Thread by @lymanstoneky

Longtime followers know that one of my greatest joys in life is reading the Bible, thinking about the Bible, discussing it with others, linking it to things I study, and then using this knowledge to mercilessly troll the most uptight of my brothers and sisters in Christ.

SO LET'S TALK ABOUT THE CENSUSES OF NUMBERS

If you know anything about the Bible you probably know that the Israelites/Hebrews/Jews/whatever-you-want-to-call-them were enslaved in Egypt then through miraculous aid of God escaped and went to the Promised land i.e. what we call Israel+West Bank+Some of Jordan and Lebanon.

Now, if you are either a big Bible reader who doesn't skip the boring bits OR you're a big Bible skeptic who likes to tell Christians how crazy the Bible is, you probably know that during that 40-year-long-roadtrip, they stopped to take some headcounts. Censuses.

And if you know anything about those censuses, you would know one or two things:
1) They count 603,550 men of fighting age
2) That number is so absurdly high it defies belief and is the basis of many people disbelieving these stories

So let's talk about why we should actually believe the census numbers in Numbers as they are written.

But before we do that, let's address who I expect to #trigger here.

The most zealous and crazy of my critics within the LCMS (and Reformed) interlopers already think I'm possibly a demon and definitely a heretic for other reasons, and they probably think I'm gonna make some horrible godless modern gloss on these censuses. They will be #triggered.

But they were born that way so it's not their fault.

But more broadly, I want to flag here that my view is that unless you have very compelling warrant, when the Bible says "X happened," Christians must believe "X happened" pretty much as written.

So if you're looking to find a Smart Christian explain why REALLY it wasn't a miraculous parting of the ocean it was a weird concurrence of geology and wind, nope, the Bible says the waters stood up on end that's what they did the ground was bone-dry it was a miracle.

My view is that the Exodus and Conquest narratives as they are written are correct and true and that they are arguably the most reliable historic record we have on hand of the period. That's a view coming from both my personal bias (obv) but also plenty of study.

So wait that sounds orthodox why would this trigger conservatives.

Well, because I'm going to argue that all of our Bibles have failed to transmit to us what is actually literally plainly written on the page if you just look at it.

In fact, I'm going to argue that not just are there some very striking errors in translation, there's almost certainly a grievous scribal error where some past scribe misunderstood what the text was saying, tried to correct it, screwed up, and now we have inherited that.

Now, none of that should actually be hostile to conservatives in principle. Your Bible has footnotes on passages where manuscripts disagree; one of those (or all of them!) are scribal errors. There are whole stories missing from some texts.

When we confess divine inspiration, we are confessing that a divinely inspired text does exist and was created. We are not committed to believing that any old book with "Bible" printed on the cover is a valid representation of it. For example, "The Message" translation exists.

The Message is very fun and all but I'm sorry you cannot refer to reading it as reading the Bible.

Anyways, I'm putting disclaimers up front so you see where I'm coming from. It's inspired. The events are true and really happened. It is possible for humans to engage in mistranslations or poor textual transmission across time.

Again, my LCMS bros will be very wary at this point because this is sounding like "historical textual criticism" or whatever. Sure, I'm interested in the history and the text. But it is not some terrible libera conspiracy to argue over the literal grammar and lexicology!

Okay, so, to the censuses.

603,550.

This number comes from two places. First, Numbers 1 tallies by tribes and adds it all up. Second, Exodus 38 gives us the sum, 603,550 men age 20 and up.

But there's a problem right away.

A key principle that we in the LCMS lean on is "let the Bible interpret itself." What that means is there are times where parts of the Bible literally refer to other parts and tell you what it means. This is a super clear guide.

So do other parts of the Bible talk about the censuses and their results?

There are limited "by name" discussions, but the theme of "the relative size of the Hebrew population" is actually super huge in the Exodus/Conquest narratives. It's all over the place.

