"… indeed I will greatly bless you, and I will greatly multiply your seed as the stars of the heavens, and as the sand which is on the seashore…"
– God’s words to Abraham in Genesis 22:17
Concerning the words above, Henry M. Morris, in his book entitled The Genesis Record, writes:
It is instructive to note God’s comparison of Abraham’s seed to the sand and to the stars. He had said once before (Genesis 15:5) that his seed would be as numerous as the stars of heaven. However, to the naked eye, one can only count approximately three thousand, at the most. Consequently, God’s promise might not at first have seemed overly impressive, since three thousand descendants would not make a very large nation. Now, however, God says in effect that there are as many stars as there are grains of sand on the seashore. He had earlier told Abraham his seed would be “as the dust of the earth” in number (Genesis 13:16).
Abraham recognized that God was saying his descendants would be impossible to count, but it did sound as though He were making an “unscientific” comparison when He likened the stars to the sand. In our modern day of giant telescopes, however, we know that such a comparison is very appropriate. No one knows the exact number of the stars but it can be roughly estimated, for the observable universe at least, as approximately 1025. Since there are… then the number of sand-sized particles would also be calculated as 1025. Although such a calculation may well be considerably in error, it at least shows that the stars and the sand are of about the same order of magnitude in number. This fact could not have been discovered by men without the telescope; so it constitutes one of the many remarkable examples of modern scientific truth found in the pages of the Bible long before scientists could have learned them by the scientific method.
Abraham recognized that God was saying his descendants would be impossible to count, but it did sound as though He were making an “unscientific” comparison when He likened the stars to the sand. In our modern day of giant telescopes, however, we know that such a comparison is very appropriate. No one knows the exact number of the stars but it can be roughly estimated, for the observable universe at least, as approximately 1025. Since there are… then the number of sand-sized particles would also be calculated as 1025. Although such a calculation may well be considerably in error, it at least shows that the stars and the sand are of about the same order of magnitude in number. This fact could not have been discovered by men without the telescope; so it constitutes one of the many remarkable examples of modern scientific truth found in the pages of the Bible long before scientists could have learned them by the scientific method.
God apparently used hyperbole to describe how numerous Abraham’s descendants would be. However, even if Morris’ calculations were a little off, the number of stars and the number of grains of sand on the seashore truly are on the same order of magnitude, which is something ancient man would not have known through his own effort.
VB
