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FUN STUFF
Former Adventist Fellowship Forum: ARCHIVED DISCUSSIONS 1: FUN STUFF
Posted by BRUCE H on Saturday, April 22, 2000 - 8:06 am:
When I grew up in Adventist Church I was often
told that the Bible had errors and discrepancies
in it and that was because erring mortals had
written the Bible and man makes mistakes. I have
done a lot of study on a lot of these points of
contention in the Bible and I find the Bible
without fault and no errors. Here is an
interesting example.
1 Kings 7:23
23 And he made the Sea of cast bronze, ten cubits
from one brim to the other; it was completely
round. Its height was five cubits, and a line of
thirty cubits measured its circumference.
This passage deals with Solomon's Temple and the
products of Hiram the Bronze worker. The hugh
cast bronze basin in 1 Kings 7:23 was 10 cubits in
diameter and its circumference was 30 cubits,
which is mathematically inaccurate. Almost any
schoolboy knows that the circumference of a circle
is not the diameter times 3, but rather, the
diameter times a well-known constant called
("pi").
The real value of ("pi") is 3.14159265358979 but
is commonly approximated by 22/7.
This is assumed, by many to be an error in the Old
Testament record, and is often presented as a
skeptical rebuttal to the inerrancy of the
Scripture. How can we say that the bible is
innerrant when it contains such an obvious
geometrically incorrect statement? How do we deal
with this?
Well if you do your research and ask the Holy
Spirit for Help he will guide you into all truth 1
John 2:27. I came upon the answer at this website
http://www.khouse.org, they stated that they found
the answer the same way.
The common word (Hebrew) for circumference (KJV =
round about) is qav (6957-strongs). Here,

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however, the spelling of the word for

circumference, qaveh, adds a heh (The same letter
added to Abram to make it Abraham).
(In the text above, each word also has a leading
vawv as a conjunction for the masculine singular
noun.)
In the Hebrew Bible, the scribes did not alter any
text which they felt had been copied incorrectly.
Rather, they noted in the margin what they thought
the written text should be. The written variation
is called a ketiv, here as qaveh or quv with a heh
added (Sorry I cannot use the Hebrew it will not
work on this web site), and the marginal
annotation is called the qere.
To the ancient scribes, this was also regarded as
a remez, a hint of something deeper. This appears
to be the clue to treat the word as a mathematical
formula.
The Hebrew alphabet is alphanumeric: each Hebrew
letter also has a numerical value and can be used
as a number. The Hebrew letter (qowph) has a
value of 100; the other Hebrew letter is the
(vawv) and it has a value of 6 (both these letters
make up the Hebrew word for circumference), thus,
the normal spelling would yield a numerical value
of 106. The addition of the (heh), with a value
of 5, increases the numerical value to 111. This
indicates an adjustment of the ratio 111/106, or
31.41509433962 (30 cubits times the ratio
{111/106} 1.0471698) cubits. Assuming that a
cubit was 1.5 ft., this 15-foot-wide bowl would
have had a circumference of 47.12388980385 feet.
This Hebrew "code" results in 47.1226415093 feet,
or an error of less than 15 thousands of an inch!
(This error is 15 times better than the 22/ 7 or
3.14 estimate that we were accustomed to using in
school!) How did they accomplish this? This
accuracy would seem to vastly exceed the precision
of their instrumentation. How would they know
this? How was it encoded into the text?
Beyond simple these engineering insights of
Solomon's day, there are more far-reaching
implications of this passage. The Bible is
reliable. The "errors" pointed out by skeptics
usually derive from misunderstandings or trivial
quibbles.
You can see this in your interlinear Bible.

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Bruce Heinrich
BH
BH

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