Did the Israelites lay eggs like reptiles?

by doubtful 15 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  Robdar

  Oh Gawd, does this mean the Bible is not accurate, not the inerrant word of The Great Mathematician ?

  Yes it does. But that is a Gentile belief anyway, not a Jewish one.
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  J. Hofer

  there were not necesarrily 1 man + 1 woman couples. so to give some more benefit of the doubt you'd need to calculate with some 1 man + 3 women families or the like.

  but then again, the hebrews probably never were in egypt.
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  saltyoldlady

  The item I think you are missing here is the 2 to 3 million people were not all Israelites - it included a vast mixed company of Egyptians that decided at the last moment to join them. I think I would have joined them too - after seeing the demarcation of the calamities befalling the natives and the Israelites being blessed. The number of 600,000 men is mentioned in verse 37 - plus women and children - so the multiplication rate doesn't have to be nearly as great as you have calculated here - and the word VAST probably included more Egyptians than Israelites is my guess.
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  sir82

  I could have sworn the Insight book tried to tackle this problem.

  Anyone have a WT-CD handy? IIRC, somehow they got their math to work.
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  blondie

  You must remember that the WTS justifies polygamy in Israel with the need to increase the numbers of the Israelites. If I missed it above, have you calculated how fast the population with multiple wives?
• 

  doubtful

  @Leo - No. We are going to pretend that not a single Hebrew child ever died before reaching adulthood and fathering 10 children of his own who also never died. So, no room for infant mortality in these calculations. If anything, we can assume that each couple had 20 children, and then allow for the infant mortality factor to kick in.

  @J.Hofer - I certainly thought about the concubinage issue. 1 man could very well have had 3 wives, thus trebling the figures. Yet, that does not change the total number of women. There's still a finite number of women in their society. So it doesn't matter if 1 man impregnates 3 women, or if each woman has her own husband to herself that impregnates her. Furthermore, you could say that for every 1 man who has 5 or 6 wives, that translates into 5 or 6 men who have no wives, or put another way - for every additional wife that one man has, that's one less wife for another man. So, it doesn't add to the total population. There's almost always a proportionate amount of men:women in a population. It's always right around 50/50.

  Secondly, this does not take into account the low probability of so many Israelite men having multiple wives. Consider their circumstances. Even in ancient Israel, only the wealthy could afford to have multiple wives. They weren't free you know. They had needs and they needed to eat. So, it was costly to support multiple wives. These Hebrews in Egypt were supposed to be slaves. Propertyless, second-class citizens without rights. Do you think they would have had the sufficient economic wherewithal to support upwards of 3 wives, and dozens of children?

  @saltyoldlady - If there were 600,000 Israelite men (according to their tribes, so they were not Egyptians) of military age only, then that means there must have been a corresponding number of Israelite women. Add 600,000 more. So, the total number of adults between the ages of 20-50 is now at 1.2 million, and this would only include the Hebrews. This amount does not include the "vast mixed company" of Egyptians, nor does it include all the rest of the Hebrews between the ages of 0-20 (which there would have been a lot of considering that each generation would had to have been growing exponentially with an ever expanding base), nor does it include all of the elderly, which there surely must have been a lot of, as according to the Exodus account, people still had remarkably long life-spans - Moses, Levi, Jacob, Aaron, Miriam, etc - all living past 100 years of age.

  In any event, the intial 1.2 million figure alone far surpasses the total possible number of Hebrews for this time. Once you account for the children and adolescents, the elderly, and the vast mixed company of Egyptians, you're looking at a stupendous figure that represents a number many times greater than the highest possible allowance for the real size of their population.