September  UTC  One of my major concerns has been to prevent this whole section and not just the numbers part of it from expanding out of all proportion this might lie behind many of my edits If you feel the various explanations of eleph and of the gematrianumerology distinction needs more detail the answer might be to move it down to a footnote Yes youre right of course the explanation of the very precise figure in Numbers is a gematria and the explanation of the rounded figure in Exodus is a numerology and theyre two different things  Frankly I dont like the entire section Id like to replace it with a new approach reviewing some of the major contemporary scholarship Theres a lot of interesting work out there and this obsession with bibleashistory gets us heading in the wrong direction  as Carol Meyers says not sure we actually quote her but she wrote an important recent commentary on Exodus