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Just an interesting factoid for you all, courtesy of QI:
If you were to guess that in the Biblical 'feeding of the 5000', 5000 people were fed, you would be wrong. The Bible said 5000 'men' were fed, the women and children were not bothered to be counted because they were not as important.
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That's true of most places in which people were counted in the Bible.
For instance, after the exodus from Egypt, the population was counted. But that was actually only the number of men in the appropriate age range for fighting battle, given as 600,000, leading some scholars to suggest that 2-3 million Israelites left Egypt. Which in turn leads other scholars to suggest that the exodus couldn't possibly have happened, as that number of people would have been an impossible logistic arrangement.
But going back to the feeding of the 5000; it somewhat depends on the words used in the original text. Hebrew doesn't have a gender neutral term for 'people', and generally uses the male term for mixed gender groupings. Having said that, there are some terms that are only ever used for groups of men and some terms that can be used for either groups of men or for mixed groups. And without the original Hebrew text, it's impossible to know exactly what was meant.
