Maybe we shouldn't indulge too much in it, lest we look like fools ourselves -- but it is obvious that numerology has an important meaning to these people.
I was recently reading
The invention of the jewish people by Shlomo Sand, and it commented on the unrealistic figures given in ancient history books, such as Josephus' "Wars of the Jews".
Josephus estimated that 1.1 million people died in the siege of Jerusalem... Like all ancient historians, Josephus tended to exaggerate his numbers. Today most scholars believe that virtually all demographic figures from antiquity are overstated and that a good many of them have numerological significance.
I find it so revealing, somehow, that Sand should say this to comment an old figure of "1.1 millions"! It appears that, despite all the alleged progress of our scientific approach, the re-writers of history still work on the same mystic approach when it comes to numbers. Very instructive.
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The invention of the jewish people appears to be a very sane book that somehow "normalizes" the myth of the origins of the jewish people, and of the inevitability of a jewish nation: proving how it has been a regular, artificial construction of invented facts, fluctuating ethnicity and distorted history (in other words just like any other nation in the world) that only in relatively recent times gave to this tradition a definitive nationalistic self-aggrandizing form, defined by the zionist ethnocentric historiography.