What would be nice is if we have a case of MOSES discussing Census results, since Moses is the author of Numbers.

Okay pause here. Is Moses the author of numbers?

I say yes, and obviously, I'm right.

But if you are familiar with the historical textual criticism literature you know this is not necessarily the dominant scholarly view. Many scholars see the Pentateuch as a cobbling together of several competing historical and ceremonial traditions.

To me, there are two very obvious ways to preserve Moses' authorship without just closing your eyes and ears to the pretty obvious and strange textual tensions and semi-repetitions in many places.
1) Moses was carefully documenting the multiple perspectives which did exist

In this telling, the two camps modern scholars identify as appearing during the monarchy or even the Exile actually existed from the beginning, and had dueling stories from the get-go, and Moses wrote a community document giving place to both of them. Easy peasy.

Option 2)

Moses is the original source, he gets an editor later on. This one is a lot less friendly to conservatives, but not unprecedented. This is obviously what happened to the story anthology we know as Judges: multiple authors get bundled. Psalms too, explicitly.

I don't care which option you take. For me it's enough to say I think Moses is the authorial source of the text and it's all validly described as "Books of Moses" and representing the version of events Moses believed, under the inspiration of the Spirit, needed to be told.

Cool so, MOSES. Does Moses ever comment on the censuses?

Well, my morning reading today, the provocation for this, was Deuteronomy 7.

There, Moses explicitly says the land to be conquered has SEVEN peoples MORE NUMEROUS than the Hebrews.

Okay so if we have 603,550 Hebrew men ages 20+, that makes probably 2-3 million total Hebrews. Call it 2.5 million. If the other 7 nations each have 4 million (they're much more numerous!), that's 7x4=28 + 2.5 = 30.5 million people.

The total population today of Israel, West Bank, Lebanon, and Jordan is about 30 million people, similar to the putative population being described in Dueteronomy.

Now, estimating ancient populations isn't easy. And it's almost impossible in the ancient Levant were there's huge variation in political form, migrations, geography, etc. We'renot gonna get a great external check on that.

But, we can look at other areas.

We know that the Nile valley was universally regarded as one of the most densely populated parts of the known world. It was a core hub of Empire, a massive food producer, opulently wealthy, huge monumental architecture.

Helpfully, it's also a desert with lots of archaeological remains AND it was a LITERATE society. As a result we know absolutely gobsmackingly huge amounts about ancient Egypt and in particular we have a very good idea of its population.

The land of the Nile valley is WAY better in terms of crop yields than the Promised Land, every historic account (including the Bible!) describes it as prosperous and heavily populated. It is our benchmark for the maximum pop ancients could have believed a society would have.

The Nile valley was home to fewer than 10 million, and likely fewer than 5 million, people in the Late Bronze/Early Iron age. Egyptian population didn't hit 30 million until 1960.

You can go google tons of historic data on this but folks we know how much land they had available for cultivation. We know the EXACT crop varieties they used BECAUSE THEY BURIED JARS OF IT WITH MUMMIES. We know how many calories humans eat.

We know Egypt was a huge grain exporter which means the population was not close to consuming the maximum caloric yield. And the Bible reaffirms this view: the story of Joseph implies that Egypt overproduced grain by a very large margin in normal years.

So right here I would argue we have a very real problem in terms of "letting the Bible interpret the Bible."

Moses emphatically says (and you'll find this in tons of other places) that the Hebrews are NOT VERY NUMEROUS. They are FEW IN NUMBER.

And yet if we take the Census of Numbers 1 at the face value of what our translators of today have given us, we arrive at the insane conclusion that there were more people in the lower Levant in 1000 BC than there are today.

AND YET ALSO SOMEHOW ENOUGH WILDERNESS FOR THE HEBREWS TO WANDER AROUND FOR 40 YEARS!?!?!?

