It occurred to me that there are a lot of people in the Bible. How many? There are 2,026 names and nearly 3,400 individuals - from Aaron to Zurishaddai.
There are so many questions about who's there and why. Here's a question that might interest us all. Can we verify the people in the Bible actually existed? There's a researcher who is doing this and has verified 53 people in the Hebrew Bible. Here's an excerpt from the article HERE:
"Although the Hebrew Bible names almost 3,000 people, Mykytiuk states that for an overwhelming number of these, it only gives the person’s name and does not supply enough specific information about them to identify them in any other writing. The number of individuals for whom the Bible gives enough information to identify them specifically is far smaller, surely no more than a few hundred, he estimates. With 53 of the people mentioned in the Hebrew Bible now verified through years of research, Mykytiuk will move on to the New Testament, first with a BAR article on 23 verified political figures, then to another one covering about six religious figures. In 2015, he published an article in BAR titled, Did Jesus Exist? Searching for Evidence Beyond the Bible."
Notable is that there are so few women in the Bible: another article on the total number of names says that there are 1,700 distinct personal names with 137 of them being women.
If we go to dummies.com, we learn that the Bible has a "cast" of thousands, but some of them play more important roles than others. They go on to list the 11 important people in the Bible. They start with Adam and Eve, move on to Noah, Abraham, and Moses and conclude with Jesus, Peter and Paul.
Those remain familiar names, but there are others that are unusual and strange: Dorcas, Dodo, Gomer, Ishbi-benob, Ham, Ichabod, Mash and Mushi.
