Hey there, Narkissos! I'm sorry for the delay, time has been short.
Now I hear your argument! Thanks for being much clearer. You are of course correct in showing that, if it is claimed that the variation is unique or that "it must mean something," the honest and correct path for the apologist to take is to show how often the same phenomenon occurs elsewhere. I share the sentiment of your comments. Note that I'm taking a different approach from the one we find in the OP, as I conveyed in my first post. It is highly unlikely that scribes envolved in the composition of 1 Kings 7:23 (or even 2 Chronicles 4:2) had this "pi pattern" in mind when they penned the text, since it involves forms of interpretation that reached a developed state only long after the composition period. What I was showing was what kind of approach an interpreter of the text could take, in particular the one who follows the historical and traditional age-old Jewish fashion of interpretation. It could be anyone living, say, in the 17th, 19th or 21st century, for the matter.
The OP's quoted article seems to lead us to think that, since there is a qere/khetiv variation, it should be taken as a clue that will lead us to find the pi pattern. It also seems to suggest that this was encoded by either the original author(s) or, most likely, the scribes that copied the earliest manuscripts. Moreover, the article appears to be an apologetic effort to "explain" this apparent "wrong value" of pi in the Bible.
I do none of that. The implied value of pi in the text doesn't need to be defended. It is just an estimation that suffices for the context of a religious work. The text doesn't demand anything else for the reader to aprehend its content and meaning. It is fully satisfying as it stands.The occurrence of the qere/khetiv phenomenon in 1 Kings 7:23 doesn't mean that a "special exegesis" is in order.
I'm showing the path the Jewish intepreter takes if he is looking for "something more". The passage gives him much more than he could ever hope for! Those who are familiar with Jewish mystical exegesis know the Jews believe the biblical text has different "levels" of interpretation. The pious Jewish student of Scripture believes that, if he digs deeper into the text, he will be generously rewarded with gems of wisdom lying beneath the surface. So when he approaches 1 Kings 7:23 (or actually any other passage of their sacred writings), he knows that the description of the molten sea means what it says. But he believes that if God was the author of Scripture, he might as well have encoded additional layers of meaning in the passage.
Therefore his trained mind will look for understandings that go beyond the plainest meaning of the text. The question is: will he find anything in 1 Kings 7:23? The question is even more significant because, in a sense, that verse is not an ordinary one. Jewish interpretation places great emphasis on the symbolic significance of numbers and geometry. Number symbolism suffuses Jewish mystical thought. And 1 Kings 7:23 just happens to be a very rare passage in the Jewish Bible (the only one I can think of at the top of my head) that deals with geometric and engineering calculations, because of the implied value of pi. It naturally lends itself to being interpreted beyond its surface meaning. It is not just another "average verse". The bets are high. Will he find anything meaningful there?
It is only in this context that the spelling of qaveh appears as a clue-key. If he is searching the verse for a hint that will lead him to a deeper insight, the spelling of qaveh will no doubt quickly catch his trained eye (either by means of the qere/khetiv occurrence or the variation in the 2 Chronicles parallel passage). And that's where he would find the beauty of it: the spelling variation is a rather ordinary, non-unique phenomenon. To him it would follow precisely as his belief claims: God reveals himself in small things like in the letters of the sacred writings.
One of the traditional practices in Rabbinical Judaism is counting the number of letters in a given text. If he follows the clue given by qaveh and, beginning with this word, counts the number of letters that form a self-contained sentence describing the circumference of the molten sea ("a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about"), he will find 22 letters. Twenty-two letters describing a circumference -- that wil pick his curiosity, suggesting that he is on the right track, because for him the mere mention of a set of "22 letters" evokes the Hebrew alphabet, which has exactly 22 letters. And a very ancient Jewish tradition states that God used the 22 letters to shape the cosmos, saying that he "placed them in a circle." (Sepher Yetzirah 2:4)
In this tradition, the letters are the agents that delimit the shape of the world that was a primeval chaos before creation, according to Genesis. (Compare Sepher Yetzirah 1:11) The waters of the deep are thus delimited by God's creative word, integrating with the declaration that "he set a circle upon the face of the deep" (Proverbs 8:27,29), which in turn is imaged by the molten sea in the temple (reputed by Jewish thought as a typological representation of the cosmos). This a-circle-and-22-letters motif thus results in a very tight, unexpected and impressive integration between Jewish mysticism and 1 Kings 7:23.
And so it goes as I explained in detail in my first post: the alternate spelling of qaveh omits the "revealing" letter hey and that reduces the letter count from 22 to 21. The 22/21 ratio thus adjusts the estimation of pi to a better value. Similarly, using a "deeper" practice of Jewish interpretation - gematria - gives us two values for the qv(h) word - 111 and 106. And the ratio 111/106 adjusts the estimation of pi to an even better value.
Three estimations of pi:
3
3 * (22/21) = 3.142857...
3 * (111/106) = 3.14150943396226...
It is very important to draw attention to the significance of this. One could say that "numbers can mean anything," to excuse himself to think a little about the significance of the pattern. A person can "search for patterns" in a given text and may even find something "meaningful" like a "pi pattern" if he looks hard enough. But that is definetely not what is going on in this passage. There are countless "approximations of pi," but the three approximations of pi above (3, 3.142857... and 3.14150943396226...) are EXACTLY the first three elements in the sequence of convergents of pi (which is by definition a sequence of better and better approximations)! This mathematical sequence (like the prime number sequence or the repdigit sequence, for instance) is a fixed set of data. The approximations just couldn't be any more significant.
And there's no force-fitting whatsoever: the student is limited to resorting to standard historical Jewish interpretational practices - textual variation, letter count and gematria -, doing so with much grace and simplicity. And more: it possesses internal harmony: the "deeper" the style of exegesis gets (plain text reading → letter count → gematria), the better the approximation is, all the while integrating grade-school geometry with Jewish theology and cosmogony. There is pattern and coherence in what was supposed to be a sea of chaos. That's a top-level phenomenon and it is impossible to remain indifferent to the pattern once you see it. It is mind-boggling.
What do you think?
