by Farrell Till
In their wilderness wanderings, Yahweh's "chosen ones" bellyached about every little hardship. When they tired of the manna from heaven that Yahweh so generously provided them, they complained again: "If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at" (Num. 11:5). If the people wanted meat to eat, why they didn't slaughter some of their enormous flocks and herds from which they obtained their constant supply of animals to incinerate on Yahweh's altar is anyone's guess, but people in biblical times didn't seem to react to situations in logical, sensible ways. The "chosen ones" wanted meat, and so they complained to their god Yahweh, who was so angry at them for their latest rebellion that he promised to send them so much meat that it would come out their nostrils.
Numbers 11:16 So Yahweh said to Moses, "Gather for me seventy of the elders of Israel, whom you know to be the elders of the people and officers over them; bring them to the tent of meeting, and have them take their place there with you. 17 I will come down and talk with you there; and I will take some of the spirit that is on you and put it on them; and they shall bear the burden of the people along with you so that you will not bear it all by yourself. 18 And say to the people: Consecrate yourselves for tomorrow, and you shall eat meat; for you have wailed in the hearing of Yahweh, saying, 'If only we had meat to eat! Surely it was better for us in Egypt.' Therefore Yahweh will give you meat, and you shall eat. 19 You shall eat not only one day, or two days, or five days, or ten days, or twenty days, 20 but for a whole month--until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you--because you have rejected Yahweh who is among you, and have wailed before him, saying, 'Why did we ever leave Egypt?'"
Yahweh's statement confused even Moses, because he too reacted logically and assumed that Yahweh meant for meat to be obtained from the flocks and herds: "And Moses said, 'The people whom I am among are six hundred thousand men on foot; yet you have said, "I will give them meat, that they may eat for a whole month."' Shall flocks and herds be slaughtered for them, to provide enough for them?" (vs:21-22).
Yahweh never did things the sensible way, so according to this fanciful story, the promise was fulfilled not with meat from the Israelites' flocks and herds but with quails that a wind blew to the Israelite encampment.
And there went forth a wind from Yahweh and brought quails from the sea, and let them fall by the camp, about a day's journey on this side and a day's journey on the other side, round about the camp, and about two cubits above the face of the earth" (vs:31-32).
Biblicists read this passage and never stop to think about what would have been involved if this event had actually happened. In the first place, there is the matter of how many quails would have been in the area that the Bible claims was covered to a depth of two cubits. A cubit was about 18 inches, so a depth of two cubits would have equaled a yard. Eerdmans Bible Dictionary states that a day's journey was a distance of 20-25 miles and quotes Josephus as a reference to support this figure (1987, p. 267). To give as much benefit of the doubt as possible to the biblical story, I will use the lower estimate of 20 miles in my calculations to show how absurd it is to believe that this event ever happened.
Now let's notice that the text quoted above stated that the quails fell to a depth of two cubits (about one yard) for a day's journey (about 20 miles) on this side and the other, round about the camp.Have biblicists never bothered to calculate how many quails would be in a three-foot layer that covered a 20-mile diameter? If this were a circle of quails for a distance of 20 miles on all sides of the camp, then an area of about 1250 square miles were covered with quails to a depth of about three feet. Do biblicists have any idea how many billions of quails this would have been? There are 46,656 cubic inches in a cubic yard. A quail is not a large bird, so if one quail occupied an area 5 inches by 5 inches by 5 inches or 125 cubic inches (which could easily contain any quail I have ever seen), there would have been 373 quails in each cubic yard of the area covered as the Bible claims.
A cube that is a mile square and 3 feet deep would contain 3,097,600 cubic yards, so if one cubic yard could contain 373 quails, every square mile of the area covered with quails would have contained 1,155,404,800 quails. And there were 1250 square miles covered with three feet of quails! We're talking about over 1.1 trillion quails. That would have averaged out to more than 385,000 quails for every man, woman, child, and infant in the Israelite horde. In the text quoted above, Yahweh said that the Hebrews would eat quails for a month, but for the three million Israelites to have consumed over a trillion quails in a month, each person would have had to eat 12,833 quails per day. No wonder Yahweh said that the Israelites would have meat coming out of their nostrils.
This is what the biblical text says about the actual gathering of the quails: "And the people rose up all that day and all the night, and all the next day, and gathered the quails" (v:32). To have gathered all of them, each of the three million Israelites, working the entire 36 hours implied in "all that day and all the night and all the next day," would have had to gather 10,698 quails per hour, which would have been 178 quails per minute that they would have had to gather, with no time off for rest. The average, of course, would have been even higher than this, because infants and young children would not have been able to help in the gathering.
The biblical text states that "he that gathered least gathered ten homers" (v:32). A homer was a unit of dry measurement equal to 10 ephahs, and an ephah was thought to be a capacity equal to about 5.8 gallons, although Josephus gave it a value of about 9.25 gallons. To give biblicists the benefit of doubt, we will take the higher estimation of 9.25 gallons, which would mean that those in the Israelite horde who gathered the least number of quails still had about 90 gallons of quails. Even that would be a lot of quails for a person to eat in a month. Since 90 gallons of quails would come nowhere close to the 385,000 average for each person, we must conclude that the slacking off of some Israelites put an added burden on others, and so some would have had to gather many more than 178 per minute during the 36-hour stretch. Besides this, the quails would have had to be cleaned and preserved in some way; otherwise, the stench of decaying flesh would have been unbearable. Even before the 36-hour gathering period was over, in a desert climate the flesh of the quails would have already begun to decay and smell, and surely a god who was so particular about disposal of human waste (as we noted in an earlier posting) would not have tolerated rotting flesh around the camp of his chosen ones. Deuteronomy 23:14 stated that the reason for the commandment that every person take a trowel to the "designated area" to use in burying their excrement was to prevent Yahweh, "who walked in the midst of [the] camp," from being so offended by any unclean thing that he would "turn away from you [the Israelites]," so surely a deity this sensitive would not have tolerated rotting quail flesh all around the camp. After all, this is the same deity who, as noted in an earlier article, commanded priests to carry the offal and dung of animal sacrifices "outside the camp" to be burned (Lev. 4:12; 16:27; 21:9, 11; Heb. 13:11). Surely, he would have demanded no less of a clean-up of the quails, so let's hope that no inerrantists try to weasel out of the problem this story poses by arguing that most of the quails were just left on the ground to rot.
There are no discrepancies in the Bible? Well, if obvious exaggeration is not a discrepancy, what is it?
No comments:
Post a Comment