As with
other ancient documents, the Book of Mormon’s discussion of number of
participants in battles seem to be often exaggerated. My friend Stephen Smoot
has two useful blog posts addressing this issue:
Joshua
Berman, a Jewish Rabbi and Biblical scholar, wrote that, with respect to
numbers in the Tanakh:
Throughout the writings of the ancient Near
East we find that numbers are often unrealistically large, especially when
reported in a military context, such as army size or the detail of booty taken
from an enemy. (Joshua Berman, Ani
Maamin: Biblical Criticism, Historical Truth, and the Thirteen Principles of
Faith [Jerusalem and New Milford, Conn.: Maggid Books, 2020], 29)
Berman, as
one of his examples discusses the armies of Judah in the book of Chronicles:
In the second book of Chronicles, we find
troop figures for the armies of many of the kings of Judah. Concerning the
first four of these kings, these figures are listed over six chapters. The army
of Rehoboam, we are told, numbered 180,000 (II Chr. 11:1). The army of his son,
Abijah, numbered 400,000 (II Chr. 13:3). The army of Asa was comprised of two
units: one numbered 300,000 and the other numbered 280,000. Finally, the armies
of Jehoshaphat, his son, consisted of five units. Those units numbered 300,000;
280,000; 200,000; 2000,000; and 180,000 men (II Chr. 17:14-18). These numbers
are all quite large and cannot conform to any realistic picture of what we know
about life in the Land of Israel at the time. In fact, the armies of Jehoshaphat
total over one million soldiers! When we look at these numbers a little more
closely, though, we see two trends. One is that some of the numbers are what we
would term large round numbers—200,000, 300,000, and 400,000. The other numbers
we might term semi-rounded figures—180,000 and 280,000, each of which appears
twice. Put differently, the figures that are “semi-rounded,” of which there are
four, all end with eighty thousand. That seems a bit odd. After all, if the
armies are presented as rounded to the nearest ten thousand, one would not
expect that all four examples of armies that are not rounded to the nearest
hundred thousand all happen to round to eighty thousand. For all of these
reasons, it is difficult to read these figures as reflective of quantitative
realities.
One perspective scholar has recently discerned
a clear pattern that points to the meaning inherent in these numbers. The sum
of Jehoshaphat’s armies totals 1,160,000. This figure is exactly double the
size of his father Asa’s armies. The figure is also exactly equivalent to the
sum of all the armies of the three kings of Judah who preceded him, recorded
above (19). The narrative of Second Chronicles casts Jehoshaphat as the most
righteous of the kings of Judah—more so than any of his predecessors, or those
that immediately followed him. The author of Chronicles uses troop numbers to
convey that idea in keeping with an ancient convention of employing
non-realistic numbers As a reward for his righteousness, Jehoshaphat commanded
not only the largest army but, rhetorically speaking, an army so large that it
doubled the size of his father’s armies and equalled the total of all those who
preceded him. Put differently, the book of Chronicles depicts troop numbers not
to convey reality but to convey meaning. There are many other numerical figures
in the book of Chronicles that do not seem realistic and which we cannot as of
yet explain in symbolic terms. However, the observation that Jehoshaphat’s
armies equaled the total of his predecessors surely cannot be coincidental. It
represents a literary use of numbers in a way that is not intuitive for us
today. (Ibid., 29-30)