Holy Quail!

Tea smoked quail with oriental coleslaw

An unusual account is recorded in Numbers 11. It begins with the Israelites short of food and looking for a little meat:

"Therefore the LORD will give you meat, and you shall eat. You shall not eat one day, or two days, or five days, or ten days, or twenty days, but a whole month, until it omes out at your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you." - Numbers 11:18-20

Therefore, as you can imagine, God, being the God of Love that he is, sends them a little meat:

"And there went forth a wind from the LORD, and it brought quails from the sea, and let them fall beside the camp, about a day's journey on this side, and a day's journey on the other side, round about the camp, and about two cubits above the face of the earth." - Numbers 11:31

Now, let's calculate just how many quail are involved here. Most bible dictionaries (see net.bible.org)consider a day's journey to be approximately 20 miles (32.1 kilometres). Therefore, a circle with a radius of 2 miles (3.2 kilometres) would have an area of 1,256 square miles (2,021 kilometres). The quail filled this area to a depth of 2 cubits, or 35 inches (88.9 centimetres).

This makes 102 billion cubic feet (31 billion cubic metres) of quail. The quail is a fairly small bird, averaging about a pound (453 grams) in weight, and 13 inches (33 centimetres) in height. Based on this size, each quail would occupy 0.72 cubit feet. Therefore, God must have blessed the Israelites with approximately 142 billion quail. Shiver me timbers! That's over 47,000 quail for every Israelite. It must have been like an early version of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

Now, I'm not sure what the world population of quail is, however, the current world population of chickens is about 24 Billion (see Wikipedia - 24 billion chickens in 2003). Chickens likely outnumber quail by at least 100 to 1, since chickens are commonly raised in huge commercial quantities in our modern, crowded earth. When the Israelites asked God for a little meat, little did they suspect that he would respond with over 500 times the entire world population of quail.

Before I finish with the quail, I must point out the end result of the meat harvest.

"While the meat was yet between their teeth, before it was consumed, the anger of the LORD was kindled against the people, and the LORD smote the people with a very great plague." - Numbers 11:33

I thought God said that they would get to eat the quail for a whole month? This Jehovah fellow isn't a nice person at all, is he?