outhouse

how about this then

during the great revolt, you know that pesky little event where anywhere from 600,000 to 1,000,000 jews were killed or died from stravation, lived inside the walls.

please ignore more history

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Revolt

Tacitus, a historian of the time, notes that those, who were besieged in Jerusalem amounted to no fewer than six hundred thousand, that men and women alike and every age engaged in armed resistance, everyone who could pick up a weapon did, both sexes showed equal determination, preferring death to a life that involved expulsion from their country.[11] Josephus puts the number of the besieged at near 1 million.

Sarpedon

Sanders' mistake was to take ancient historians and religious texts at face value.

Anyone, anyone who has studied history will know that ancient writers exaggerate. And anyone who studies religion will know that religious sources are usually totally unreliable. This is someone you call 'one of the best scholars to date?' Ha!

I did answer your question about the population of the Levant. I said I didn't know, because there is no documentation. And I also pointed out that neither you nor Sanders know either. I also pointed out that you and he assumed a population that was not equalled until mid 20th century, which I find unrealistic. Why can't you admit that you don't have any sources either? Explain why your sources are better than my guesses. You can't, because they are guessing too, and I explained quite carefully why my guesses are better than theirs.

I am certainly not going to bow to the authority of some guy just because he is a college professor. As someone who has attended college, I know quite well that professors are not always right. Heck, I have a masters degree, I could be a college professor. Guess what: I have studied ancient roman city planning at a graduate level. So don't tell me I'm not qualified to make general statements about ancient cities of the Roman Empire.

outhouse

less you forget then, its not only Sanders that has come to this conclusion.

find me any credible scholar that claims lower numbers for the passover.





also the revolt shows that the city does/can hold the people stated for passover with ease.


so now you have two things to back with sources, one how few people were in attendance at passover, and how many people died in the revolt.

Sarpedon

You use a wikipedia article to back that up? You silly person.

You forgot the quote "Josephus claims that 1,000,000 jews were killed."

The fact that you think that "Josephus claims that 1,000,000 jews were killed," means the same thing as "1,000,000 were killed," shows exactly how gullible you are. How convenient that the Romans killed such a big, round number isn't it? Its almost as if someone was guessing.

His guess is no better than mine. Worse, even, considering he had an emotional attachment to the subject. You were aware that people who are emotionally involved in a subject are not the most reliable sources, weren't you?

Sarpedon

Perhaps we should all calm down at this point. No one is disputing that the Siege took place. No one is disputing that the population of Jerusalem was massacred. No one is disputing that there was genocide or a vast human tragedy.

What we dispute is the idea that there were 1,000,000 people at the time in the area. As pointed out, this was the population of Rome at the time, a population that the entire state of israel wouldn't achieve until the forties.

This is too big of an assumption to rest on the word of one, prejudiced source, that is Josephus. You can't use Tacitus' number to support Josephus' because they are so different. If Josephus could be wrong by 400,000, why couldn't he be wrong by 600,000?

outhouse

so you have zero sources and complain about mine, sure your not YEC?

Duke Leto

Good grief. I don't NEED sources, the numbers the classical historians are quoting are absurd. If you cite a professor who says water can flow up hill, the fact that he's a professor doesn't make it true.

I've gone through the math of why a Jerusalem population of hundreds of thousands is absurd several times. Written authority has to take second seat to inferences made from scientific observation. You're the one taking the written record as scripture without submitting it to scientific analysis. That's YEC behavior.

Your assertion that 20,000 people can fit in an acre alone disqualifies you from making an authoritative statement on the subject. As noted above there are 43,000 odd square feet in an acre, and it is not physically possible for any human being to stand in an area of 2-3 square feet or less. A 5' tall man will be about 2.5' from shoulder to shoulder and 1' thick in the chest. That's 2.5 square feet. Granted women and children are smaller but that's 2.5 square feet of base area, you need more than that if your crowd of men is going to be able to move their legs

Either you think acres are bigger than they actually are, or human beings are smaller than Peter Dinklage on average.

I suspect you're misquoting someone asserting that 20,000-30,000 can LIVE in a square mile as proof that 20,000-30,000 can stand in an acre. 8,000-10,000 is about the maximum human anatomy and the definition of an acre will allow, and that's disallowing any room for any of the standers to move.

You need to take a step back and admit that you're wrong on that point at least before anyone can take your argument from authority seriously.

