112 
Jordan only 601,730. Instead of five sons, each man would 
seem to liave had, on an average, a fraction less than one. 
16. The words translated six hundred thousand might, by a 
little straining, be rendered one thousand six hundred. This 
number of adult males would imply a total population of about 
6,000, a manageable number. But I must frankly avow my 
belief that the word thousand, elejph , is an insertion ; and that 
the subsequent numbers have been amplified by some similar 
misunderstanding ; that 600 armed warriors, with a retinue of 
2,000 or more, escaped from Goshen, crossed the Bed Sea, 
and wandered and died in the Desert. The increase of the 
seventy original males into a total of 2,o00 in 210 years is 
much above the ordinary rate. Taking g-H-th as yearly increase, 
a fraction which, I believe, represents the ordinary annual 
rate in France, we shall get about 360 as the progeny of 140 
likely to be existing at the end of 210 years, at the average 
rate of increase in an old country here in the West. But the 
Hebrews increased exceptionally, and numbered some 2,500 
at the end of that time ; the progeny, doubtless, of others 
beside the seventy heads of tribal divisions who came into 
Egypt. We shall find similar misconceptions of numbers if 
we examine some subsidiary numbers in the account of the 
wanderings in the Desert. In the plague which ensued upon 
the matter of Peor, 24,000 are said to have died. The pesti- 
lence seems to have lasted but a few days, so that the daily 
death-rate must have been enormous ; far exceeding that 
terrible mortalityat Paris in the year 1832, when the cholera first 
appeared, and in six months carried off 18,000 victims out of 
a population of less than 900,000. WTiat can have been done 
with the corpses ? In cities or extended tracts of country 
furnished with all appliances for the burial of the dead,, we 
can understand how a large number may be disposed of in a 
given time ; but how could the 24,000, or the 14,700 who 
died in the matter of Korah, have been prevented from poison- 
ing the whole locality by their decomposition ? I shall be told 
that the dry sands of the Desert, by their desiccative power, 
destroyed or neutralized all that was pestilential. I must, 
however, doubt whether 24,000 corpses, interred at once 
within a limited space, would not severely tax these desiccative 
powers. It seems as if the whole Desert must have become 
a very Aceldama. 
17. The spoil taken from the Midianites, as recorded in the 
31st chapter of Numbers, is expressed in very high figures. 
I will not say much of the 675,000 sheep, the 72,000 oxen, 
and the 61,000 asses; those who have travelled with Tartar 
hordes, or even with wandering Arabs, speak of countless 
