The Bible does not teach that Pi = 3

In the description of the furnishings of Solomon’s Temple we read:

Then he made the sea of cast metal. It was round, ten cubits from brim to brim, and five cubits high, and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference. (1 Kings 7:23)

Ruh roh! A circumference of thirty and a diameter of ten means pi =30/10 = 3. