Re: Jericho and OT numbers (was: I AM RIGHT AND YOU ARE WRONG)

Jan de Konin wrote:
> ...
> My uncle, also J.de Koning, but not Jan, was a pastor in a reformed church
> and as far as we know slated to become a teacher of Old Testament at a
> university before he died in a German concentration camp in1944. He wrote
> and proved in his book (in Dutch) "De El-Amarna tabletten en he Oude
> Testament'" (published in 1940) that the way numbers are treated in the
> O.T. cannot be true. That was not only the first chapters of Genesis, but
> all the early books of the O.T.. In the book his main example was the
> number of Israelites that went around Jericho. Indeed, the walls that came
> tumbling down are found there, but it is humanly impossible, that the
> number of people that walked around Jericho is as high as our (translated)
> bible says. The size of Jericho was simply too small.

This claim struck me as strange. How can you say Jericho was too small?
The Israelite army probably wouldn't have marched in single file. We
have no idea how many people would have walked side-by-side. Num.1:46
gives 603,550 as the number of the "men able to go forth to war". If, to
begin with, you take Jericho to have a size of zero and distribute an
army of this size in a circle around it, giving every man a generous
square meter, you get a circle of 438 m radius and 2.754 km
circumference - which you can easily march within about 40 minutes (or 4
hours and 50 min to do it 7 times). If the outside of Jericho's wall was
a circle with 1 km radius, the outermost Israelites would have to have
marched 6.86 km, taking 1 hour and 40 min (or 12 hours on the last day).
This assumes that the entire army would have to be on the march at the
same time, which is not necessary (especially on the first 6 days),
easing the procedure.

Peter

-- 
Dr. Peter Ruest, CH-3148 Lanzenhaeusern, Switzerland
<pruest@dplanet.ch> - Biochemistry - Creation and evolution
"..the work which God created to evolve it" (Genesis 2:3)