Is the value of pi in the bible?
No, you can’t find the value of pi in the bible, but it looks like many people think you can: This is kind of a trivial question, but it seems to surface quite often. Pi (the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle) is really not given in the Bible. There is a pair of references that seem at first glance to indicate that this value is 3, but a closer reading shows that it really doesn’t. Now he made the sea of cast metal ten cubits from brim to brim, circular in form, and its height was five cubits, and thirty cubits in circumference. Under its brim gourds went around encircling it ten to a cubit, completely surrounding the sea; the gourds were in two rows, cast with the rest. It stood on twelve oxen, three facing north, three facing west, three facing south, and three facing east; and the sea was set on top of them, and all their rear parts turned inward. It was a handbreadth thick, and its brim was made like the brim of a cup, as a lily blossom; it could hold two thous
I’d like to correct hkabla’s answer. True, the decimal expansion of Pi is infinite and non-repeating, and hence cannot be written in any book, a book containing of necessity only a finite number of letters. However this doesn’t mean that the number Pi cannot be written in a finite number of symbols. Indeed, as you probably know, the number Pi is usually represented by the Greek letter Pi (hence the number’s name). There’s a very finite representation for you of this number. I haven’t read the New Testament in the original Greek, but i bet there is at least one occurrence there of the letter Pi. Hence, indeed, the value of Pi is to be found in the Bible. More accurately, a standard representation of the value of pi is to be found in the Bible, but that’s as close as you’ll ever get to seeing any number’s value: as one of its representations.
