Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Joshua Berman on Unrealistic Battle Numbers in the Book of Chronicles


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)