Judaism and Science

Credit: Roger Price

The Hebrew Bible is filled with numbers. There are different kinds of numbers — cardinals and ordinals, integers and fractions, even primes. And they are everywhere in the Torah text.

There are numbers for days. (See, e.g., Gen. 1:5, 8, 13.)

There are numbers for life spans. (See, e.g., Gen. 5:5, 8, 11.)

There are numbers for populations, i.e., census numbers.  (See, e.g., Ex. 1:5, 12:37; Num. 1:46, 2:32.)

There are numbers for the measurement of quantities. (See, e.g., Ex. 16:22, 36, 29:40.)

And for sizes. (See, e.g., Gen. 6:15.)

There are numbers for the duration of events. (See, e.g., Ex. 12:40, 24:18.)

There are numbers for a host of seemingly mundane things, such as the number of visitors and the number of palm trees. (See, e.g., Gen. 18:2; Ex. 15:27.) read more