SIDEBAR NOTES

5 HOW MANY HEBREWS?

d.See also Colin J. Humphreys, The Miracles of Exodus: A Scientist’s Discovery of the Extraordinary Natural Causes of the Biblical Stories (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), chapter 8. Retranslating eleph in Exodus doesn’t answer all of our questions. Humphreys is forced to conclude that later scribes misunderstood the numbers in Numbers, so that while the (hypothetical) original read that the total number of Israelites was “598 [eleph= troops] and 5 [eleph= thousands] and 550 men, and the original readers understood that there were 598 troops containing 5550 men. At a later date, when the original meaning was lost, a scribe conflated the numbers and ran together the two [eleph] figures (598 + 5), to yield 603 thousand, not realising that two different [eleph] meanings were intended.” See Humphreys, “The Number of the People in the Exodus,” 207. We have no manuscript evidence for such a misreading, but it remains a possibility. The Old Testament was translated into Greek before New Testament times, and that translation reflects these conflated numbers, so the scribal misreading would have at least coincided with the Greek translation, if not predated it.