Re: Chronicles 4:2
Bad translation.That's not what it actually says.
A couple of years back I got in a discussion with a Jewish friend of mine about this. We finished up phoning a rabbi in Jerusalem (his brother) to get a definitive translation of that passage. What it actually says is "The distance across it was 10 cubits, and the measure around was 30 cubits x 111/106'", that's accurate to about 26ppm.
Put simply, the original English translators didn't fully understand the fiendishly complicated Hebrew writing system, which uses the same symbols for letters and numbers, relying on context to work out the difference (hence our need for a rabbi to work it out). The translators saw a mathematical equation and thought it was a grammatical error, so they ignored it. Subsequent translators never corrected the error.
It's interesting that someone worked out pi to about 5 decimal places, some 2000 years before decimal places were invented.
Now, when can we have an "angel" icon for cases like this. In the meantime I'll use the angry schoolmaster instead.