Photo Credit: Adrian Bruce's Educational Teaching Resources

I will be using the following discussion of large numbers as background for an upcoming article on Mohammed's name in the Song of Songs.

In 1967, when I was a young man of 22, I read about crows and their ability to count to three. That is, crows could tell if one, two, or three hunters entered a cornfield and if the same number left the field, they would come into the field to snack. But if four or more hunters came into the cornfield and only three left, the crows could not count past three and so they would come into the field only to be shot. For crows, the number three was their biggest number. Any number larger was uncountable.

In ancient times the number 10,000 was used to designate the numberless, the countless, or the infinite. The Ancient Greeks used the word murios (10,000) when describing a huge number of things. In modern English, myriad also means an unspecified large quantity, although for modern English speakers if we want to indicate a very, very, very large uncountable number we would use a term like gazillion

The largest number named in Ancient Greece was a myriad myriad (one hundred million) and used by Archimedes to number the grains of sand that fit into the universe. That is, a myriad was uncountably large, a myriad of myriads was infinitely uncountable.

The Romans also used myriad as a number meaning both 10,000 and exceedingly large.

In the Far East, the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans divide their large numbers into myriads. For example, a million is a hundred myriad. (1)

Likewise in the Old Testament, the Hebrew word for 10,000 is revava and was always used to convey the meaning of an uncountably large number: "And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her: Our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of ten thousands, and let thy seed possess the gate of those that hate them" (Genesis 24:60). Another example: "and they are the ten thousands of Ephraim, and they are the thousands of Manasseh" (Deuteronomy 33:17). In no sense were these words used as an exact census count of people.

In Muslim Arab history the number ten thousand is often used to indicate a very large number. For example, at the Siege of Medina, Arab pagans and Jewish tribes joined a confederacy to attack Mohammed in 627 A.D. Although scholars do not agree on the number, it is generally reported that the strength of the attacking army was 10,000 men. Using the number ten thousand was specifically meant to give the impression that a gazillion attackers were arrayed against Mohammed and so makes his victory even more astounding.

Again, a widely repeated story even unto the present day is that in 630 A.D. Mohammad entered Mecca as the leader of an army of “ten thousand men.” Now was it exactly ten thousand men? Could it have been 9,934? It doesn't matter: ten thousand men in 630 A.D. would sound like the word millions used today.

The use of a large number to exaggerate an actual count is not confined to ancient times; we note that many Muslims today allege that "millions" of civilians were "murdered" by US troops in Iraq. That figure is more then 20 times the actual number. According to the leaked Iraq War Logs published on the Internet by WikiLeaks on 22 October 2010, the files show 66,081 civilian deaths out of a total recorded death toll of 109,000. The great majority of those civilians were not killed by American forces (2). Ah, Muslims and their hyperbole.