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Steve Wells, over at Dwindling in Unbelief, wants to know something: How many has God killed? Alas, there are problems with working out just how many: what was the population of the earth at the time of the Flood? How many people lived in Sodom and Gomorrah? First-born Egyptians? None of this is specified, but there are plenty of occasions in the Bible where God kills people and a number is given. His total? 2,270,365, not including rather a lot of women and children.
But we can at least make a reasonable guess as to the real number of people killed by God in the Bible.
Let's pretend, for a moment, that Biblical chronologies are correct. The Flood would have happened in 2346 BCE, or 4352 years ago. There are loads of graphs showing population over time, and most of those that go back that far show a population of around 20 million and only eight people survived, so we can add 19,999,992 to the total.
If we were being really mendacious, we could note that least one fundie puts the world population at nine (US) billion at the time of the flood!
So, what about the Exodus? That's widely believed to be set at the early part of the New Kingdom, which was a time of great population pressure and the population was estimated at about 3 million. There appears to be no consensus as to what proportion of that population were first-born and not Israelite, so I'm going to guess that God slaughtered 500,000 people that night.
Sodom and Gomorrah present another problem as the cities appear to be completely mythological, but we're not going to let that stop us when we're dealing with a purely mythological murderer. Alas, this means we have to delve into the murky world of Biblicval archæology, which is about as respectable as Von Däniken. There have been many suggestions for the location of the damned cities, so let's pick one. In particular, the "Mirror Cities" a group of cities first discovered in the 1970s are a popular choice for fundies. What interests them in particular is the large number of graves associated with them - about 1.5 million of them. As Nate Wilson points out:
These shaft tombs have many people buried in each chamber, bones mixed together (Shank), and were made before the towns were built--in fact, some of the tombs date many hundreds of years older than the end date of the cities (Sanders I & II). This could indicate a mass burial followed by inhabitation by survivors.
Please ignore that the quote doesn't actually make sense, or ask how a handful of survivors could bury so many people. What's important is that we have a figure. Obviously it's far too high and would give the destroyed cities three times the population of Edinburgh, so I'm going to divide by 10 and assume most of the bodies are the survivors and their descendents.
So, what the total now? 22,920,357, give or take nine billion or so.
Posted in
Love Thy Neighbour
at 21:47. Last modified on May 31 2007 at 10:06.
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