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Solomon made “a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about … and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about” (1 Kings 7:23; 2 Chronicles 4:2). A circle’s circumference is its diameter times pi, 3.14159…, so a vessel ten cubits across is about thirty-one and a half cubits round. Critics say the Bible here makes pi equal to three, and so is mistaken in a matter anyone can measure.

Preferred: The two numbers are not taken at the same place, and the passages say so. The ten cubits are “from the one brim to the other” (1 Kings 7:23), “from brim to brim” (2 Chronicles 4:2): the width across the top. And the brim was not straight up and down: “it was an hand breadth thick, and the brim thereof was wrought like the brim of a cup, with flowers of lilies” (1 Kings 7:26; 2 Chronicles 4:5). A cup’s brim, like a lily, turns outward. So the widest part of the sea was its brim, and the line that compassed it went round the body of the vessel beneath.

The next verse says where that was: “under the brim of it round about there were knops compassing it, ten in a cubit, compassing the sea round about” (1 Kings 7:24; 2 Chronicles 4:3). The sea is described as compassed under its brim, where the rows of knops ran.

The numbers then agree to the letter. A line of thirty cubits goes round a body 30 ÷ 3.14159 = 9.55 cubits across. The brim, ten cubits across, stood out beyond it about a fifth of a cubit on each side, some four inches, for a brim a handbreadth thick wrought like a lily’s. Ellicott, from the shape of the vessel and its contents, concluded the same: “there must, however, have been first a bulging inwards, immediately under the rim.” Scripture does not give the ratio of a circle; it gives the measurements of a real casting, each taken where it says it was taken.

Also given: If the line was taken round the inside, the same answer holds from the other side: ten cubits across the outside of the brim, thirty round the inside of the wall, the difference made up by the thickness of the brass and the turn of the brim.

Also given: That the measures are in whole cubits, as builders give them. Gill: the circumference “answers to the diameter of 10 cubits, or near it, a round number being given not strictly mathematical”; Keil and Delitzsch, that it is “expressed in whole numbers which come very near to the mathematical proportions.” This is true of how measures are commonly given, but it is not needed here: the passages themselves say where each number was taken, and so the two are exact.