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.)
0 Comments
Yes, the title itself is more than a bit ridiculous because the "movement" we think of as neoorthodoxy was a product of its time. It wouldn't have happened had it not been for the conditions in Europe between the two world wars. Here's where I'm going with that - neoorthodoxy is generally seen to be obsolete or a relic; most folks know nothing about it and I would imagine that few seminaries spend much time with it. (In truthfulness, how many students are really going to get through Church Dogmatics?) I mentioned neoorthodoxy in a post knowing that I would have to explain myself eventually. When I peel away some of the scary words, we'll see that the essentials of this approach to Christianity sound a lot like "cutting edge" popular theology. I can use that both to sound some warnings about popular theology and also to show where neoorthodoxy may have had a good point.
It's impossible to "identify" neoorthodoxy. The men who shaped it had the common experience of being shaped by the conditions mentioned above, but they did not really attempt to promote a systematic statement of beliefs (as a group; individuals such as Barth did). Names often associated with this group of course include Karl Barth, but also Emil Brunner, C. H. Dodd, Gustav Aulen, Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. There is nothing uniform about their writings except that they reacted to common concerns. Neoorthodoxy often has a rather negative connotation, mostly going to Barth's controversial statement, "The Bible is God's Word so far as God lets it be His Word." We'll get to that. But for starters (or non-starters), we need to know that this movement started as a rejection of Protestant liberalism and Protestant scholasticism. The loose association of scholars who eventually took on this moniker rejected the basic elements of liberalism: Christianity should be accommodated to science and culture, and humanity was steadily improving. But they also rejected the basis of scholasticism: that Christianity can be entirely summarized in a series of analytic propositions that are absolutely rational and coherent. I still see both of these tendencies in American Christianity, and I still see reactions against them. If you've ever heard someone say on the one hand that "social justice is no substitute for a clear presentation of the Gospel" or on the other hand that "true faith has to travel from your head to your heart" then you're also aware of these reactions. It's the starting point for emergent and emerging churches (both Rob Bell and Brian McLaren are regularly accused of having a neoorthodox understanding of Scripture, at the very least; actually, the term neo-neoorthodox comes to mind to describe that entire programme, and I think that's no small part of the reason why Barth is taking a beating again in conservative evangelical circles). I have heard neo-orthodoxy traced to the great and unintentional Christian existentialist Soren Kierkegaard. Like other passionate and novel thinkers (Phoebe Palmer comes to mind), I think we can find the roots of their unique writings in the unique tragedies of their lives. Palmer lost a child to a crib fire, leading her to create the altar theology of the holiness movement. Kierkegaard gave up the love of his life (for reasons that I don't really understand), leading him to emphasize the relationship between love and loss, choice and consequence. He rejected the popular idealism of his day (the German idealism of Hegel, the monistic opposite of materialism) because he believed that life could not be systematized, only experienced. In other words, a book about love couldn't begin to approximate the experience of loving. (By the way, isn't he right? And isn't that one of the major claims of evangelicalism?) Here is Kierkegaard's most important observation: faith, like love, cannot be reasoned - it can only be experienced. Indeed, and this is one of the valuable pickups of neoorthodoxy, the Christian faith cannot be rationalized. I understand that the purpose of activities such as apologetics is to establish the reasonability of Christianity, but I find it a great error when that exercise becomes substituted with analytical rationality. There are major elements of the Christian faith that cannot be explained. In fact, take a look at this list: creation ex nihilo, fall, incarnation, substitutionary atonement, resurrection, salvation, consummation, eternity. How many of those can you prove logically and rationally? NONE! We can explain them in terms that are reasonable, but that's it. These truths require faith. In fact, Kierkegaard saw that Christianity is actually an experience of crisis; that's why he said it began with a "leap of faith". To him, existence, true, free, existence could only be found in the exercise of this very choice (hence the term existentialism). The neoorthodox picked up on this. Christianity cannot simply be an intellectual assent to a religious creed. A Christian must go through the anxiety and tension of doubts associated with the paradox of changing from death to life and take that leap of faith (this is very unlike the process I mentioned with respect to the Puritan Golden Chain). To them (and they certainly have a point), liberals neutered the faith by ignoring this exclusivistic tension; scholastics dissolved the faith by propositionalizing it. In a way I guess similar to Tertullian, the neoorthodox embraced the paradox of Christianity and celebrated its irrationality. How can God be both transcendent and imminent? How can Jesus be both God and man? How can a Christian be both sinner and saint? How can salvation be both of God's sovereignty and man's responsibility? How can the temporal relate to the eternal? These are truly great and largely unanswerable questions. What got the neoorthodox in trouble (if you want to use that term) is their focus on the self-revelation of the transcendent God. I agree with them that this is of central importance to Christianity. Indeed, I've often thought that a systematic theology must begin with revelation, not theology, because what we know of God is what He wants us to know. How has He revealed such to us? What does the act itself of revelation tell us about God-who-wants-to-be-known? God somehow condescends to humanity (preserving us in the great peril of this encounter); He even becomes incarnate as a way of elevating our relationship. Jesus is the Word made flesh. The Bible is the Word inscripturated. And yet, not everything Jesus said and did is in the Bible (John 21:25). That must mean that the Word of God is more than the Bible. While the relationship between general and special revelation was a major controversy among the neoorthodox, that's not actually my concern here. They took the step of saying that the Bible therefore contains the Word of God. Barth then took the next logical step (seeing as how non-Christians could be unaffected by the Bible) of concluding that the Bible became the Word of God in the power of the Holy Spirit. |
AuthorIf I ever say something in here that doesn't make sense, please ask me to clarify. It always makes sense in my head, but that doesn't necessary mean anything to you . . . Categories
All
|