Yahweh's Quails

Farrell Till errancy@infidels.org
Thu, 20 May 1999 10:57:24 -0700 (00927241044, 2.2.32.19990520175724.008e285c@midwest.net)

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TILL
In their wilderness wanderings, the "chosen ones" bellyached about every
little hardship. When they tired of the manna from heaven that Yahweh so
generously provided them, they complained again: "If only we had meat to
eat! We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the
cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our
strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at"
(Num. 11:5).  If the people wanted meat to eat, why they didn't slaughter
some of their enormous flocks and herds from which they obtained their
constant supply of animals to incinerate on Yahweh's altar is anyone's
guess, but people in biblical times didn't seem to react to situations in
logical, sensible ways. The "chosen ones" wanted meat, and so they
complained to their god Yahweh, who was so angry at them for their latest
rebellion that he promised to send them so much meat that it would come out
their nostrils: 
 


>16 So Yahweh said to Moses, "Gather for me seventy of the elders of


Israel, whom you know to be the elders of the people and officers over them;
bring them to the tent of meeting, and have them take their place there with
you.


>17 I will come down and talk with you there; and I will take some of the


spirit that is on you and put it on them; and they shall bear the burden of
the people along with you so that you will not bear it all by yourself.


>18 And say to the people: Consecrate yourselves for tomorrow, and you


shall eat meat; for you have wailed in the hearing of Yahweh, saying, 'If
only we had meat to eat! Surely it was better for us in Egypt.' Therefore
Yahweh will give you meat, and you shall eat.


>19 You shall eat not only one day, or two days, or five days, or ten days,


or twenty days,


>20 but for a whole month--until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes


loathsome to you--because you have rejected Yahweh who is among you, and
have wailed before him, saying, 'Why did we ever leave Egypt?'"


>


Yahweh's statement confused even Moses, because he too reacted logically and
assumed that Yahweh meant for meat to be obtained from the flocks and herds:
"And Moses said, 'The people whom I am among are six hundred thousand men on
foot; yet you have said, "I will give them meat, that they may eat for a
whole month."' Shall flocks and herds be slaughtered for them, to provide
enough for them?" (vs:21-22).
 
Yahweh never did things the sensible way, so according to this fanciful
story, the promise was fulfilled not with meat from the Israelites' flocks
and herds but with quails that a wind blew to the Israelite encampment: 
 
 "And there went forth a wind from Yahweh and brought quails FROM THE
SEA, and let them fall by the camp, about A DAY'S JOURNEY on this side and A
DAY'S JOURNEY on the other side, ROUND ABOUT THE CAMP, and about TWO CUBITS
above the face of the earth" (vs:31-32).
 
Biblicists read this passage and never stop to think about what would have
been involved if this event had actually happened. In the first place, how
could a wind "from the sea" blow quails to the encampment? Quails are not
aquatic birds. The story would have been more believable if the birds had
been ducks or gulls. Second, there is the matter of how many quails would
have been in the area that the Bible claims was covered to a depth of 2
cubits. A cubit was about 18 inches, so a depth of two cubits would have
equaled a yard. *Eerdmans Bible Dictionary* states that a day's journey was
a distance of 20-25 miles and quotes Josephus as a reference to support this
figure (1987, p. 267). To give as much benefit of the doubt as possible to
the biblical story, I will use the lower estimate of 20 miles in my
calculations to show how absurd it is to believe that this event ever happened.
 
Now let's notice that the text quoted above stated that the quails fell to a
depth of two cubits (about one yard) for a day's journey (about 20 miles) on
this side and the other, ROUND ABOUT THE CAMP. Have biblicists never
bothered to calculate how many quails would be in a three-foot layer that
covered a 20-mile diameter? If this were a circle of quails for a distance
of 20 miles on all sides of the camp, then an area of about 1250 square
miles was covered with quails to a depth of about 3 feet. Do biblicists
have any idea how many billions of quails this would have been? There are
46,656 cubic inches in a cubic yard. A quail is not a large bird, so if one
quail occupied an area 5 inches by 5 inches by 5 inches or 125 cubic inches
(which could easily contain any quail I have ever seen), there would have
been 373 quails in each cubic yard of the area covered as the Bible claims.
 
A cube that is a mile square and 3 feet deep would contain 3,097,600 cubic
yards, so if one cubic yard could contain 373 quails, every square mile of
the area covered with quails would have contained 1,155,404,800 quails. And
there were 1250 square miles covered with three feet of quails! We're
talking about over 1.1 trillion quails. That would have averaged out to more
than 385,000 quails for every man, woman, child, and infant in the Israelite
horde, and for the 3 million Israelites to have consumed that many quails in
a month, each person would have had to eat 12,833 quails per day. No wonder
Yahweh said that the Israelites would have meat coming out of their nostrils.
 
This is what the biblical text says about the actual gathering of the
quails: "And the people rose up all that day and all the night, and all the
next day, and gathered the quails" (v:32). To have gathered all of them,
each of the 3 million Israelites, working the entire 36 hours implied in
"all that day and all the night and all the next day," would have had to
gather 10,698 quails per hour, which would have been 178 quails per minute
that they would have had to gather, with no time off for rest. The average
would, of course, have been even higher than this, because infants and young
children would not have been able to gather quails.
 
The biblical text states that "he that gathered least gathered ten homers"
(v:32). A homer was a unit of dry measurement equal to 10 ephahs, and an
ephah was thought to be a capacity equal to about 5.8 gallons, although
Josephus gave it a value of about 9.25 gallons. To give biblicists the
benefit of doubt, we will take the higher estimation of 9.25 gallons, which
would mean that those in the Israelite horde who gathered the least number
of quails still had about 90 gallons of quails. Even that would be a lot of
quails for a person to eat in a month. Since 90 gallons of quails would
come nowhere close to the 385,000 average for each person, we must conclude
that the slacking off of some Israelites put an added burden on others, and
so some would have had to gather many more than 178 per minute during the
36-hour stretch. Besides this, the quails would have had to be cleaned and
preserved in some way; otherwise, the stench of decaying flesh would have
been unbearable. Even before the 36-hour gathering period was over, in a
desert climate the flesh of the quails would have already begun to decay and
smell, and surely a god who was so particular about disposal of human waste
(as we noted in an earlier posting) would not have tolerated rotting flesh
around the camp of his chosen ones. Deuteronomy 23:14 stated that the reason
for the commandment that every person take a trowel to the "designated area"
to use in burying their excrement was to prevent Yahweh, "who walked in the
midst of [the] camp," from being so offended by any unclean thing that he
would "turn away from you [the Israelites]," so surely a deity this
sensitive would not have tolerated rotting quail flesh all around the camp.
After all, this is the same deity who (as we will see in later postings)
commanded priests to carry the offal and dung of animal sacrifices "outside
the camp" to be burned (Lev. 4:12; 16:27; 21:9, 11; Heb. 13:11). Surely, he
would have demanded no less of a clean-up of the quails, so let's hope that
no inerrantists try to weasel out of the problem this story poses by arguing
that most of the quails were just left on the ground to rot. 
 
There are no discrepancies in the Bible? Well, if obvious exaggeration is
not a discrepancy, what is it?
 
 
Farrell Till
Skepticism, Inc.
jftill@midwest.net