3 ms·
I don't have the math in front of me for the first question, but I've seen it worked out in the past. It's on the order of 1 in a billion. On the second questi
by dbatten 6y ago
I don't have the math in front of me for the first question, but I've seen it worked out in the past. It's on the order of 1 in a billion.
On the second question, considering "all the numbers in the Bible," an arbitrarily chosen number or set of numbers from the Bible will contain a pattern very, very often, because that's how people thought in that culture.
Jesus didn't have 12 disciples by accident. They symbolically represent the 12 tribes of Israel.
The genealogy in Matthew 1 doesn't contain 3 sets of 14 generations by accident. The author had to skip at least a few kings from the Jewish tradition to make it work out. And the fact that it's intentional is underscored by him explicitly saying "so, there were 3 sets of 14 generations..." (He's making a theological point, but the details of that aren't relevant to the question at hand.)
I could go on... Intentional numerical patterns are, in fact, quite common! And this gives us more, not less, reason to suspect that the Genesis 5 genealogy has an intentional pattern.