outhouse

he's just digging holes trying to cover his mistake from complete lack of knowledge in first century cultural anthropology surrounding the temple. this is history not intellect


we understand the city could not contain 400,000 people year round. but duh!!

thats not what we are talking about.




we are talking about a huge money making event for the romans and temple during a required event

outhouse

if you quit guessing, you would quit making mistakes.


do you know what the population of Judea was during the first century?? how about Galilee, how about all the other surrounding villages that held jews required to come?


do you understand what a tent village is outside the walls of the city?

Iskander

It was said because tacitus makes no comment on the figure of 6000000 and I suggested that the population of Jerusalem coul be as high as 400000 briefly during passover.

It is not a dogma, perhaps Tacitus thought that 6000000 was an impossible number but made no comment
Perhaps tacitus is a lousy historiam that willinglly writes what he knows to be utterly impossible.

Sarpedon

Outhouse, since you don't have any documentation, because there is no documentation, perhaps you should shut the hell up while the adults have a conversation, or learn to be polite. The difference between you and me is that I'm smart enough to make reasonable guesses, while you accept other people's unreasonable guesses as facts.

In 1914, entire population of Palestine, including Galilee region, less than 700,000. If you seriously believe that the population of the area circa the first century was the same as in 1914, and that every single person showed up for the festival which you seem to be implying, all on the say so of some middle american theologian and ancient historians who were clearly pulling numbers out of their asses, there's no point in trying to have an intelligent conversation with you.

So what if there was a religious requirement? If religious people in the 1st century were anything like religious people today, they would have ignored their religious requirements whenever it suited them. Likely, each extended family would have sent one or two members to represent them and perform the necessary rituals, and make the necessary donations and do the necessary shopping. The idea of an entire nation packing up and going to temple once a year at the same time is just plain silly. Who would be guarding the walls of outlying towns? Who would be feeding the non-sacrificial lifestock? You can dismiss this as a 'guess' if you want, but I say its a hell of a lot more plausible than the idea that an entire nation abandoning its outlying regions for a month out of every year.

And Iskander. I doubt that Tacitus would 'know' that something is impossible. Even with their censuses, I don't think the Romans ever believed that everyone was counted. Even modern censuses are still estimates, as no one can count the homeless and those who choose to avoid the census.

Duke Leto

I misread that and I apologize for the mistake. I thought it was 600,000 combatants not 600,000 total. Even if we give it only 60,000 combatants plus 540,000 non-combatants, the logistics problem still stands. Too many people and not enough surface area to store them AND seven plus months of food.

Since outhouse wants to believe there was enough water and I don't feel like crunching the actual numbers to prove him wrong, we'll PRETEND there was enough water for everyone in spite of the fact that modern Jerusalem has water supply problems with a population on that order of magnitude.

Realistically, those besieged people are going to need 500 g of wheat a day each. Let's be generous and let them survive on 200 g. 200 g * 600,000 * ~210 days = ~ 13,000 metric tons. That's a handysize freighter full of grain they're hiding in an area about the size of the Old City. Except it would be in pots. Probably on par with water, but with the containers I think you're looking at 3 liters per kg, let's call it 75 million liters of storage space, which for the sake of keeping things simple, we'll call 2.5 million cubic feet. Again, in the interest of nice round numbers, we'll say that the Jews can't pile it more than 25 feet high, which gives us 100,000 square feet of besieged Jerusalem full of nothing but a 25 foot high stack of grain pots at the beginning of the siege, that's 2.2 acres of 200 or 640 depending on who you ask. Take away your ability to stack it and it'll shoot up to ~ 20 acres of nothing but grain pots. 50 acres if we jack it back up to a survivable diet. Again, some of that acreage is offset by multifloor buildings, but it's still a huge amount of space and it takes away from living space necessary to keep disease from killing everyone. In fairness, the empty pots do provide a solution to the drainage problem, as long as you can keep the used and fresh straight.

Based on the above I don't see how sufficient food could be stockpiled for a 600k size siege of Jerusalem.

Duke Leto

Incurable depravity. Let the record indicate I did not start the insults.

Iskander

Amen

Sarpedon

There's no reason to assume that all the beseiged in Jerusalem survived the full seven months.

And it seems the densly populated residential section of ancient Jerusalem was approximately the same size as Pompeii, who's population is estimated (by competent people) at around 20,000 at the time of the eruption. So I see no reason to assume that Jerusalem was more than 30,000 residents.

Duke Leto

Those are both kinda what I've been saying, although the caveat would be that I doubt there were more than 60,000 to start with.

outhouse

I dont have time for stupidity, or hashing out a worthless post.


you want to argue with proffessors on the subject and some of the best scholars to date, thats fine, but i would like a adult reply, and something better then the guess your not qualified to make.

SOURCES please provide them, and i will gladly apologize, im not to big to admit when im wrong, but i wont let a couple of rubes throw guesses out from ignorance


you have failed to answer my questions about the population of the levant, and those that traveled to the temple.


where did Sanders make his mistakes and why???