Devotional at the Bonners, Friday evening, 25 June 2009, starting at 6pm. Be there!

Difficulty

Here's how one writer put it:

Geometry class escapes religious fundamentalist scrutiny, too, as a careful reading of Second Kings reveals. The circular altar in Solomon's temple, we're told, is nine cubits in diameter and 27 cubits around the rim. Except that makes Pi an even three-point-zero instead of 3.1416. Oops.

Response

Interesting. I just used the Debian program "bible-kjv" to search for "cubits" and "nine", and found no hits. Vaguely remembering the story, I searched for "sea" and "cubits", and found the story I believe you're referencing.

It's not in Second Kings. It's in 1 Kings 7:23ff, and 2 Chronicles 4:2ff.

It's not 9 and 27 cubits. It's 10 and 30.

It's not a circular altar. It's a circular "molten sea".

And perhaps the most significant issue; this sea had a "brim", like a cup, which was as wide as a hand (1 Kings 7:26). The measurement of the circumference was done by a line (v. 2). I suspect that most people running a string around a huge cup would place the string just under the brim. So, assuming a hand is 4 inches wide, and a cubit is 18 inches, we have 540 / 172 = 3.1395...; that's pretty close to Pi, well within the margin of error for hand-size, or string-stretch, etc.