- Dec 5, 2022
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I’ve been doing a lot of research lately on Old Testament chronology and the Exodus in particular (I’m retired and have a lot of free time on my hands). And I came up with a wacky idea, that is pure speculation, not something I want to convince anyone is true. But I’ve never heard it suggested before, and the more I go down this rabbit hole, the more sense it makes. I’ll be happy if someone can show me I’m absolutely wrong and unbiblical here, and I’ll just drop it. As background, I believe in inerrancy (in the inspired authors, but copyists could make mistakes occasionally), and in the literal histories of the Old Testament, and I’d rather not have a debate with anyone who denies the Exodus account.
I wondered about the size of the Exodus, 603,550 adult males and perhaps 2.4 million total, and it occurred to me, what if Moses was using sexagesimal (base 60 numbers) for the tribes, as Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Akkadians all used, and later scribes tried to correct what they thought were wrong totals.
If the hundreds digits were actually 60s, and the thousands were 360s, and the ten thousands were 3600s, it would cut the totals to about 217,000 adult males. We would need to correct only the single number for the total, and how we interpret the rest.
I figure it would agree more closely with everything else the Scriptures say, for example, that God chose the least significant of nations, not the greatest, and that they were less than the seven nations they would face in Canaan. The largest population estimate I’ve found for Canaan back then is 600,000, plus unknowns, nomads, and others who left no trace, but not millions more.
It would conform much more easily with the count of 22,273 firstborn males, which seems extremely small out of 2.4 million. I can make the numbers work either way, but the lower population requires far fewer assumptions and extreme conditions. Only boys who opened their mother's womb count, not boys born after girls or miscarriages. Infant mortality was very high; that's why they didn't count them until they were one month old, perhaps. Perhaps mixed marriages didn't count. Perhaps adults who were already raising their own families didn't count. etc.
It’s also hinted at by the fact that out of 24 tribal totals in two censuses, the hundreds digits are always from 2-7, six different digits as you’d expect in a sexagesimal system. I don’t know why it would be 2-7 instead of 0-5 or 1-6, but the odds of getting that consistency by sheer coincidence are something like .003% probability.
One thing that I thought was going to be a flaw turned out to be a strength. Moses took a collection, a half shekel from every adult male and it totaled 100 talents and 1775 shekels of silver, exactly what you’d get with a 3000 shekel talent, and then he used the 100 talents to make 100 bases for the boards that went into the tabernacle, 2 bases per board. But a talent was 60 or 70 pounds. Did they need 120-140 pounds of silver to hold up every board?
Then I ran across a theory that they had two systems of weight, one was 1/3 of the other. It’s complicated, but Ezek. 45:12 says, “Twenty gerahs will be your shekel. Twenty-five and twenty and fifteen shekels will be your mina.” It was assumed that this means 60 shekels make a mina and therefore 50 minas make a talent. But what if he’s defining two different minas, a sanctuary religious mina and a commercial mina? It could be translated, “Twenty shekels, 5, and twenty shekels, 15 will be your mina.” So they had an unnamed unit of 20 shekels. Five of them made a light mina. Or 15 of them made a heavy mina. And I’m proposing the light mina was a religious weight system that Moses invented (he talked about the shekel of the sanctuary, but there was no sanctuary before he built one). The heavy mina was what they used for commerce, so that a nice even 10 minas would make a talent equal to the 3000-shekel talent other nations used (some used a 3600-shekel talent). The sanctuary talent would be 1/3 of that, and by my math it would also result in a collection of just over 100 talents for the census collection with my lowered population, but later scribes would have had to change the number of leftover shekels.
Then the bases for the tabernacle would only be 20-25 pounds each, 40-50 pounds per board, which looks sufficient to me. And the walls, bases, and curtains of the tabernacle had to be transported by 4 carts and 8 oxen. But when I looked into how much two oxen can pull, I was told 1-2 thousand pounds, including the weight of the cart. With my numbers, the silver bases would fill one cart, leaving three for the walls and curtains. With the traditional numbers, the bases alone would fill 3 of the 4 carts. And this two-weight system could simplify some later passages, such as David’s crown weighing one talent. A 20-pound gold crown would be a lot easier to wear than a 60-pound crown.
