Julian

Very true, but he did have the benefit of math and logic. Here is something I posted a long time ago:

600,000 males on foot escape from Egypt, excluding children. That would mean that we are looking at probably around 1,000,000 males total. Add to that an equal number of women. I will be fair here even though women are generally more numerous in a population. That makes for 2,000,000 people. Exodus further states that they brought along a large number of livestock and so on. Again I will be conservative and say a total of 3,000,000 goats, cows, chickens (no pigs) and so on. That makes for a total of 5,000,000 living creatures. Now, they all need water. Watering holes or wells in the desert are generally not overly large so lets assume that 10 creatures can drink or fill their waterskins at any given time. Lets say it takes 20 seconds for each group of 10. You would need about one and a half gallons of water a day in a desert enviroment to stay strong and healthy. Basically this means that you would need to carry 6 gallons of water away from the water just for yourself. Even more to feed the livestock for the next few days even though they drank today. So roughly about 20 gallons of water or around 160+ pounds of additional weight. Of course, small children and babies can carry next to nothing so add another 40 pounds at least. Boy, they must have been really strong. All this water should last you and yours for about six days or so. That is how long it would take to water the entire population. Six days. By that time you will have to go back to the well and get more water. No wonder it wook 40 years. It would seem that they spent all that time wandering around in a big circle around a watering hole, never able to proceed. And I am, of course, not even concerned with the fact that waterholes will dry out in many cases... Oh yeah, lets not even look at how to feed ruminants in the Sinai desert...

Another fun thought: Since one of the plagues of Eqypt killed of all the horses, how were the chariots drawn? Non-jewish slaves with a bit between their teeth?

Julian

Godless Wonder

how did you come up with six days?

If I allow each person 1 second on average to get his water (an absurdly short time) and assume 1 million people (ignoring beasts) then that's 1 million seconds.


1000000 secs/ (60 secs/min)
16666.66 mins
16666.66/60 mins / (60 mins / hour)
277.77 hours
277.77 hours /(24 hours/day)
11.57 days.

You said 20 secs per group of 10, or 2 secs per person.
If you mean 10 secs per group of 20, (0.5 secs per person) that would get close to your six days for a million people... But not sure that's what you meant.

Julian

I made an initial error in my conversion (I originally did this in metric) and then I fixed it quickly when I pasted it just now. It is quite possible that any subsequent dependencies are now wrong. Of course, with your math the situation is even worse for those poor guys...

The point was to show that simple math can show the whole exodus as being completely absurd. Of course, what would you expect from a book that claims pi = 3

Julian

Sheshbazzar

This has been covered in other threads, the Book does NOT claim that pi = 3

MiddleMan

Farrell Till's site has a number of articles you can browse. Follow this link:

http://theskepticalreview.com/articles-idx.html

And look under the "Egypt" category.

Also, Brett Palmer has some articles there as well that are very good regarding the Exodus:

http://theskepticalreview.com/palmer/palmer-idx.html

Julian

Perhaps you can point the way to those threads?

Wallener

A link to get you started...

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/bibleval.htm

Godless Wonder

It might as well, for all the difference it would make.

Julian

Wow, those are the worst apologetics I have ever read. Completely arbitrary. He assumes a width of the rim to make it match pi. Just picks the number out of thin air, despite the fact that the text referes to the same area of the construction ("round about" ) and this after he just argued that their measurement were not exact. Makes you wonder how they built any buildings since they obviously just reached out their arms for measurements. Apparently, they were more discerning when building buildings but not so when we need to validate the bible.

The writer could have easily said 30 cubits circumference or 10 cubits diameter and it would have been fine but he had to give us both and thereby revealing himself as a writer and not a mathematician.

Julian

Wallener

LOL! Always good to start with a bang.