Remember folks, Acres of Farmland Per Person were HIGHER in the past because crop yields were lower, so to sustain 30 million people in the southern Levant, you'd have needed extremely intense pastoralism and desert agriculture on every inch of land from Medina to Damascus.

Which would have meant no wilderness wanderings. But we know that land was NOT in cultivation, because during the wanderings, the Hebrews run out of food and depend on God to send miracle food from heaven.

Sidenote: some modern readers want to argue the manna was like some kind of plant sap that's still around today. C'mon guys. Do not be the absolute lamos everyone thinks you are. You can't even believe God maybe gave bread? It's like His whole thing; He's VERY into bread!

So anyways, the Hebrews do a Census. I won't bog down in the details of why and the theological significance etc etc. The reason I won't bog down there is I am determined to make this thread as theologically non-implicative as possible.

What I mean is, when you finish this thread, first of all, congrats, how did you do it, wow. Second of all, this is an extremely trivial interpretive question with no important theological substance. There's no twist at the end of this thread that's gonna call for some change.

I told you at the beginning that I'm very committed to pretty much the traditional reading of this stuff. You're not going to find some big new theological takeaway from me. Just a demographic triviality in desperate need of correction in new translations.

The Censuses only count "men able to go out to war." Exodus glosses that as men 20 and up. That's kind of interesting since archaeologically warriors in this period were often a lot younger; child soldiers were common.

Also, because we know that 1) God killed off all the old folks because they didn't trust him in the wilderness 2) The Hebrews had lots and lots of babies, it's likely the conventional "50% under 20" number is wrong. Probably 60-75%.

I won't bore you on the math but if you look at like old Icelandic censuses, the earliest Palestinian censuses, or modern Sub-Saharan African censuses, it's basically a certainty that the Hebrew population was AT LEAST 60% under 20, possibly 75% under 20.

Which means if you accept 603,550 men 20 and up, you're actually looking at between 3 and 4.8 million total people. Which would raise your 7-nations calculation to like 35-55 million. It just gets more and more bonkers.

My smarter conservative commenters are noting that the Pentateuch contains explicit evidence of post-Moses editorship. Yes, but the traditional gloss is these are just small additions and basically footnotes, not major reworkings.

https://twitter.com/smithkl42/status/1625157158148124673

So so far, I have looked at an already hard-to-believe passage (603,000 people wandering in the desert?) and made it even more insane and hard to belief. At this point, if the conventional English-language rendering is your only option, you'd be right to be very concerned.

And of course, because God reached down from heaven, held a pen in his hand, and literally wrote the Bible in English with the help of King James, the English IS your only option!

Thread over!

;-)

Okay but seriously let's look at the Hebrew.

Full disclosure: I don't read Hebrew. But I did stay at a Holiday Inn.

No but for real, I don't read Hebrew. But I was raised by an OT scholar and translator, know how to use Google Scholar, and can work my way through an Interlinear

More importantly, the argument I'm going to advance here isn't new. Rabbinic interpretation has suggested this as a possibility for *checks notes* apparently literally forever? And English-language readers have suggested it at least since the 19th century.

So what is that argument?

Here's what an interlinear of one of the lines of the Numbers 1 Census looks like. Remember, Hebrew reads right to left, as God intended.

If you aren't familiar with reading Hebrew grammar you get nothing from that. But the upshot is this. The actual NUMBER given reads like this:

"X thousands, LINKING WORD, Y hundreds"

Each tribe, that's how the numbers are quoted.

Okay so let's start with the linking word. Your English translations are gonna say "and". "X thousands AND Y hundreds."

But that's not what is actually written there. There's a single letter for that "and," the Hebrew letter waw/vav.

Use any standard reference you'll see it CAN mean "and." Or.... it can mean "or." As just one example, Exodus 21:17 is uniformly translated using it as "or," and is incorrect rendering it as "and." It is a linking word, but it's one we have to use context to translate.

So it COULD be "X thousands AND y hundreds" or it could be "X thousands OR y hundreds."

