Now, the Talmud apparently gets its measurement prettywrong.
But what I want to know is this: Were there any other people in ancient cultures (Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian) who measured a larger amount of stars than a couple thousand? Any which measured ten thousand, hundreds of thousands, millions, billions?
I don’t think the concept of “a million” existed prior to the bible being written. Roman numerals, for example, didn’t go over a thousand. Two or three thousand would have been the same as infinite to ancient peoples.
I don’t believe eany of those three statement is true. You can’t seriously think that the Egyptians built the pyramids without any concept of a number > 3,000.
The promise to Abraham is that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky. If that is taken as the number of stars in the universe, that’s somewhere between 10[sup]22[/sup] and 10[sup]24[/sup].
Given that the total number of people who have ever lived on Earth is only a few billion, the Bible is off by nine orders of magnitude as of now. It’s going to be a very long time indeed before the promise is fulfilled.
I have seen mentions of Egyptian “million” numeric symbol. And regardless of that, they would certainly have needed to handle such quantities e.g. for figuring out how many taxable hectares (or similar) of land there is in the country, or how much grain it produces and so forth. And you don’t even necessarily need “million” as such for this, you could count in 100,000 as in India or 10,000 as in China.
The “stars in heaven” bit sounds first and foremost as an analogy for “uncountable”. It requires some technological sophistication and systematic effort to get an accurate count of visible stars. So for people who had better things to do the number of stars would be “a whole lot”, “uncountable”. The same applies to “sand in the sea” analogy even though there are obviously more sand particles out there than the population of all descendants of Abraham over the last several thousand years.
I think this point might have been more obvious in the days before light pollution. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing the sky in one of the few remaining truly dark parts of the world, it’s pretty hard to wrap your head around just how many stars you can see. It’s sometimes strange to think that for most of human history, that was the view everyone got every clear night.
Especially when the moon is new. I’ve been camping the Sierra during a new moon and was astounded by how much you can see by starlight alone. With a full moon it’s “almost” daylight.
When I moved up here I wondered what the heck that whitish thing that went across the sky was for a few nights before I realized it, and felt like a moron. I also had no idea that moonlight really was that bright outside of TV or movies. When there’s snow on the ground and a full moon, it’s startlingly bright.
Light pollution, as unavoidable as it is these days, sucks.
Romans regularly field very organised very organised armies of many times 3000. They collected taxes from many more than 3000. They held censuses of their empire. They most certainly had a concept of large numbers.
This link takes you to a beautiful photo of the night sky taken about 100 km away from a city. (That city is a big one, though - Tehran, which is the bright bit in the corner of the photo.) No telescope is involved, this is just a photo taken with a decently long exposure in a dark place by a skilled photographer. In the time of Abraham, there would have been no bright bit in the corner, no brightly lit cities, and everywhere would have been this dark sometimes. Remember that this is only a small part of the sky; in a flat area, this would have been the view for 360 degrees around you. Does that look like only a couple thousand stars in the whole night sky to you? Or like an uncountable number that might as well be infinity?
Archimedes had names for numbers up to 10 to the (10 to the 64th power) power, and he lived in third century B.C. Sicily (then a Greek colony), as is discussed in the Wikipedia article that I linked to. As I mentioned, the Indians at least by the sixth century B.C. had names for numbers up to 10 to the 421st power. By the second century A.D., the Chinese (and apparently the Indians) had numbers up to 10 to the (7 times (2 to the 122th power)) power. No, these terms weren’t known to most people at the time, but there were intellectuals who thought about them.
The claim in Genesis that there were more stars in the sky than grains of sand was meant poetically, not as a precise count. The people at the time of the writing of Genesis weren’t stupid. Quit trying to take the Bible as if it were a scientific treatise.
I am interested in this - what are you asking of this question? As in, are you asking is it correct? Is it right to do? Why does it happen?
I forget who said it, but someone has said this, so I will restate it as I remember it. A religion, or any organization, idea and that stuff, depends on its followers for survival. The most effective way to attract followers and keep them? Power. Inherent power is always a plus, too. What is a great way to obtain power? Reference your lineage/knowledge to something extremely ancient and esoteric.
So astronomy is something that has been around pretty much from the start of civilization. That a Christian/Jewish (I am just following the examples) websites use a references of, i think, the salt covenant(?) as a suggestion that they were aware of the number of stars far before it was certain that man was aware of the number of stars is a technique to demonstrate their esoteric knowledge that is far more superior as 1)they knew it first, and 2) it came from God. It gives them rank, and it attracts the reader who can be a potential follower.
As for the star count, you may want to check out this Chinese dude, Gan De (or Lord Gan) from the 4th-ish Century BCE. I am not sure if he tried to reach a star count or was concentrated mainly on observing planets, but it is worth a shot.
It’s actually a pretty obvious and mundane comparison anyway. Anyone who’s seen a moonless sky in truly dark conditions (and in pre-industrial times, that was everyone) could easily make the comparison between stars in the sky and grains of sand in a hand. It’s very obvious that there are more than a couple of thousand stars visible.
