See comment 1 under the Pentateuch discussion

I know how to do the smiley thing.
Roy | 02.02.05 - 7:17 pm | #

Yeah, I've looked at this before. Either the numbers are to not be taken literally or they're simply wrong. I'd suppose they could be right in the original autographs - then we could still hold to inerrancy.

Has he talked about geneologies and dating yet? It's fairly obvious that those are incomplete as well - Merrill does a great job with this in Kingdom of Priests.
Matt | Homepage | 02.02.05 - 10:41 pm | #

Well, I don't think you're dumping inerrancy necessarily if you don't take these numbers literally. It could be later inflation, but it could also be a genre issue.

Haven't talked about geneologies or dating yet.

My main question is why would Moses or a Mosaic writer have used inflated or inaccurate numbers? What's the point to that? Just to look good?
John Mark | 02.03.05 - 9:32 am | #

Typically, numbers are symbolic and large numbers tended to mean nothing more than "a whole lot." All ancient cultures seem to have done that, at least the ones that I have read. Really, would ancients with only rudimentary mathematical theory be able to discern between 68,500 or 685,000? Even the Greeks and Romans, who seemed much more concerned with accuracy and verification(by comparsion) inflated (or deflated--if they lost)numbers. I just don't think ancient authors, story tellers or auditors were concerned with Western ideas of specicifity. I also don't think you can impugn their motives for it nor do I think you can ever really get an answer to why they did it other than it's what everyone did.

Given that, what might all this mean about a flood that covered "the whole earth"?
Roy | 02.04.05 - 1:05 am | #

Good comments, Roy.

And on the flood thing, obviously there's no problem since the vapor canopy is collapsing.
John Mark | 02.04.05 - 11:09 am | #

Thanks! But I would like to temper those comments by stating that ancients were capable of accurate counts (though maybe not by modern Western standards), as troop casualty counts for some Greek and Roman battles show. I think, in the end, all we can try to determine was whether a degree of specifity was, for whatever reason, important to the story. I'm not convinced that accuracy was important to the Pentateuch accounts, so I'm inclined to discount the importance of the numbers or their accuracy.

All moved in? When do we get to see the new digs?
Roy | 02.06.05 - 9:28 pm | #