When it comes to the Bible, Don’t Trust Number

One of my Math teachers used to say, “Numbers don’t lie.” I agree but with an exception. As much as numbers don’t lie, I believe liars use numbers. Numbers are so powerful that they can intimidate the most powerful of warriors. One of the best old-time war strategies was finding out “how many they are”. Numbering the enemy gives the other side greater advantage. In old days, warriors used to tie torches on their horses at night to trick the enemy into believing that there is more to the numbers.

As much as I may be interested in numbers, I am actually more interested in the truth and meaning behind numbers. For example if you tell me “one million people died in the Rwandan genocide” I may go, “huh! What a terrible loss and brutality!” But if you tell me the entire population of Portland was wiped out in the Rwandan genocide, the numbers start to make sense.

This brings me to one of those chapters in Genesis that most people find boring. And I don’t blame them. Genesis 5 is all about numbers: And Adam lived 13o years and he had children and Adam lived 800 years and he had Seth and Adam lived 930 years and Adam died and Seth lived 105 years and Seth had children and Seth lived another 807 years and Seth had more children and Seth lived another blab blab and blah blab… Can this get any more boring than that?

You wonder why someone would waste an entire four pages of the Holy Book to tell us how long all these people lived. I mean, who cares. And was the writer’s intention to really enumerate facts on how long each of these people lived or did he have a greater meaning in mind? What do you think?