David's chief of the captains, Josheb-bas-sheboth killed 800 men in a battle (2 Sam. 23:8). Another commander, Abishai, killed 300 men in a fight (2 Sam. 23:18), and Jashobeam, another "mighty man" of David, killed 300 in one battle (1 Chron. 11:11). By comparison, I don't think Conan the Barbarian ever killed more than a few dozen men in any battle, according to the chronicles of his deeds by Robert Howard, but, of course, Conan worshiped Crom, not Yahweh, so the paltriness of his feats is understandable.

Let's not get too excited here, shall we? 2 Sam. 23:8 says, "The Tachmonite that sat in the seat, chief among the captains; the same was Adino the Eznite: he lift up his spear against eight hundred, whom he slew at one time." What does "one time" mean? One fight, as our critic thinks? No -- the same Hebrew phrase is used in Josh. 10:42 ("And all these kings and their land did Joshua take at one time, because the LORD God of Israel fought for Israel:") Note how the word for "time" is used elsewhere: "And the priest shall dip his finger in some of the blood, and sprinkle it seven times before the LORD, even before the veil." (Lev. 4:17) One fight? No, one campaign. Still a little tight for one man? It isn't one man -- Adino's rank was that of a third-rank general (shaliysh). Generals don't do the grunt work in battle. Adino is being credited with all the casualties inflicted under his command, in line with the ancient notion of representational agency. What those you commission do, you do. This is even more clear in the second example:

2 Sam. 23:18 And Abishai, the brother of Joab, the son of Zeruiah, was chief among three. And he lifted up his spear against three hundred, and slew them, and had the name among three. (cf. 1 Chr. 11:11)

Abishai is an even higher ranker than Adino -- plus, news flash for metaphorically-impaired skeptics: To "lift your spear" is to initiate military action (Josh. 8:18, "And the LORD said unto Joshua, Stretch out the spear that is in thy hand toward Ai; for I will give it into thine hand. And Joshua stretched out the spear that he had in his hand toward the city."; Nahum 3:3 "The horseman lifteth up both the bright sword and the glittering spear: and there is a multitude of slain, and a great number of carcases; and there is none end of their corpses; they stumble upon their corpses...") If we're going to be critics, let's at least speak the language.

The state of Judah fell on hard times in 2 Chronicles 28:5-8, because first the Syrians killed many men, which may have been revenge for that time in 1 Kings 20:30 when the Israelites killed 100,000 Syrians in a battle, after which the surviving Syrians retreated into the city of Aphek, where a wall fell and killed 27,000 more. (This wasn't the Great Wall of China, was it?)

Again, let's speak the language and think outside the box, shall we? The verse at issue, 1 Kings 20:29-30: "And they pitched one over against the other seven days. And so it was, that in the seventh day the battle was joined: and the children of Israel slew of the Syrians an hundred thousand footmen in one day. But the rest fled to Aphek, into the city; and there a wall fell upon twenty and seven thousand of the men that were left. And Benhadad fled, and came into the city, into an inner chamber." The Hebrew yom (as we know from discussions of Genesis can take the meaning of an indefinite, consecutive period; this is restricted as in Genesis when other time markers accompany, but no such marker is found here. As for Great Walls, we don't need a structure that size -- we have stadiums that hold 50,000 to 100,000; Aphek need not have been equal in area to one of those for its walls (the word can be used collectively of all four sides of a walled city; cf. John. 2:15) to have fallen on (note that it does not say "killed" in the text) a mere 27K. This is not, as another Skeptic compares in a following article, akin to D-Day with troops hiding behind barriers and using precision weapons; this is the equal to a building collapse. One may as well ask how 50,000 might have been killed in the World Trade Center, had valiant rescue efforts not succeeded.

The rest of the critic's complaints are of the same basic order -- never making any distinction between mustering power and actual troop presence and activity. This leaves one other issue, that of population again. This comment is typical:

Ms. Meyers described the evidence for expansion of the population of early Israel in small villages at this time. She also noted the difficulties the Israelite pioneers faced in working an area of poor soil and erratic water supplies. It was hardly a landscape that could support armies numbering tens of thousands, much less hundreds of thousands. In Who Were the Israelites? Gosta W. Ahlstrom makes similar points about the small size of Israelite settlements and the difficult nature of the land (1986, pp. 19-22).

In reply, I would only note that I would not take the word of creampuff scholars who wouldn't survive a moment themselves in such conditions. The ancients were in constant survival mode and had no leisurely time-wasting activities like television eating up their days. The sweat of one's brow was the key to living -- and every man was a soldier. The comparison to modern Israel, a nation of 2 million, providing only 264,000 soldiers is an absurdity. Modern soldiers are trained professionals; ancient soldiers were any walking, breathing man who could pick up a spear, though the specially trained attained higher rank; this is why their casualty numbers were so much higher than those of our modern battles between professional soldiers. Let's keep away from the anachronisms, shall we?