Could I be on to something here, or am I completely delirious?
I wondered about the size of the Exodus, 603,550 adult males and perhaps 2.4 million total, and it occurred to me, what if Moses was using sexagesimal (base 60 numbers) for the tribes, as Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Akkadians all used, and later scribes tried to correct what they thought were wrong totals.
If the hundreds digits were actually 60s, and the thousands were 360s, and the ten thousands were 3600s, it would cut the totals to about 217,000 adult males. We would need to correct only the single number for the total, and how we interpret the rest.
I figure it would agree more closely with everything else the Scriptures say, for example, that God chose the least significant of nations, not the greatest, and that they were less than the seven nations they would face in Canaan. The largest population estimate I’ve found for Canaan back then is 600,000, plus unknowns, nomads, and others who left no trace, but not millions more.
It would conform much more easily with the count of 22,273 firstborn males, which seems extremely small out of 2.4 million. I can make the numbers work either way, but the lower population requires far fewer assumptions and extreme conditions. Only boys who opened their mother's womb count, not boys born after girls or miscarriages. Infant mortality was very high; that's why they didn't count them until they were one month old, perhaps. Perhaps mixed marriages didn't count. Perhaps adults who were already raising their own families didn't count. etc.
It’s also hinted at by the fact that out of 24 tribal totals in two censuses, the hundreds digits are always from 2-7, six different digits as you’d expect in a sexagesimal system. I don’t know why it would be 2-7 instead of 0-5 or 1-6, but the odds of getting that consistency by sheer coincidence are something like .003% probability.
One thing that I thought was going to be a flaw turned out to be a strength. Moses took a collection, a half shekel from every adult male and it totaled 100 talents and 1775 shekels of silver, exactly what you’d get with a 3000 shekel talent, and then he used the 100 talents to make 100 bases for the boards that went into the tabernacle, 2 bases per board. But a talent was 60 or 70 pounds. Did they need 120-140 pounds of silver to hold up every board?
Then I ran across a theory that they had two systems of weight, one was 1/3 of the other. It’s complicated, but Ezek. 45:12 says, “Twenty gerahs will be your shekel. Twenty-five and twenty and fifteen shekels will be your mina.” It was assumed that this means 60 shekels make a mina and therefore 50 minas make a talent. But what if he’s defining two different minas, a sanctuary religious mina and a commercial mina? It could be translated, “Twenty shekels, 5, and twenty shekels, 15 will be your mina.” So they had an unnamed unit of 20 shekels. Five of them made a light mina. Or 15 of them made a heavy mina. And I’m proposing the light mina was a religious weight system that Moses invented (he talked about the shekel of the sanctuary, but there was no sanctuary before he built one). The heavy mina was what they used for commerce, so that a nice even 10 minas would make a talent equal to the 3000-shekel talent other nations used (some used a 3600-shekel talent). The sanctuary talent would be 1/3 of that, and by my math it would also result in a collection of just over 100 talents for the census collection with my lowered population, but later scribes would have had to change the number of leftover shekels.
Then the bases for the tabernacle would only be 20-25 pounds each, 40-50 pounds per board, which looks sufficient to me. And the walls, bases, and curtains of the tabernacle had to be transported by 4 carts and 8 oxen. But when I looked into how much two oxen can pull, I was told 1-2 thousand pounds, including the weight of the cart. With my numbers, the silver bases would fill one cart, leaving three for the walls and curtains. With the traditional numbers, the bases alone would fill 3 of the 4 carts. And this two-weight system could simplify some later passages, such as David’s crown weighing one talent. A 20-pound gold crown would be a lot easier to wear than a 60-pound crown.
Could I be on to something here, or am I completely delirious?
