As the groundwork of his objection he lays down:—
"That it is an indisputable fact, that the story as told in the Pentateuch intends it to be understood—(i.) that they came out of the land of Egypt about 215 years after they went down thither in the time of Jacob; (ii.) that they came out in the fourth generation from the adults in the prime of life, who went down with Jacob" (p. 100).
He next proceeds to estimate the average number of children in each family:
"In the first place, it must be observed, that we nowhere read of any very large families among the children of Jacob or their descendants to the time of the Exodus.... We have no reason whatever, from the data furnished by the Sacred Books themselves, to assume that they had families materially larger than those of the present day.... The twelve sons of Jacob had between them fifty-three sons, that is, on the average, 4-1/2 each. Let us suppose that they increased in this way from generation to generation. Then, in the first generation there would be 53 males (or rather only 51, since Er and Onan died in the land of Canaan, Gen., xlvi. 12, without issue); in the second, 243; in the third, 1,094; and in the fourth, 4,923; that is to say, instead of 600,000 warriors in the prime of life, there could not have been 5,000....
"The narrative itself requires us to suppose that the Hebrew families intermarried, and that girls, as well as boys, were born to them freely in Egypt, though not, it would seem, in the land of Canaan.
"Yet we have no ground for supposing, from any data which we find in the narrative, that the whole number of the family was on that account increased. On the contrary, etc.... If we take all the families given in Exod. vi. 14-25, together with the two sons of Moses, we shall find that there are 13 persons, who have between them 39 sons, which gives an average of 3 sons each. This average is a fairer one to take for our purpose than the former; because these persons lived at all different times in the interval between the migration into Egypt and the Exodus. We may suppose also, that the average of children is still as large as before, or even larger, so that each man may have had on the average six children, three sons and three daughters....
"Supposing now the fifty-one males of the first generation (Kohath's) to have had each on the average three sons, and so on, we shall find the number of males in the second generation (Amram's) 153, in the third (Aaron's) 459, and in the fourth (Eleazar's) 1377, instead of 600,000.
"In fact, in order that the fifty-one males of Kohath's generation might produce 600,000 fighting men in Joshua's, we must suppose that each man had forty-six children (twenty-three of each sex), and each of these twenty-three sons had forty-six children, and so on!—of which prolific increase, it need hardly be said, there is not the slightest indication in the Bible" (pp. 102-5).
From this he concludes,
"That it is quite impossible that there should have been such a number of the people of Israel in Egypt at the time of the Exodus as to have furnished 600,000 warriors in the prime of life, representing at least two millions of persons of all ages and sexes; that is to say, it is impossible, if we will take the data to be derived from the Pentateuch itself" (p. 101).