There are multiple English translations of the Bible that seem to indicate that 603,550 male Hebrews 20 and over fled Egypt to escape slavery and the Pharaoh. For example, in Exodus 38: 25-26 it states the following: “And the silver from those of the congregation who were numbered was a hundred talents and a thousand seven hundred and seventy-five shekels, by the shekel of the sanctuary: a beka a head (that is, half a shekel, by the shekel of the sanctuary), for every one who was numbered in the census, from twenty years old and upward, for six hundred and three thousand, five hundred and fifty men.”
If we add in women and children, the number balloons to 2 million. But did 2 million flee Egypt – or could there be an error in the translations? If we assume each paid a half a shekel, we would assume that they paid 301,775 bekas, or half shekels.
Dr. Colin Humphreys commented on this issue in 1998 in the Vetus Testamentum: “A mathematical analysis is given of the very large numbers of people at the Exodus from Egypt recorded in the book of Numbers. It is shown that if there were “273 first born Israelites who exceed the number of Levites” (Num. iii 43), then the total number of Israelite men aged over 20 in the census following the Exodus was about 5000, not 603,550 as apparently recorded in Numbers. The apparent error in Numbers arises because the ancient Hebrew word ‘lp can mean “thousand”, “troop”, or “leader”, according to the context. On our interpretation, all the figures in Numbers are internally consistent including the numbers at both censuses, the encampment numbers, etc. In addition we deduce that the number of males in the average Israelite family at the time of the Exodus was 8 to 9, consistent with the concern of the Egyptians that the Israelites had “multiplied greatly” whilst in Egypt (Exod. i 7). The total number of men, women and children at the Exodus was about 20,000 rather than the figure of over 2 million apparently suggested by the book of Numbers.”
Furthermore, some have used Canaanite scales on talents, which suggests that a talent is 3,000 shekels, to inflate the numbers. If we use the Egyptian scales instead, those numbers decrease significantly. It’s more likely that the Hebrews would have used Egyptian scales because they hadn’t even entered Canaan yet. Based on Dr. Robert Stieglitz’s (1979) article in the Journal of American Oriental Society, a talent in Egypt was 933 grams, while a shekel was 9.33 grams and a mina (or deben) was 93.33 grams. So a talent is 100 times the shekel or 200 times a half shekel, which makes the taxes paid much more affordable for the smaller group of people.
SJ Thomason is a Christian business professor who’s also a wife and mother of two sons. You can view this in video form here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MalD2BRWKY
Christian Apologist 