Duke Leto

Then why are you posting in response to them? :huh:

outhouse

actually, I used to argue that the 400,000 were never in the 37 acre temple complex at once. many lambs were brought into the city by travelers and many more were herded in by the saducees to sell. Those brought into the temple were ritually washed in the pool of israel. Now the meat was able to be cooked all through the city provided you were within the walls. they had the main ceremony in the temple, but the feast was city wide with BBQ pits everywhere.

the 400,000 while it may have in extreme cases like the passover of density when jesus was there, been inside the temple. I like to look at the figure as city wide, not just the temple.


funny if you search you will find someone who did the math on the sheep, and the logistical problems of pulling it off, based on Josephus numbers.

it was a good read.

It cant be done by cooking them all in the temple. But they have found these cooking pits all through out the walled city during this time.


400,000 did not eat inside the temple, it doesnt mean they were not in there for the first sacrifice and to hear the trumpets though.


we have the people, the jewish population could have made Sanders numbers

they had the food, with sheep brought into the area long in advance, the temple had a years worth of food storage within its walls alone.

plus the water storage you found, besides the ponds, pools, springs, and aquaduct

the space of 36 acres was said to be as packed as it could get, which by math alone makes it.



now im not saying every passover had that attendance either. But some did, and jesus passover was noted as packing the temple which multiple historians witnessed

Duke Leto

Completely ignoring the point of the post again...

If you think there were enough Jews in Palestine, please give us an idea of how many that was. If it's a Palestine with over 700,000 in total population of all types... Where on Earth do you think the food was coming from and how did it get there? (We've already demonstrated that no meaningful number of people are coming from further than Galilee.

There were 400,000 acres under cultivation in 1946 and that's more than would have been possible in the 1st Century since they were already using technology that was far more advanced than that available in the 1st Century. (Israel is basically self sufficient agriculturally.) Moreover, not all those acres in modern Israel are given over to grains, the modern acreage of a million acres is only 200,000 are given over to grain. A lot of land in Roman Palestine was given over to olives and figs and such which have a far lower number of calories per acre.

Let's pretend impossible things are true though, and give Roman Palestine 200,000 acres under cultivation. That's one fifth the amount of agriculture that's making the Jordan run dry. Of these, 40,000 acres are given over to grains, which will be the majority of the calories in the local diet.

Modern yields are as much as 100 bushels per acre, an average yield per acre for a medieval English farmer was 8 bushels. An acre in Kansas is supposed to feed about 9000 people. For a day. Let's pretend that's 45 ancient people for one year. The Kansas acre is a minimum of 50 bushels. Our Jewish farmers are lucky to have had 8 because technology actually has advanced in the 1000 years between them and our medieval Englishman and the English have reliable rain. Let's call it 16 because I think they grew 2 crops a year. That's a third the yield of modern Kansas or 15 people per acre.

That's 600,000 people and not all of them are Jews, maybe 300,000 tops. I'm being absurdly generous with both the acreage and the yields here.

If you're thinking the food was coming by import, then where are the exports? Even if they are exporting enough high value stuff to buy the tons of grain we're talking about, how are they hauling it inland economically?

There's a reason major cities were on oceans, lakes or rivers (or canals) before the invention of railroads, ox-drawn carts and camel trains are extremely uneconomical because the animals literally eat into your profit margin. And we're talking about thousands of carts hauling thousands of tons of food as much as 100 miles from Caesarea and Tyre. There is a reason why grain is never traded by land in the ancient world. It is usually cheap enough locally that hauling it more than 20 or 30 miles is a losing proposition.

I keep on raising pretty valid objections and you keep on switching back to proclaiming things I've already refuted as proof I don't know what I'm talking about. You insist I don't have any competency to criticize scholars, I go and get a quote from a scholar who raises the exact same logical objections and you insist on reading his initial "I don't know" as proof that he doesn't disagree with you. If I contact actual Israeli and Harvard archaeologists and they come back proclaiming my estimate to be correct, are you then going to claim they don't know their field?

Duke Leto

It dawned on me that I had been to an event vaguely like the one we've been talking about, a Penn State Temple University football game with preceding tailgate circa 2006. It was not a huge game by Beaver Stadium standards, the stadium seemed to be at half capacity. It has a stated capacity of 110,000 or so, so let's call that 50,000 people. My memory tells me it took something like 20-30 minutes to get seated.

I have no idea what Jerry Sandusky was doing that day and frankly I don't want to know.

I looked up some statistics and plans for the building to try and figure out the scale. The parking lots plus the stadium take up 110 acres. I tried to figure out the footprint of the stadium itself, since none of the websites say what it is, from the photographs. A football field less the end zones is by definition about 90% of an acre, so let's call the field as a whole 2 acres. My rough estimate on the seating area is that it's about 5 times the area of the playing field for 10 acres of seating, which agrees with my estimate of 10,000 per acre as the maximum reasonable crowd density. That makes Beaver Stadium a third the size of the Temple Mount.

