Continuing with contradictions throughout the Old Testament, you’ll see some that lean toward the scientific, such as the “cure for leprosy” and how the kidneys are the seat of our consciences, but there wasn’t enough to include in a group large enough for a post all its own. As usual, Q is the quote from the guy (whom I’ve named in this article) and M is my reply.
Q: Exod 17:14 God says that he will utterly blot out the remembrances of Amalek. (That remembrance is now permanently preserved in the Bible.)
M: The original is “I will erase/cancel the memorial/name/remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.” John Gill refers to a Latin scholar of Hebrew that this phrase means more of “pushing them in a corner and cutting them off.” This seems to agree with the Brown-Diver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon where they have “of persons or people, blotted out by their destruction.” So this seems to be a simple Hebrew idiom used back in the day. It is found several times in the Old Testament.
I’m thinking one can almost take it literally because there are no “remembrances or memorials” of the Amalekites, even Egyptian and Assyrian records don’t record them. The memory of them has been “blotted out” to such a great extent that modern scholars argue they never even existed.
Q: Lev 14:49-53 The cure for leprosy involves incantations and the blood of a bird.
M: This is not about the “cure for leprosy” but about “purifying a house” after mildew has been removed. This ceremony is more of an offering. If Guy had used verse 54 where it says “This is the law for leprous diseases and itch,” I might have seen what he was saying, although the verse was actually referring back to all it had just covered. Or if Guy had simply used the first part of the chapter where it was about someone who had had a skin disease, but even here it was about after they had been healed. Therefore, I’m not sure where Guy understood this was about healing leprosy.
Just a quick word about these admittedly odd techniques of cleansing houses and persons. I believe this was, to put it simply, for the psychological health of the Israelites – a way to smoothly transition their minds back to a monotheistic (one God) way of thinking from a polytheistic (many gods) way. They had spent many generations living with the Egyptians and their multiple gods and multitude of sacrifices, potions, and rituals for getting rid of their own bugaboos. Most likely, they had adapted some of those as part of their daily lives, not to mention their parents’ and their grandparents’.
Though Moses had many trials with the Israelites throughout their journey to the Promised Land, I feel it would have failed altogether if the people weren’t given an innocuous outlet for their ingrained superstitions. Once Jesus died on the cross, these were to be stopped and no longer practiced.
Q:1 Kings 6:2, 2 Chron 3:3 Solomon's temple was only about ninety feet long by thirty feet wide, and yet —
1 Kings 5:15-16 153,300 persons were employed to build it.
1 Kings 6:38 It took seven years to build.
1 Chron 22:14 13,100,000 lbs. of gold and 116,400,000 lbs. of silver were consumed in its construction.
1 Chron 23:4 24,000 supervisors and 6,000 officials and judges were employed to manage it.
M: Here’s a link to a short video of Solomon's Temple 3D. However, the cherubim are wrong. They are not Assyrian lamassu, which are a hybrid of a winged lion and man, as depicted here. Otherwise it’s a fairly accurate rendering.
Can you imagine the details in this place? The size of the rocks? The tiniest of details inscribed in the gold and the other materials? I bet it was the most awe-inspiring place on earth. That being said, the 90x30 was the main Temple, not the entire court area where there were halls, side rooms (of 3 floors), and porticos. I imagine some of the materials he gathered were for the palace too (at least in regards to the number of employees and gathering supplies).
I’m not sure where Guy got his conversion for talents to pounds, but I was informed from ChatGPT that a talent weighed up to 66 pounds (Babylonian weight). Wikipedia has Egyptian talents at 60 pounds, meaning the amount of gold Solomon used was 6.0 to 6.6 million pounds of gold, silver was 60 to 66 million pounds. Both are still staggering amounts.
Be that as it may, this total was simply what David had collected for Solomon, not all of it was used for the Temple. In 1 Kings 7:51 it says Solomon placed all the gold and silver from his father, David, in the treasuries of the Temple, clearly showing it wasn’t all used in the building of the Temple.