DCHindley

Hmmm,

Don't know what happened to your reply where you asked where my estimates come from. They were a source that cited Magen Broshi. Broshi's book, Bread Wine & Scrolls (2001), covers population density and this is where he states his estimates of between 160-200. While I am also aware that there are estimates as low as 150 per hectare (I think that 230 acres = 93 hectares) I settled on this as reasonable, but not ridiculously high or low.

230 acre(s)

=337.734850 aroura(e)

=3.377348 pecheis(2)

=337.734850 schoinion(2)

=337.734850 iugerum(-a)

=93.079725 hectare(s)

=230.000000 acre(s)

=9307.972476 are(s)

=930797.247606 metres(2)

=930.797248 dunam(s)

=40.053943 cors-space

=675.469700 plethron (min)

=337.734850 plethron (max)

It looks as though my source did not get the math exactly right when they converted acreage to hectares or Dunams.

The 230 acres figure was Broshi's estimate of Herod's Jerusalem. Here is his figures for several periods.

Period	Area (in acres)	Broshi's pop estim	160	200
The Jebusite City and King David (c. 1000 BCE)	12	2,000	1,920	2,400
King Solomon (c. 930 BCE)	32	5,000	5,120	6,400
King Hezekiah (c. 701 BCE)	125	25,000	20,000	25,000
Return from Exile (c. 333 BCE)	30	4,500	4,800	6,000
The Hasmoneans (second century BCE)	165	30,000 - 35,000	26,400	33,000
Herod the Great (c. 4 BCE)	230	40,000	36,800	46,000
End of the Second Commonwealth (c. 66 CE)	450	80,000	72,000	90,000
Justinian (c. 565 CE)	300	55,000 - 60,000	48,000	60,000

I think that pilgrims would not all be staying in town - most of them likely camped in tent cities set up for this purpose outside the gates, similar to the way pilgrims are handled at Muslim holy shrines.

But I suppose Magen Broshi doesn't know shit about archeology either ...

DCH

Duke Leto

I saw it, thank you for clarifying that the area was 230 acres under Herod and 450 acres at the time of the War. Broshi's numbers, unlike those giving Jerusalem a million inhabitants, are at least reasonably sane.

The objection is that 160-200 people per acre was simply too high because Hong Kong Island and Manhattan Island, two of 2012's most crowded urban areas, have population densities of 66 and 108 people per acre. Broshi wants his Jerusalem to be twice as crowded as modern New York.

Realistically I don't see how the density could get above 30 per acre within the walls, for about 12,000 tops of permanent residents inside the walls. But there were settlements outside the walls too, so Jerusalem could have had as many as 50,000 inhabitants in the days before the siege.

There's back of the napkin math on this higher up in the thread.

Of course all these 400,000 alleged people COULD have camped out outside the city... But looking at another historic campground, the Union Army position on Cemetary Ridge at Gettysburg was a pretty densely packed 3+ square miles for 80,000 men (I'm going by a ballpark estimate from the map) , and they were getting food delivered to them. So realistically a tent city big enough to hold 400,000 would be 15 square miles. That's two thirds the size of Manhattan. POSSIBLE, but severely unlikely, even for a few days.

Again, look at the size of modern Israel, which is roughly the size of Judea, Samaria and Galilee compared to the entire Roman Empire. It is 0.5% of the Empire. The Empire was supposed to have 60 million inhabitants under Claudius. Since Judea/Samaria/Galilee was NOT a fertile province like Egypt or Gaul or Northern Italy, it is unlikely it had more than 300,000 inhabitants, and not all of these will have been Jews.

Sarpedon has some notes on the population of Palestine under the Ottomans and I had some links on Jerusalem. Bottom line is that the places had 700,000 and 30,000-50,000 inhabitants in 1914. Again, that includes 1900 years of technological progress, not all of which the Palestinian Arab peasants were cut off from.

Bottom line: Not enough space, not enough food, not enough Jews.

credoconsolans

This.

All I could think of is the strain on local water resources. Nearly half a million people needing 3 liters per person per day, not including that needed for washing and cooking and all the water needing to be collected by women with pots on their heads. The lines would be miles long to wait. They would spend entire days waiting to get a share of the water, just to turn around and get back in line again.

In the days of ancient Greece, during the Olympic games, the numbers were large and the area where the games were held was much smaller, but they also had logistic problems, tourists and athletes had to bring in their own food and water and shelter and by the end of the festival, the latrines were overrun and people were dropping like flies from dehydration and dysentery.