I am happy with round numbers.) As you can see from the map below, that would be a very large camp--large enough to encompass multiple cities. (By comparison, Jericho was about 6 acres, or 0.01 sqmi.) (By the way, I understand that the camp would not be a perfect square. If for some reason we get to a point where it makes a difference if one of the sides of the camp is 9 miles wide and another is 11 miles wide, I can be more precise.)
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