Actually, they are straight out of your translation of the Torah.
But let me ask you a question: What would you guess Hur’s age was at the time of the Exodus?
(PS: I’ll be offline for a bit - spending the afternoon and evening with a granddaughter.)
Have you got different numbers to present to us?
Jayhawker Soule:
Is the translation of the numbers in Numbers considered open to question?
Couldn’t say precisely, but he was a grandfather of someone old enough to be a master craftsman.
Jayhawker Soule, I’m not a mod and you’re not breaking any rules, but you are new to the site and I feel like you’re approaching Greate Debates a bit funny.
I sense that you have topics that you want to discuss, but when the discussion doesn’t go as you envision, you just get frustrated by it and take to taking pot shots at what others are saying, regardless of whether your pot shot actually even makes any sense. (E.g., complaining that my summarization of my own words, written to Merneith, was “distorting your words”, or now finding fault with cmkeller’s version of the Torah as though he went out and found the one which was translated by Nefarious Cultists.)
GD isn’t going to go nice on you. If you don’t have your own argument to make and if you aren’t willing or able to find data to back your argument, there’s not really any value in hanging out just to complain that the thread isn’t going your way or that everyone else’s cites are stupid. Yeah, some cites are stupid and that’s worth pointing out on the occasion. But the reason to hang out in GD is to debate. So far, you aren’t debating.
And my point is, you should try. You seem fairly knowledgeable and there’s a lot of information available on the web.
Sage Rat:
You’d think so, but then again, the Bible itself tells the story of the Golden Calf, less than two months after the Israelites had all heard the voice of G-d. For reasons we, as 21st-century people, can’t really relate to, the appeal of idolatry was apparently very, very strong in the ancient world. Biblical Israel had its sinners as well as its saints, and temptation to sin (in various ways) is consistently an aspect of the human condition.
That is not my impression but, as you, I am new here.
I think you see what you want to see.
Here you are correct. I misinterpreted your post. My apologies.
I find fault with the translations because more than a few scholars find fault with the translation.
But, for the record, I do not believe that 600,000 military-capable men (plus older men, women, and children marched under the banner of YHWH through the Sea of Reeds.
What I do believe is that there was a Southern incursion into the Highlands that was formative, one evidenced by a number of things: the distribution of Biblical names, the Yahweh-centric theology, the use of circumcision as a cultural marker, settlement patterns, the shift in burial methods, etc. Friedman recognizes this.
I think Sage Rat said that with the best of intentions, Jayhawker, and I think you should take it to heart. As an old timer here, I’ve seen a number of new posters burn out because they come in too hot. I would add that you can’t be too controlling of drifting of the focus of a thread. Don’t invite people to start a new thread every time the subject drifts a little.
You seem an intelligent and knowledgeable guy. Just have fun. 
It has been argued by George Mendenhall and others that אֶלֶף ('elef) - typically and correctly translated as ‘thousand’ - originally meant something akin to clan, squad, or contingent. So, for example, the Jewish Study Bible renders Numbers 1:16 as:
“Those are the elected of the assembly, the chieftains of their ancestral tribes: they are the heads of the contingents of Israel.”
and I Sam 10:19 as:
“… Now station yourself before the Lord, by your tribes and clans.”
Or, perhaps, we are simply dealing with a case of gross exaggeration. 
Jayhawker Soule:
What are some of the alternate translations offered for the numbers I’m referring to? Really, that’s a totally new one on me, that there’s any dispute over the translation of Hebrew numbers.
Which is all fine and good to believe. The article you linked to in the OP specifically posits a theory that the Levites alone has a Bible-like Exodus experience and then hooked up with the rest of the tribes later, and, knowing only what’s revealed in the linked article, I don’t see much merit in this proposal. If the point is to make the Exodus seem more believable by down-scaling the degree of what there’s no physical evidence for (Levites alone rather than 600,000 warriors + families), that’s still something there’s no physical evidence for, so why is that so much better?
Jayhawker Soule:
Even if I were to accept that “elef” has this meaning in some contexts (although I know nothing of Mr. Mendenhall’s work nor what prompts him to revise the translation in the verses you mentioned), there’s no way that it means anything other than “thousand” in the censuses in the first four chapters of Numbers. Each of the four censuses listed contain both individual tribe/clan numbers and then total numbers, and the spare hundreds add up to the proper amount of thousands that you’d expect in decimal mathematics.
Thanks for the feedback.
I agree, and there is no doubt but that 'elef commonly means “thousand.” The problem is that Biblical Hebrew is both terse and difficult, and words can have different meanings depending context and period.
Although this is a bit off-topic - my fault entirely - let me quote a rather long piece from the Plaut Commentary:
And, yes, it remains a theory.
Presuming that the account in the Bible is true, then that would be a reasonable position to hold. However, I think it’s fairly clear that we cannot trust the veracity of the story. It’s fairly clear that all or the majority of the details were made up.
- The Egyptians make no report of any such occurence.
- Even if we presume that the Egyptians wouldn’t report a great loss like that, one would expect that after having viewed such a miracle, a number of Egyptians would have sought to join the Jews. Neither the Bible nor any Egyptian text points to an exodus of Egyptians.
- There’s no evidence of the people crossing the Sinai.