Put another way, it could possible be "X thousands; that is, Y hundreds."

So like "3 thousands; that is, 30 hundreds."

But that would be a very silly usage, because thousands and hundreds have an automatic conversion.

But image units that don't. "I'll give you for bags of grain; that is, 37 pounds." since bags of grain may have nonstandard weights, etc.

So what are the units actually used?

Well, the word used for "hundreds" is pretty undisputed. It means "hundred." There's not a lot of wiggle room, though arguably it allows for rounding (in fact we need it to allow for rounding under any reading).

But the word used for "thousands" is a whole different animal. It's Romanized as "elep." It has usage throughout the Old Testament. Every non-census usage in reference to PEOPLE means something like "platoon" or "clan" or "fighting unit" or "team." It's all military usage.

And it is always translated "thousand." So you get these stories of like tens of thousands of Judean hill bumpkins swarming down on foreign armies.

But the point is, it's usage is almost always either counting money or referring to bands of warriors.

A very closely etymologically related word does literally mean "clan."

So we have this word, "elep." Every time it refers to people it refers to groups of soldiers. Almost every non-person usage is counting money (later on it counts war-horses). Closely related word means "clan"

Now let's make this really nutso.

The Numbers 1 census is done by collecting ONE COIN (money) from EACH WARRIOR (fighting group) grouped BY CLANS (clan).

And described using "elep."

The conventional way this has been rendered is very simple. And when I say "conventional" I mean the Greek Septuagint and eeeeeeverybody since then.

Assume the COIN meaning (1,000 coins), apply it to the FIGHTERS meaning (1,000 fighters), the clans are just LABELS.

So you get:

"Reuben: 46 THOUSAND (elep) and 500" or "Reuben: 46,500."

But this is weird. Because you see, the "coin" usage only appears ONE TIME in the Bible before Numbers, but a TON after it.

My view, and this is wildly speculative, is that the early coin usage in in Genesis may be a case where a later editor updated an out-of-date word, and in fact the "elep means coins" usage was CREATED BY the Census of Numbers.

But that's wild speculation not germaine to my wider point.

My wider point is: the Septuagint used a word "chiliades" which does literally mean 1,000. But elep doesn't literally mean 1,000. It literally means, in reference to people, "fighting units."

ESPECIALLY when we already know IT IS A CENSUS OF FIGHTING UNITS.

And furthermore, we have 3 closely clustered means: 1,000 coins, fighting band, clan.

The "1,000" interpretation basically deletes the other two.

You lose the entire sense that this is a Census *of warrior bands*, which is what it explicitly is, and why it doesn't count women and children.

And so you get this stupid modern liberal takes like "the bible didn't see women and children as people see they aren't even counted in the census"

IT'S A CENSUS OF WARRIOR BANDS YOU NINCOMPOOPS

And the math here works out very nicely! Here it is recalculated this way:

So what you can see is there's no change in the last 3 digits of estimated populations between the Septuagint's gloss and my suggestion. The only disagreement is literally in the thousands (and tens and hundreds of thousands) digits.

You can see that band size is nonstandard but vaguely similar.

Obviously, in a tribal society, you don't have like formal 30-man units or something. Basically, CLANS. Cousins. So this is a measure of something like "cousins in a group over age 19."

In a society with TFR of 5-10 per woman, it's totally plausible you'd have 5-15 adult males in a given three-generation family tree. In fact that's what we do find in kinship studies of this kind of society today.

Okay want to notice something else weird?

The numbers of men are all rounded. Which is fine and all; nobody faults Moses for rounding.

BUT NONE OF THEM ROUND TO ZERO IN THE HUNDREDS PLACE.

The statistical odds of never getting a round-to-zero in the hundreds place across 24 numbers (two censuses) are very low. Like super-duper low. You'd think SOMEWHERE a tribe would have like "27,000" people." But the hundreds place is ALWAYS positive.