Now for the number of supervisors, officials, and judges. The Israelites had a leader, or shall we say here – supervisor, for every ten people, then every fifty, then every hundred, and then every thousand (as per Moses). If you include the 30,000 getting the cedars from Lebanon in the total number of workers, then that would total 24,012 supervisors. Pretty spot on. That should help qualify the rest as being quite accurate.
Q :Esther 6:6, Job 19:27, Psalms 7:9, 16:7, 73:21, Prov 23:7, 16, Isaiah 10:7, Jere 11:20, 17:10, 20:12, Matt 9:4, Luke 2:19, 9:47, Acts 8:22, Rom 10:9-10, Heb 4:12, Rev 2:23 (See KJV especially.) Thought occurs in the heart. The kidneys ("reins") are the seat of conscience.(Note: This is not merely a poetic use of these terms, as is now claimed. In early times, it was actually believed that various body organs other than the brain were responsible for our thoughts, feelings, actions and the like. The heart was believed to be the seat of thought processes and beliefs, while the kidneys were thought to be the seat of conscience.)
M: I tell you what, I love my kids with ALL my heart! And I bet you love your spouse with all your heart too. Yes, perhaps the ancient Hebrews did believe that the heart was the seat of mind, but we believe it's in the brain. What if 300 years from now we discover that the mind isn't actually in the brain, but our thoughts actually come from – oh, I don’t know – let's say an ethereal component that seems to interact with the brain instead? Something we might dub a “soul.” Science is ever evolving and we don't know what we don't know. Evenso, there is no reason to believe that there was a flaw in the Bible here, just a knowledge that God wanted us to discover on our own.
However…
The word used for “heart” was also used for the “Inner man”, so it can not be taken quite as literal as Guy here would like to take it. The same word was used for the inner depths of the sea in Exodus15:8, and I don’t think you can accuse the Hebrews of believing the sea had an actual heart.
Let’s look at some of the functions of the kidneys, just for fun:
Clearing the toxins out of our system which causes damage to brain cells and cognitive function;
Regulating blood pressure. High blood pressure impairs cognitive function, causing mood swings, confusion, difficulty concentrating and memory problems, directly affecting stress, anxiety, and irritability;
Hormone distribution, including Vitamin D, that affects brain function and mood;
Associated with inflammation and oxidative stress which damage brain cells and cause cognitive decline, and;
Regulates the body’s acid/base balance which affects brain function, including confusion and lethargy.
Seems the Hebrew had a little bit of knowledge of the impact of the kidneys in our lives. Still, there seems to have been, and always will be, a debate on whether the ancient texts should be read as if they meant them literally or metaphorically. As I have pointed out before, they have used the “heart of the sea” and “light of the eyes” metaphorically, so there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t use the deepest part of an animal, the kidney, as metaphorical either.
But hey, even the United States government is committing to using the Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (ITEK) to “contribute to the scientific, technical, social, and economic advancements of the United States and our collective understanding of the natural world.” ITEK is a fancy way of saying the Native Americans’ traditional beliefs and observations throughout the millennia as “applied to phenomena across biological, physical, cultural and spiritual systems.”
So, if we are to use Native American beliefs in our own Federal science and spiritual reasonings, this should include the Hebrew Bible and all other early civilizations, as well as the first century Christian “phenomena”, right?
Q: Prov 20:30 Blows and wounds cleanse away evil.
M: Solomon is stating something we all know – there are some people who won’t straighten up their lives until they are hit hard enough to hurt. This is a psychological assessment, not a literal cleansing or washing away of evil. If Guy had bothered to look at the second part of the verse, this would’ve been obvious because you can’t literally use a whip on the inner depths of the heart.
Q:Where did ALL those cattle & horses come from over and over?
Exod 9:3-6 God destroys all the cattle (including horses) belonging to the Egyptians.
Exod 9:9-11 The people and the cattle are afflicted with boils.
