To the editor:

Ken Toth’s math skills in the April 14 DMR are as bad as his uneducated myopic theology.

According to the quartermaster general of the Army, it is calculated that Moses would have needed 1,500 tons of food each day to feed 2 to 3 million Israelites. So, 4,000 tons seems a little high.

Be that as it may, Toth’s 4,000 tons of manna each day for 40 years or 14,600 days (not 146,600 days) would total 58,400,000 tons of manna, not 58,400 tons. Using his numbers, he should have calculated 586,400,000 tons of manna. But, either way that is a lot of manna, whatever manna is, and that’s a very boring diet for 40 years. No wonder they complained.

Concerning water: each human requires approximately a half-gallon of water per day, so 3.5 million people (Toth’s number) would require 1.75 million gallons of water each day. Since 1 ton of water is about 264 gallons, dividing 1.75 million by 264 yields approximately 6,630 tons of water per day for the Israelites. It’s not known how many cattle, sheep, goats, and other animals they may have had. If the total was around 1 million, their water requirement may have been (very roughly) 2,000 tons. This total of 8,630 tons is considerably less than the 60,000 tons that Toth reports.

Toth asserts that it costs $10 million a day to take care of the Jews. Really? This is balderdash; where did this figure come from? Did they use Egyptian money or gold and silver? Did they spend the money at the equivalent of Walmart, MacDonald’s, and Vons stores that they encountered along their journey? And consider that no archaeological evidence has ever been found indicating a 40 year sojourn of millions of people and animals in the deserts of the holy land. Surely thousands of artifacts, bones, and the remains of ancient campsites should have been discovered.

Furthermore, if 3.5 million Israelites walked 10 per row with 5 feet separating the rows, the line of people would extend about 331 miles. If they walked for 12 hours a day, at 2 mph, that would be 24 miles walked each day. It would take approximately 2 weeks for the last row to arrive where the first row started. This timeline is at odds with the Bible.

Finally, extensively quoting the Bible, which is nothing but a sheepherders’ Bronze/Iron Age superstitious guide to reality, proves absolutely nothing.