Is There an Error in the Bible about Pi?
And now for something completely different: a slice of pie. No, wait. I meant the value of pi, the 16th letter of the Greek alphabet that is so essential in geometry, and to critics of the Bible. Looking at the common target, 1 Kings 7:23-26 KJV, some people claim that God's written Word has a serious mathematical error. One explanation is that the writer was rounding off the number, which was a common practice. In fact, it still is today, since the actual decimal value of pi never ends. People who want precision without obsession may use 3.14159265359, which is rounded off. The best I could do for this post was 9:27 AM, so it appears in the USA on 3-14-15, 9:17 Eastern Time. In math class, we used the most common short form for pi, 3.14 . We'd plug it in to get the area of a circle when the radius was known, π * r 2 . Pi r squared. Cornbread are round. However, there is a better explanation about the seeming error in 1 Kings than saying the author was rounding it off.