Exod 12:12, 29 All the first-born of the cattle of the Egyptians are destroyed.
Exod 14:9 After having all their cattle destroyed, then afflicted with boils, and then their first-born cattle destroyed, the Egyptians pursue Moses on horseback.
M: Exodus 9:3-6 says only the miqneh, or livestock, of the Egyptians are destroyed. In Ex 9:9-11, it uses behemah, beasts (all animals: cats, dogs, birds, etc). There were 5 plagues from the cattle devastation to the firstborn being destroyed in Exodus 12. We don’t know how much time there was between plagues. There was likely plenty of time for the Egyptians to hurriedly acquire cattle from the Israelites and other neighboring countries. (In Exodus 12 it was behemah.)
The Egyptians must have had time to replenish some of their horses. By chariot time, Pharaoh only had 600 in his calvary. Israel, being small in relation to Egypt, Solomon had 4,000 chariots and up to 40,000 horses at one time. It is estimated that Ramses II had no less than 2,000 chariots for the Battle of Kadesh. This shows me that Moses’ pharaoh must have suffered quite the loss prior to this final chase.
Q: Did Solomon have 40,000 or 4,000 stalls for horses?
1 Kings 4:26 And Solomon had 40,000 stalls of horses for his chariots, and 12,000 horsemen.
2 Chron 9:25 And Solomon had 4,000 stalls for horses and chariots, and 12,000 horsemen; whom he bestowed in the chariot cities, and with the king at Jerusalem.
M: This might be one of those scribal errors that occur in the Bible (see the next contradiction). But I’m not convinced as much now. I had been about 50/50 with my thinking until I had this long, detailed, twisted, and inside-out conversation with ChatGPT on the correct interpretations of the two passages. No matter how I twisted it, the meaning of the interpretations seemed to come out the same. So we’ll leave the discussion for scribal errors to the next section.
In Kings it says 40,000 “horses’ stalls for the chariots” or “stalls for the horses of the chariots” or “stalls for the chariots’ horses.” In other words, the 40,000 stalls were for horses. Stalls, not necessarily horses. In Chronicles it says 4,000 “stalls for horses and chariots” or the “horses’ and chariots’ stalls.” It was counting only the chariots’ stalls this time, I believe making each chariot and horse (or pair of horses) as a single unit.
It seems to be that Solomon had available 40,000 stalls for his horses, but in actuality had only 4,000 chariots. That would show that Kings was focusing on the building (or maybe horses), with Chronicles focusing on the equipment.
Q: How old [was] Ahaziah when he started his reign?
2 Kings 8:26 Two and twenty years old was Ahaziah when he began to reign.
2 Chron 22:2 Forty and two years old was Ahaziah when he began to reign.
He succeeded his father, who died at the age of forty. Thus, if Ahaziah was 42, Ahaziah was two years older than his father.
M: This is a true translation error. Ahaziah was 22 when he started his reign as is supported by the earliest versions of Chronicles in the oldest Syriac, Arabic and Septuagint, which agree with Kings. This would seem to show the original Hebrew had 22 in Chronicles.
This is one of those rare scribal errors that occurs in the Bible. In “Divine Original of the Scripture”, (1659, p14), Dr. John Owen states, “God has suffered this lesser variety to fall out, in or among the copies we have, for the quickening and exercising of our diligence in our search of his word.”
What I haven’t found is that any of the scribal errors ever change anything of importance in God’s message to us. In this instance, it was a “crossed eye” problem – you know how your eyes can get crossed when reading after a long period of time.
That’s it for this time. I’ll be continuing the Old Testament with the next article. Please feel free to leave any comments or questions.
©2024 Kelly L. Hartley
Kelly L. Hartley, a new author, writes Bible studies, devotions, fiction, and poems. She focuses on Bible contradictions for her “Spare Time Musings” on Substack. She’s a member of Ozark Chapter of American Christian Writers and Springfield Writer’s Guild. Social media: Substack, 𝕏, Facebook, Instagram.