This brings us to the hard part.

The sums.

Clearly, I believe the sums reported here are wrong.

But not wrong in the way you might think.

I do not believe that Moses (or whatever helper was writing this stuff down) did it wrong.

But I do think scribal errors, especially in cases where words have unclear meanings, phrases are repeated, and numbers are involved, are common.

And ESPECIALLY if some later scribe, familiarized with Greek methods of counting and military organization, perhaps assumed the numbers-usage should apply, because of course military units are units of 1,000 men.

And he would perhaps have noticed that the original sums offered were just weird; the the hundreds places all seemed right, but the thousands just didn't add up.

So he fixed it.

Folks, the hundreds places SHOULD NOT BE THE SAME.

Me adding up all those hundreds should not yield identical digits in the hundreds places with different digits in the thousands. That isn't how math works.

It seems obvious that what happened is a scribe did the math I am showing you He saw that the hundreds places added up. The thousands didn't. He assumed "elep" meant "thousand" because Greek military units grouped by 16/256/1024. He fixed it.

The text the scribe saw probably said, in Numbers 1, "598 elep, that is, 5,550 men."

The scribe thought it said "598,000 5,550" which made no sense. He assumed the extra 5 from 5550 was an error. He assumed 598,000 was an error. He fixed the math.

The upshot is that instead of a tiny decrease in population across Numbers you get a moderate increase.

Now, again, none of this has major theological relevance.

But I'll note that Exodus 12 also gives us a number. It's often translated "600,000 on foot." But that isn't what it says. It says "about 600 elep on foot" not counting children. It's "about" the same number.

You can read more about this here. Fixes some insane math around the Levites and firstborns too which has always wrecked interpreters. thetorah.com/article/recoun…

But the point is, we should read "elep" as "fighting unit." About 5-15 adult men. The army Joshua entered Canaan with was under 6,000 fighters. Not enough to conquer on his own. The total Israelite population was under 100,000, plausibly under 50,000.

Even small amounts of intermarriage or assimilation threatened Israelite identity because they were WILDLY outnumbered. The only way to preserve identity was radical separatist devotion to God and an extreme violent clearance of other peoples from the land.

Even allowing a few small tribes to remain risked absolutely swamping them demographically, which is EXACTLY WHAT THE TEXT SAYS.

(also keep in mind, most of the "Canaanites" are not indigenous either, but foreign colonial powers: Hittites, Amorites, etc)

Once you understand just how small the Israelite population was, so many things make sense. It's why even after they kept obliterating armies the baddies kept throwing new armies at them: they're so small! This should be easy!!

But if the Israelites are actually marching around with 600,000 soldiers, nobody would bother trying to fight them. Jericho would just surrender.

Yes, it is exceptionally unlikely to get these man/elep ratios by chance. It's not chance. The correct numbers are 5,550 and 5,730.

https://twitter.com/KiteX3/status/1625172017724149760

So look, I am not proposing any revision to the traditional view of what happened in the Exodus or Conquest. I am not proposing any revision to our views of authorship. I am not proposing any change to any theological belief.

In fact, I'm proposing that a major argument against validity of the Exodus/Conquest story is totally wrong, and essentially invented by mistranslation and scribal error a very long time ago.

That the texts are inspired does not mean the specific copies we have in our hands have not been contaminated in some way by bad transmission.

But, by the grace of God, that transmission has contaminated only nerdy trivialities, not the essentials of faith.

And if you want some more of what I think is really great and thoughtful Lutheran reflections on dealing with manuscript transmission writ large, you can read here (Ruth's cousin, as it happens!) concordiatheology.org/wp-content/upl…

ANYWAYS.

You heard it here from your local conservative Christian traditionalist demographer:

The censuses of Numbers are entirely plausible and believable and there is no reason to doubt their accuracy. They are incredible historical documents we should highlight, not bury.

