However, the counts given for each tribe in Numbers 1-2 cannot be interpretted in this fashion. They are given in units of "thousands", "hundreds" and "tens" and in addition the total is given. No interprettation of eleph except "thousand" makes sense in that case, so the difficulty remains.
- True, but the Hebrew Bible doesn't always use the same word in the same way, as it was redacted together from a number of different sources. So the previous reading does remain a possibility. RK 01:04, 13 Sep 2003 (UTC)
- What I'm saying is that whoever wrote the tables of count in Numbers 1-2 obviously meant "thousands", so the large total of 603,550 remains a problem for those who can't accept that the Bible account might be wrong. Of course it remains possible that the author of Exodus meant "clans" rather than "thousands", but that would just create a contradiction between Exodus and Numbers which is even more of a problem for the literalist. I didn't try to write this opinion in the article, but it seems to me that the close similarity between the total in Exodus and the total in Numbers makes it most unlikely that anything except "thousands" is meant in Exodus either. --zero 01:49, 13 Sep 2003 (UTC)