“Then he made the tank of cast metal, 10 cubits across from brim to brim, completely round; it was 5 cubits high, and it measured 30 cubits in circumference”.
Cynics on this board and elsewhere have often cited this verse to claim that the Bible says pi is exactly equal to 3. The usual rejoinders are “who cares?”, “it’s not actually wrong, since it’s only giving one significant digit”, and “maybe the diameter is being measured between the inner edges of the brim, so the thickness of the tank walls accounts for the difference”.
But this is much cooler…the word translated as “measured” is KV, which has the basic meaning of “line”. When we read from the Bible, we say KV, because that makes sense in context. But the actual Biblical text contains a superfluous letter and reads KVH, which means “hope”. There are many commentaries on the wordplay there, but there’s also numberplay.
Every Hebrew letter has a numerical value, and therefore every word has a value which is the sum of its letters. The value of KV is 106, and that of KVH is 111.
To five decimal places, 111/106 = pi/3. Either it’s a really bizarre coincidence or some ancient mathematician knew exactly what he was doing adding that extra H.
Are you saying an omniscient god could not have predicted the use of a base-10 positional number system and the existence of the King James translation? HERESY!
It’s four decimal places (5 significant figures) I think, but also, why would it be pi divided by 3 - what is the significance of the division by 3? How does that fit?
It’s the parallelism I find neat. It’s like the verse is winking at us, saying that just like we know the verse means KV when it says KVH, we also know it means 3.1416 when it says 3. There’s no other obvious reason for the superfluous H to exist.
In the King James Version, a few lines later it says
For on the plates of the ledges thereof, and on the borders thereof, he graved cherubims, lions, and palm trees, according to the proportion of every one, and additions round about.
Now if you take each English word and convert to a number (A=1, B=2, etc and add them up), you’ll find that “cherubims” = 98 and “proportion” = 156, and 98/156 = pi/5. The KJV translators must have known what they were doing!
(Ok, it’s only to four places and a little more obviously cherry-picked than the OP.)
This seems like a good place to point out that in the Hebrew text of Exodus 8, it says “frog” instead of “frogs”, which prompted Talmudic scholars to debate whether or not Moses had God unleash one really big frog that wreaked havoc on Egypt’s crops, which in turn prompted a metaphorical argument about the Bar Kochba rebellion. Sometimes the Bible is just weird like that.
(This counts as my one post for this week. Hi, everybody!)
Just to be clear:
There’s no evidence that the ancients knew pi to more than 2-3 decimal places (equivalent). Presuming that Kings 7:23 was written in at least 500 BCE, the best known approximation was 25/8, or 3.125.
It took until Archimedes (circa 250 BCE) to reach another decimal place, proving that pi was between 3.140845 and 3.142857 (that is, between 223/71 and 22/7). You can see the history here:
The OP is claiming that pi was really known to 3.1415… and that this was hidden in the bible. But you can find just about whatever you want using gematria (converting Hebrew letters to numbers). You can search for your own favorite numbers here:
But if you really want to dive into crazy-town, you can check out pages like this, which detail all sorts of coincidences about pi, e, triangular numbers, hexagonal numbers, and so on:
It’s just all pure coincidence. Start with a gigantic list of numbers and you can find whatever you want. Especially if you are allowed to make arbitrary changes like multiplying by 3 or adding/removing letters, and so on.