That's a rather odd interpretation, evan927.

It's rather important to notice these dimensions are not of a circle but of a rather large tub. Its circumference will not be an 'ideal' dimensionless line, but a ring with a sizable width, because there's no way anything less-than-paper-thin is going to hold in that much water.

Since a circumference is pi times the diameter, a 'pure' circle would be 10*pi cubits, which is roughly 31.4. Now, since the line going around our pool is 30 cubits, it represents a smaller circle--30/pi in diameter or roughly 9.55...

Given that, the diameter of the outside of the 'molten sea'--from "edge to edge", in the original--is about half a cubit shorter than the line we're drawing around it, meaning the wall around our pool is at least a quarter of a cubit thick (roughly four and a half inches, assuming an eighteen-inch cubit).

1 Kings 7:26 says "And it was an hand breadth thick, and the brim thereof was wrought like the brim of a cup, with flowers of lilies: it contained two thousand baths."

A handbreadth is roughly four inches wide. So I don't see what this "pi = 3" business is about.


Oh, and I agree with WWWWolf on this. It's entirely a Christian idea that either the entire Bible is true or the entirety is false. Logically there's nothing to prevent "some" of it from being false and "some" of it from being true.


I'll summarize this, since it seems some have missed it: The "line around" the sea is not measuring the same circle as its length from one brim to the other. This can be done because the brim is a ring and not a circle.