Descendants as countless as the stars

Descendants As Countless As the Stars.

Why it doesn't jibe. 

In the Old Testament book of Jeremiah (around 600 BC), God tells the prophet the stars are uncountable--

Jeremiah 33:22 "I will increase the number of descendants of my servant David and the number of priests from the tribe of Levi, so that it will be as impossible to count them as it is to count the stars in the sky or the grains of sand on the seashore." 

The average person can't count all the visible stars.

It's too difficult to do. 

The descendants, God says, will be uncountable like the stars.  

Actually, descendants can be counted.

There aren't too many of them to estimate.  

Meantime, it's absurd to say the descendants will be as many as grains of sand on the seashore--

"impossible to count them as it is to count ... the grains of sand on the seashore." 

Some Bibles editions say the host of heaven, angels--not stars--are uncountable.

For example, the King James Bible and American Standard Version--

“As the host of heaven cannot be numbered, neither the sand of the sea measured: so will I multiply the seed of David my servant.”  

Okay, maybe God can count many angles like grains of sand.

But humans can't count them; so they must take God's word for it. 

There are, without the aid of a telescope, about 6500 visible stars.

Yale University Observatory puts it at 9110 in perfect conditions.

Still the average Joe would give up, anyway. 

For sure, however, there has been far more than Hebrew 9100 descendants.

But less than the number of stars--billions--the cosmos contains.  

So, at best, the passage is being poetic.

And at worst, unreal.