It has 5 entrances which open 90 minutes before game time, implying that the minimum time to fill the stadium to capacity is a good bit lower Let's call it 25 minutes. I can't find a figure on how big the entrances are and I was not paying attention at the time, but I doubt any are smaller than the Triple Hulda Gate. There are external spiral stairwells/ramps whose width is tough to gauge but I don't think these are the only ways up. The actual choke points would be the numerous 8 foot or so wide staircases/ramps setting off every seating section. Assuming one of these per seating section we have a total of 90 (the Colosseum had 76), for about 720 feet of entry stairwell width, which would allow entry for a maximum 360 per 5 seconds or 72 per second if my estimate is right. How many would get in in 25 minutes? Just shy of 110,000. I put the Temple Mount down for 270 feet of entry stairwell and I was being a little generous. That would mean Beaver Stadium fills up 2.67 times faster than the Temple Mount, meaning your "Passover of Density" would take a bit over 4 hours to get everyone in. Does the schtick start at sunrise? Because I guarantee you the Sadducees don't have the ability to wake everyone up 4 hours beforehand. No clocks, no matter what Shakespeare says.

Sarpedon

How did you reckon the access stairs for the temple?

Also, keep in mind that people would be bringing animals to sacrifice.

outhouse

Heres a good article on all sides

http://www.abu.nb.ca/courses/ntintro.../LSUPCHAP1.htm


When King Agrippa wanted to know the number of the population during Passover, he had the priests put aside the kidneys of the sacrificial victims (t. Pesah.. 4:15). Six hundred thousand pairs were counted; assuming that there were not fewer than ten members in each Passover haburah (a voluntary association of adults), one arrives at a total of six million. It is said that this was called the "crowded Passover," so crowded that the Temple mount could not contain the numbers. Again, even if these numbers are greatly inflated the general point that Jerusalem overflowed with Passover pilgrims is still established.

Sarpedon

Umm, no. If the numbers are inflated, the entire anecdote is worthless and can be discarded. There's no way to tease reality out of such a wild story, unless you have an amazing and proven method for accounting for wild exaggeration.

outhouse

this is a imporant part here Sanders has known.

http://www.abu.nb.ca/courses/ntintro.../LSUPCHAP1.htm

Not only would the Passover crowds in the first century have been too large for the Temple courts, they would probably have been even too large for each haburah to have a single house or room in a house in which to celebrate Passover. The early rabbinic sources give evidence that this was the situation.

outhouse

False

your not taking into account this.

even if these numbers are greatly inflated the general point that Jerusalem overflowed with Passover pilgrims is still established.

Duke Leto

A bit further up the thread I posted a map of the reconstructed ground plan of the Temple Mount. Based on the stated dimensions, if the stairs for each of the Huldah Gates were drawn to scale, then the maximum width they could have is 30 feet. I gave all the other gates credit for that width and Wilson's Arch three times that amount. I was probably erring on the side of generosity because some of the gates look pretty small. I'm not sure which of the archways in the picture on wikipedia actually corresponds to the Herodian Warren's Gate, but if the gentleman in the picture is standing against the wall and not playing a Peter Jackson's LOTR game of hobbit size perspective, then it's unlikely that either had a width of 30 feet.

The "Agrippa and the kidneys" story is pretty idiotic, outhouse, not least since you're talking about having all the animals sacrificed on the Temple Mount again, which you previously backpedaled away from. For this to be credible Agrippa would have to have ordered that every sheep sacrificed for the festival have had both kidneys put aside and then brought to the Temple for tabulation. Frankly that's more than just a little disgusting. Then you have a pile of 120,000 rotting sheep kidneys that has to be counted. How many kidneys can you move from one pile to another in the process of counting them in a minute, even assuming somebody else is taking down the numbers at intervals? 20 sounds unreasonable to me, but even at that we're looking at 100 man hours of kidney counting. That's not a job anyone would be lining up to do. If we have it done by 10 of Agrippa's Greek slaves then we're looking at a full workday of kidney counting. That's realistically a minimum of 15-20 hours AFTER the animals had been killed, by which time raw meat will have gotten more than a little putrid, don't you think?

Or we can go back to getting 40-60,000 lambs over Wilson's Arch to be ready to be sacrificed in the Temple precincts before we let the people in again.

If I were the priests and Agrippa gave me this order, I'd reason that he wasn't interested in getting the real number, only an impressive one. Then I'd have made one up accordingly. Whisper down the lane to the later authors inflates it to 600,000 sheep.