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“Here Is the Bridegroom!”God’s Kingdom of a Thousand Years Has Approached
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53. Did the ancient Hebrew Bible manuscripts use alphabetic characters to stand for numbers?
53 Furthermore, the oldest Hebrew manuscripts extant, like those of the Dead Sea Scrolls, spell out the numbers of the Bible and do not use alphabetic characters for numerals, thus not allowing for a transcriber’s visual error at 1 Kings 6:1.b
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“Here Is the Bridegroom!”God’s Kingdom of a Thousand Years Has Approached
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b When, after Bible times, the Hebrews used alphabetic letters for numbers, they had no symbol for zero, as their system had no zero. Hence 400 was not represented by the letter daleth followed by two zeros, and 500 by the letter he followed by two zeros. The number 400 was represented by one Hebrew letter (taw), and the number 500 was represented by two Hebrew letters (taw qoph). The number eighty was represented by the Hebrew letter pe, whereas ten was represented by the one letter yod. So there was no likelihood of mistaking taw pe (480) as distinguished from taw qoph pe (580).
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