- ...exegesis.
- An
earlier version has appeared in the Proceedings of the XVIIth
Canadian Congress of History and Philosophy of Mathematics, Queen's
University, Kingston, Ontario, May 27-29, 1991, pp. 93-101.
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- ...rarely
- One
of those rare cases is Isaac Newton's ``obsession with the
[King Solomon's] temple's plan and dimensions...Being the man he was,
he plunged into an extensive program of reading in Josephus, Philo,
Maimonides, and the Talmud scholars'' [Westfall 1987, pp. 346-348].
Newton's inspirations were conjectured by Frank Manuel [Manuel 1974] in
the following form:``The temple of Solomon was the most important
embodiment of a future extramundane reality, a blueprint of heaven; to
ascertain every last fact about it was one of the highest forms of
knowledge, for here was the ultimate truth of God's kingdom expressed in
physical terms'' (quoted in [Brooke 1988], p. 177.)
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- ...Temple
- Built by the King Solomon, the ninth century BCE; the
water of the tank was used by priests for ritual ablutions. ``The
molten sea was a large, bronze water reservoir set on backs of twelve
bronze oxen and placed in the court of Solomon's temple...The
diameter was about 5 m (16 feet), the height about 2.5 m (8 feet), and
the volume amounted to roughly 45,000 litres (12,000 U.S. gallons).
There can be little doubt that it was one of the greatest engineering
works ever undertaken in the Hebrew nation. Its size is comparable to
some of the largest church bells cast in modern times'' [Zuidhof 1982,
p. 179].
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- ...not
- ``but several difficulties complicate the analysis of
the design of the vessel, its dimensions and the volumetric capacity
...The sea apparently was not the typical straight-walled
mathematical cylinder...a brim and a lily has outward curving
petals...The biblical account mentions first the brim to brim
diameter of ten cubits. A line streched across the top would easily have
measured this...It is then reasonable to conclude that the 30-cubit
circumference was measured below the brim'' [loc.cit., pp.
179-181].
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- ...want
- ``It has been suggested, perhaps
by someone who believes that `God makes no mistakes', that `round' and
`depth' are to be interpreted loosely, and that the tank was elliptical
in shape'' [Almkvist, Berndt 1988, p. 599].
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- ...HREF="footnode.html#258">
- ``Not all
ancient societies were as accurate, however -- nearly 1500 years later
the Hebrews were perhaps still content to use the value 3'' [Borwein,
et al. 1989, p. 204].
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- ...emphasize
- ``The inaccuracy of the
biblical value of is, of course, no more than an amusing curiosity.
Nevertheless, with the hindsight of what happened afterwards, it is
interesting to note this little pebble on the road to the confrontation
between science and religion'' [Beckmann 1971, p. 13-14].
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- ...implicitly
- ``Also, the ratio between circumference
and diameter () of the circular vessel is not mentioned in the
Bible...'' [Zuidhof 1982, p. 180]
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- ...1984]
- Who attribute their exegesis to Rabbi Eliyahu of
Vilna, alias Gaon-mi-Vilna, the famous Talmudic scholar of the
late eighteenth century; unfortunately, the author was unsuccessful in
locating the related reference to works of Gaon-mi-Vilna
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- ...values
- Analogous numeric
systems were used later, and, without doubt, following the Hebrew
tradition, in the Arabic, Greek, and Cyrillic texts [Guitel 1975]
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- ...Rambam
- A Rabbinical
authority, codifier, philosopher, and royal physician, Rabbi Moshe ben
Maimon (1135-1204), known by his acronym, RAMBAM, and as
Maimonides, was one of the most illustrious figures in Judaism of all
time.
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- ...Nachman
- A
Rabbinical authority, codifier, philosopher, physician, and poet; born
in 1195, died circa 1270; known by his acronym, RAMBAN, and as
Nachmanides
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- ...transmission
- A historian comments: Josephus, writing not
long after 70 CE boasts of the existence of a longstanding fixed text of
the Jewish Scriptures'' [Britannica 1985, vol.14, p. 760].
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- ...ridicule
- As an anonymous reviewer has written on
the third draft of the present paper (which went in all through a dozen
of drafts), ``Il n'auirait pas à adhérer à un acte de foi,
comme celui décrit en p.2 ni comme en p.3-4:`(...) Ezra has
faithfully reproduced these dimensions in his book' ''.
The present author does not remember now what exactly has the reviewer
referred to on the page 2 (nor was it clear to the author immediately
after he has received the reviewer's text), but the author's statement
about the ``faithfullness of Ezra'' has survived all changes
(see the end of 4), to testify that no ``act of faith'' is
needed to compare two verses and to conclude that the second one is a
faithful copy of the first one.
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