Well, once again, we have a skeptic objecting to overlarge numbers in the OT. Here's an old example, 2 Chr. 7:5: And King Solomon offered a sacrifice of twenty-two thousand head of cattle and a hundred and twenty thousand sheep and goats. C. Dennis McKinsey, and other skeptics, say this scenario is "incredible" for it would have required continual sacrificing of 5 oxen and 24 sheep per minute for a week. The writer, Fred Titanich, breaks it down to one animal killed every 4.3 seconds and a pile of dead animals 5 feet high covering 18 acres. All, he says, done in a week.

All in a week? Not so fast, folks. There's not a word in the text that says that all of it was done in one week; all that is said is that the observance of the festival lasted one week. If you really want to read it overliterally, you can take it to mean that Solomon sacrificed all 142,000 animals at once. Did he pile all of them up in one vertical column and use a very long knife? No, what we have here is Sol's entire offering to supply the Temple cultus for an extended period of time, well beyond the festival. Titanich also complains about the "economic impact" this would have had on Israel, but if they were not all killed at once, and kept reproducing, this amounts to an economic boon for the average Israeli as Solomon redistributes his own wealth.

Next complaints, 1 Chr. 22;14: "Now, behold, in my trouble I have prepared for the house of the LORD an hundred thousand talents of gold, and a thousand thousand talents of silver; and of brass and iron without weight; for it is in abundance: timber also and stone have I prepared; and thou mayest add thereto." Titanich has a mind picture of priests cramming all this into the Temple and having to crawl over mounds of gold, but he's not thinking out of the box again. All this says on the surface is what was prepared and available; it does not say all of it was used. Beyond that, where did the rest go? 1 Kings 7:1-2, "But Solomon was building his own house thirteen years, and he finished all his house. He built also the house of the forest of Lebanon; the length thereof was an hundred cubits, and the breadth thereof fifty cubits, and the height thereof thirty cubits, upon four rows of cedar pillars, with cedar beams upon the pillars." Read more construction details in 1 Kings. And let's not forget that gold and silver and other metals were the closest things to legal tender in those days; who paid to feed all those workers and how? See also here.

Titanich goes on to complain about the number of workers in the Temple (1 Chr. 23:4-5) and says it "must have been a pretty slack job." He's right -- it was one of those sort of jobs where you worked once a year, just like the priestly rotation in NT times. But that's only working in the Temple -- beyond that the Levites had to minister to the needs to the people and tend the herds donors like Sol were giving them. Let's think out of the box!

On quail in Numbers, see here. On Jonah and Nineveh see here. On Aphek and walls see here.