Have you ever heard of an approximation, or rough measurement? Have you ever heard of rounding to the nearest unit? Asking the Biblical value of pi is like asking what is the length of an adult male's forearm from the point of the elbow to the tips of the extended fingers.
And besides, why is a rounding of of pi to 5 decimal points the correct reportage instead of to the nearest cubit? This criticism of an ancient writer's choice of where to stop rounding pi is as ridiculous as me saying that your value of pi is incorrect because it really should be reported as 3.14159265358979. Whoever wrote I Kings had to round pi somewhere or else he would have been writing until he died and he wouldn't have been able to finish the rest of I Kings.
Cordially,
Even by your generous error margin, 1 Kings is off by over a full cubit.
And the point is that Deutsch (the guy I was talking to) was saying that EVERY word in the Bible was LITERALLY true and completely without error of any kind.
When someone makes a claim like that, ANY counter-example proves him wrong.
It's a red herring. First of all, the verse said made. It then describes some of its characteristics.
LOL! I just got done arguing this same thing on this thread.
The numbers in 1 Kings are quite clearly approximations. The point here is that, to a Biblical literalist, the Bible cannot contain approximations. Ten cubits means ten cubits, and thirty means thirty, not "about ten" or "about thirty".
I tried floating the explanation that the guy who measured the circumference had shorter arms than the guy who measured the diameter, but so far no literalist has bitten at it.
It's also fun to point out that the sign hung on Jesus's cross is worded in four different ways in the four Gospels.
This is known as "the bird," and is roughly 18 inches (45 cm).