What About Casualty Numbers?

The following article is from the 1995 / January-February issue of  *The Skeptical Review*:

by Farrell Till

William Sierichs' article [See previous article on this blog published yesterday, 5-5-18] on biblical armies should convince any objective reader that Yahweh's inspired writers had a penchant for hyperbole. If the great armies of fairly modern times, such as those that fought in the Napoleonic wars, numbered only in the tens of thousands, what reasonable person can believe that tiny Israel and its neighboring nations could have fielded armies that numbered in the hundreds of thousands? Obviously, then, biblical writers were prone to exaggeration.

Those Amazing Biblical Numbers: Taking Stock of the Armies of Ancient Israel

The following article is from the 1995 / January-February issue of  *The Skeptical Review*:

by William Sierichs, Jr

The survival of ancient Israel must have often been in doubt, since armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands repeatedly attacked the nascent state. The Israelites once stood off an Egyptian army of a million. Miraculously, for several centuries, Israel survived attacks by armies larger than those commanded by Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the generals of the American Civil War, and even the massive forces of Prussia and France in 1870.