A follower emails a wrinkle. Exodus 38 says that the half-shekels collected from the men are used to make the bases for the temple posts. There are 100 bases, each one using 1 talent of silver. Each of the men counted paid 1 beka, which is a half shekel.

If we know the total amount of silver collected and that every man paid one fixed unit, that should tell us the amount of men, ya?

Problem, we don't know how much these units weighed.

But there's some suggestion in the literature that a shekel of silver is probably the Babylonian shekel (30.2 kg), and the beka is probably somewhere around 4ish grams.

If you do the math, you end up with between 120,000 and 500,000 men.

Which matches.... neither number.

The simplest solution to my mind is simply that the 100 talents of silver included the Census silver PLUS some pre-existing silver hoard, which we know from prior passages did exist. In which case, this passage doesn't help us at all.

Okay so actually here's a crazy thing on the shekels.

You can actually arrive at any man count between 120,000 and *700,000* depending on the shekel-weights you assume. But using the standard weights we now find in archaeological digs you don't arrive at 603,000.

But it's really weird to say "100 talents and 1775 shekels" because a shekel, depending on your source, is believed to be between 60 and 300 talents.

That is to say, you'd either report it as "105 talents and 55 shekels" or "129 talents and 35 shekels"

In no world does it make sense to report 1775 shekels alongside 100 talents.

I don't really know what to make of that. But I guess I'd say, it adds to the mystery here. Why do standard known weights of shekels and talents not give 603,550?

But weirder.... why does the unreported total shekel count always end up ending in 550?

Answer: because all the reports agree on ending in 550 for men, and the original text probably had something "something and 1775 shekels"

idk, the shekel thing is all hazy because we really don't actually know how much all this stuff weighed at that time. archaeological finds show that Hebrew currency in the area wasn't strictly identical to neighboring areas, changed over time, etc

and of course the shekels being collected in Numbers cannot properly even be coins, since coins aren't invented yet. they're just generalized weights. so we really just need weight measures. which we don't have.

okay folks we gotta do more shekels and talents math.

It seems to be a common rebuttal here that the Exodus temple tax weights exactly equal out.

This is not correct.

There's a common view that a shekel equals 3,000 talents. And this is true.

If you use Greek shekels (or if you use the standard shekels used in the latter monarchy).

Sorry a Greek talent, not Greek shekels.

But the Babylonian talent, which was used throughout this area, had a different weight. Egyptians had their own system, but the Hebrews appear to have used the Babylonian system.

The issue is that the Babylonian talent had 3,600 sub-units (shekels), not 3,000. Now we do know that by 500 BC, a 3k shekel talent was becoming a thing from archaeological records. But the evidence used to assert it in the time of the Exodus is... this very chapter!

So the weight debate is circular. The translators of the Septuagint using the shekels which by then had been common for hundreds of years believed there were 3,000 shekels in a talent. The math wasn't working. They fixed it all at once.

Or, you can believe that this is the earliest known evidence of a 3,000 shekel:talent ratio, before we have archaeological finds of it.

Which is fine. Archaeology is hardly the arbiter of all truth.

But the fact that the text here would use a Greek assumption about unit size and assume a Greek conversion of weights and measures is maybe a suggestion it was cleaned up in the septuagint.

WHICH ISN"T UNUSUAL!

2 Samual 10:18 and 1 Chronicles 19:18 disagree about chariot numbers, and 1 Kings 4:26 and 2 Chronicles 9:25 disagree about stall numbers.

Kings and Chronicles also disagree about Jehoiachin's age. The Septuagint also fixed Samuel 13:1--- all our Hebrew texts say "Saul was year old..." but the Septuagint says he was "thirty years old." They fixed what seemed like an obvious textual problem.

Those are cases of obvious "typos." But 2 Samuel 23:8 and 1 Chronicles 11:11 give different man counts for casualties. 2 Samuel 1 and 1 Chronicles 19 swap out army compositions. I could go on.

