...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 $\pi$ 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 ($\pi$) 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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