If I were to pursue a PhD in Old Testament, which I am not inclined to do, I would want to study the ways that numbers are used in the Bible. I find this subject to be fascinating and I have a done a bit of reading on it. And through my minimal study I have found two things that seem to be true: 1) The ways numbers are used in the Bible often lead to difficulties or confusion, and 2) The ways that human beings have used and understood numbers have evolved through the centuries. (If you are looking for a good book on this subject, allow me to suggest The Universal History of Numbers by Georges Ifrah.)

Let’s start with some of the complications related to numbers in the Bible. We find numbers all throughout the biblical text, from genealogies to censuses, from periods of time to simple counting. Often we don’t pay much attention to these numbers, and they don’t always warrant much notice. But there are times when the numbers are challenging. For example, the ages of many people in the Old Testament seem incredible. Before the flood men and women are said to have lived for hundreds and hundreds of years, and explaining how and why this is true has led to some rather creative, if not distracting, interpretation. Population numbers, such as we find in Numbers or in Joshua, seem to be at odds with the findings of modern archaeology.

One of the most difficult numbers in the Old Testament has to do with the number of Israelite slaves that left Egypt in the Exodus. According to the Bible, “about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children” left Egypt (Exodus 12:37, NIV). With women and children included, scholars estimate that the total number of people would be near 2 million. Plus, as the text says, they had all their livestock. And they plundered the Egyptians on their way out of town, so they had a large amount of belongings, too.

It is really easy for us to read right past these numbers, but in Exodus 14:6-12 we find these Israelites quailing under the fear of “six hundred” Egyptian chariots. Why were they so afraid when there were 1,000 men to every chariot?

But wait, there’s more! If there were about 2 million Israelites marching their way out of Egypt with all their livestock and belongings, and they marched in a tight military formation, which is unlikely, then their formation would have stretched for over 200 miles. This means that the front of the line would have reached Mt. Sinai just as the rear was leaving the Red Sea on dry land! No part of the narrative works with that understanding.

These kinds of difficulties continue throughout the Bible. After an analysis of numbers in a book of the Old Testament one commentator says, “Every bit of available evidence, biblical, extra-biblical, and archaeological, seems to discourage interpreting the numbers in Numbers literally.”*

The second part of the story is the way that humanity’s appropriation of numbers has shifted over the centuries. This one is harder to see, but something of the general trend of that evolution goes like this: Early on, numbers were used in very concrete ways, i.e. to count sheep, or to establish fair trades, or even to track the motions of the heavenly bodies. As time marched on and human knowledge changed, numbers became more and more abstract realities. This is largely how we learn them today. We learn to mathematically manipulate numbers on a piece of paper, but they don’t correspond to anything real. This becomes evident as soon as the dreaded story problems are introduced. Suddenly we have to connect our abstract manipulations of numbers to real-world situations. This is hard; not everyone makes the shift.

Historically speaking, this evolution from concrete to abstract can be seen in the development in the concepts of zero and infinity, which I won’t get into here. But suffice it to say that the Greeks abhorred the idea of nothingness and thus rejected the number 0. Likewise our understanding of infinity has evolved over the years to become the concept we imagine these days.

So what does this all mean? Well the most basic truth that I have found, and tested with some Old Testament scholars, is that numbers in the Bible carry more of a qualitative meaning than a quantitative meaning. Their value (pun intended) isn’t primarily in the quantity denoted, but in a quality that is evoked. Just think of all the numbers that repeat throughout the Bible: 7, 40, 12. Each of these has a qualitative meaning to it that is more important than the quantity. There is a sense that numbers in the Bible function more like our number 13, which is often used in a way that has nothing to do with a quantity. The problem is that we can’t seem to recover the quality that these numbers evoked in the minds of their readers.

Even still, we can apply some of this learning to our reading of the Bible. We can recognize that dates and ages aren’t primarily concerned with laying out a strict timeline of events; they aren’t trying to tell us the age of the earth. We can recognize that hyperbole plays a role in some of numbers; there were political reasons for recording population numbers as they did. We can connect stories through numbers; Jesus was in the desert for 40 days and had 12 disciples because these numbers resonate with Israel’s story, which Jesus is recapitulating in his ministry. Our modern focus on quantities can distract us from the quality that the numbers in the Bible are carrying.

One final thought that I’ve wondered for a while: if the concepts of zero and infinity have been evolving over time and how we understand them now is quite different than how they were understood in the minds of the biblical writers, then how does that impact the way we interpret the biblical notions of heaven, hell and eternity? When we connect our idea of infinity to the idea of eternity are we missing some aspect of the concept that the original writers held? Do our modern concepts of nothingness relate to biblical concepts of hell? I really don’t know, but I love wondering about these things.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on that topic. Or feel free to just comment on some of the more challenging numbers you’ve found in the Bible.

• Lasor, William Sanford, David Allan Hubbard, and Frederic William Bush. Old Testament Survey: The Message, Form, and Background of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996), 105.