The point is, there are tons of places with numbers specifically where...

... we *know* that there are errors in one text or the other, where we can *plainly see* that past scribes tried to fix some wonky math.

Again, literally none of this matters for the truth of the faith. At all.

But on some level y'all Occam's Razor has to apply here: "a Ptolemaic scribe thought he was being helpful and messed it up" seems a lot more plausible than the huge number of assumptions needed to preserve the 603,550 number.

And again, none of this is a debate about "the veracity of scripture." It's true, we just literally disagree about what the words on the page mean, and if they are a faithful testament of what it was that God inspired Moses to say.

And nobody debates that there are textual problems in the Bible--- there are! It's not a threat to divine inspiration! Bad translations exist! You can find them at your local Christian bookstore!

Okay more on the Censuses of numbers.

Deuteronomy 8 makes abundantly clear that the Israelite population WILL INCREASE in Canaan. Moses says they will be free of the diseases of Egypt (probably diseases of urbanism and more tropical climate), and that they will multiply

So the issue you have is 2-5 million Israelites isn't the max.

That's the starting population, from which Moses promises swift and large increases.

And yet.... we have counts of later Israelites! In the Bible!

The largest mobilization i judges involves 42 elep, rendered generally as 420,000 (between Benjamin on one side and the other 11 on the other). This is described as being "all the people of Israel" and "all the men who drew a sword."

The language used is emphatic ("as one man"). A huge plot point in Judges is that ONE VILLAGE failed to send their men, and they face a terrible vengeance. Point being, AT MOST the combined people of Israel in Judges 20 fielded 44 eleps of troops, which would be rendered 440,000

So, somehow, the population grew by leaps and bounds as Moses said, and yet they lost 200,000 fighting men.

Nope. Nopenopenopenpenope. That makes a huge hash of the scriptural witness.

The clearer reading is just that between Numbers 26 and Judges 20, the size of an elep changed. Living in sedentary villages facilitated bigger kinship structures and more centralization of authority. We literally see this with the shift to formal Judges then kings.

By David's time, fighting unit size has very obviously increased.

The only way to preserve the explicit scriptural commentary about post-Conquest population growth is to assume a nonstandardized meaning of elep.

So you can either assume that the Septuagint authors rewrote the Census numbers, just like they messed up Job by deleting hundreds of lines, bawdlerizing the poetry, and adding extra lines for Job's wife, or you can assume the Bible is full of wrong and extraneous material.

The reason Christians stick closely to the Septuagint is early Christians didn't speak Hebrew usually but did read Greek and they wanted to read the Bible in Greek, and it happened to be available.

It's not actually the inspired text folks. It isn't. Drop it.

Now note that in 2 Samuel 24, there's another military census. David's census counts 500 elep in Judah *alone*, and 800 in the northern tribes. THIS fits very nicely with the story of growth regardless of your reading of elep.

It's about 116% growth assuming any stable elep composition.

But if you accept a *variable* elep composition, one that increases with societal sophistication, then it's EVEN MORE growth. I'll note that David's PERSONAL elep, his mighty men, is 37 guys. Up from ~10.

If we assume an increase in elep size from ~10 to ~30, then Israel's population between Numbers 26 and David's Census increased almost exactly sevenfold.

THAT sounds more like what Moses is talking about across several hundred years of growth!

Note that the archaological record shows a population decline around the time of the Conquest (which wouldn't happen if there are 5 million Israelites), and then a large increase between COnquest and Solomon journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117…

There's also a nice landscape-archaeology survey based paper out there somewhere I can't find right now. Basically the calculate density per hectare of settled areas, and potential crop yields of areas, and estimate plausible populations.

My point isn't that we should subordinate our interpretation to archaeology; we shouldn't.

It's that there's a huge glaring problem in the text itself if you take the traditional text at its conventional reading, and archaeology may be hinting at how to resolve it.