33. Variations in Numbers Will be Better Understood When Israel’s Numerical Signs Are Discovered

Variations in Numbers Will be Better Understood When Israel’s Numerical Signs Are Discovered The other objections to the trustworthiness of the records of Chronicles are mostly purely subjective in character, utterly devoid of any objective evidence in their favor; or they are based upon interpretations which are impossible to prove. Are we driven to conclude, for example, that a thousand of thousands means exactly one million, neither more nor less? May it not mean many, or countless, thousands, just as a generation of generations means many generations? And are the critics who find the account that the Chronicler gives of the conspiracy against Athaliah inconsistent with that given in Kings quite sure that the captain and the guard of Kings cannot have been priests and Levites? Besides, how can we expect to explain satisfactorily all apparent incongruities in documents that are thousands of years old? As to the variations in numbers in the different sources, they are probably due to different readings of the original signs. But we do not know what signs the Hebrews used; and so we cannot at present discuss intelligently the reasons for the variations, and never shall until the system of numerical signs used by the Israelites has been discovered. And everybody knows how difficult it is to copy numerical signs correctly. There is nothing usually in the context to help us to determine just how many men were in an army, or how many were killed in a given battle. The important thing is, who won the fight.

I once inquired what was the population of a certain Southern city. One told me 40,000; another, 120,000. When I asked for an explanation of the discrepancy, I was told that there were 40,000 whites and 80,000 Negroes. Both estimates were true; but had they been written down in two different documents what charges of inconsistency might not have been made by future scientific historians!