- Even if we presume that the wandering slaves wouldn’t have left any evidence of their journey, we have to note that the Exodus is not the only story in the before the kingdoms started to form and both Moses and the Jews have a legacy after the Exodus. The conquest of Canaan, for example, we would expect to see in the archaeological record. Nor do we see the conquest of the Midianites, that Moses supposedly oversaw.
- The place names and peoples referenced in the Bible, don’t match the historical record. There are many anachronistic references like Chaldea and Gerar. Many of the places conquered during the Conquest of Canaan, for example, simply didn’t exist at the time. And all of these anachronistic names would only make sense to a 600-500 BC writer, who had no actual document record to base his account on.
- And despite the works clearly being written in the 600-500 BC period, we have examples like High Priest Hilkiah claiming to have “found” the lost ancient works. So, pretty clearly, the priesthood and monarchy weren’t above passing off the works as genuine, even though we know they aren’t. That rather discredits any pretense of an honest approach to the collection and writing of the original text.
Basically, we can be pretty certain that everything before the foundation of the kingdoms is fiction. It might be fiction based on legend, which itself may be based on history, but it’s reasonable to assume that 99% of it is made up. Not just small details, but even the big details are probably untrue.
Further, as to the explicit claim that ancient people are just so immensely drawn to idolatry, as has been pointed out, Asherah appears to be tossed out the window pretty rapidly in 600 BC. The archaeological evidence would seem to be that once they decided to go monotheistic, it was a fairly quick process.
And we must ask ourselves, knowing that the Exodus was principally or completely fiction, why the work needs to contain references to The Golden Calf and other examples of people practicing idolatry and then being struck down by god for it?
Given everything else we know, it seems far more reasonable to assume that this was included to scare people out of polytheism, rather than because it was historic truth. Which, as pointed out, seems to have been successful. The people quickly dropped idolatry from their menu.
It also helps them to explain the historic record that they had of the kings, in which some did practice polytheism. It’s rather hard to deny the presence of a shrine to Ba’al in the middle of town, with a big inscription on top of it, saying “Built by King Manasseh.” You have to explain that away somehow. Which is why you see the big Jewish figures before the kings seeming to be perfectly accepting of and enthralled entirely by the one God. But once you get into the time where the writers actually had a historic record to deal with, the leaders of the Jews start to become a little more iffy about monotheism.
And so you see the writers including occassional mention of polytheism, through centuries of history, and each time point out how it made God angry and of course punished those rulers or those Jews.
ADDENDUM TO PREVIOUS
I also feel it’s worth mentioning the case of South America back in the Age of Exploration, where we see a group of people with an ingrained religion, coming into contact with a group of people that use miraculous means to dominate them and claim the power of a particularly mighty god behind them.
There has been no meaningful struggle among the people of South America with coming to grips with Christianity. On the whole, they seemed to have flipped over to it in a pretty brisk scheduled and never looked back.
Were the account in the Bible truthful, I see no reason to not expect a similar result.
Without getting involved in the general discussion, I would be curious to see any place in any language where a generic term for “many” morphed into a specific quantity. I doubt that it ever happens. We have many examples of numbers being employed as general terms for “lots of”–we use “hundreds,” “thousands,”" millions," etc. in that way all the time–and we can find similar usages in other languages. We even go after other languages to steal their numeric words, (e.g., myriad). Until such time as gajillion gets applied to a specific number of trailing zeroes, I find the hypothesis proposed in the quoted text to be unlikely in the extreme.
tomndebb: isn’t it a consensus among scholars that “forty” is a Biblical/Hebrew shortcut for “many?” I’ve heard that said in a number (forty!) of places. The forty years in the wilderness, the forty days of the flood, Jesus’ forty days, etc.; they aren’t “40” exactly, but “a buncha.”
OK.
I guess on at least some level your findings are roughly as good as your credentials. To what extent have you studied Semitic languages?
That, however, is moving in the opposite direction of the hypothesis proposed by the author in the Plaut Commentary.
“Forty” standing for"many" is akin to “hundreds” or “thousands” standing for “many.” I have never heard anyone suggest that there was a (Hebrew equivalent) word “forty” with no numeric value that picked up the meaning of four tens. (There may be other (numerological) reasons for the initial use of forty. The four corners of the Earth expanded by the standard of base 10, for example. Then, once forty was used for a big event, it became the catch word for any other period in which the author wanted to invoke a symbolic relationship: Forty days of rain (punishment for sin) becomes forty years in desert (as punishment for sin–see Numbers 32) becomes forty days in desert fasting to oppose sin. There are lots of hypotheses, but the Plaut guess that a generic word would acquire a specific numeric value runs counter to any example that I have ever encountered.)
My credentials are irrelevant to this point. You are welcome to follow Plaut, but it makes little sense. Does Plaut provide any evidence of elef being used as a generic word for “many” that explicitly precedes its use as a number? Does Plaut provide a citation to any word (other than elef) moving in meaning from a generalized “many” to an explicit number? That assertion should be backed by evidence and, lacking such evidence, the assertion is a weak one that appears to be an ad hoc invention to support an unsustainable claim.
Do we have any actual physical archaeological evidence that such a journey occurred? At tent pole, some pottery, a bridal or a saddle… anything to show that 100,000/1 million/whatever HUGE amount of people spent — 40 years — moving through the desert?
I mean… we do have archaeological evidence of other tribal/nomadic peoples lived in deserts, right? Coming from much much smaller groups…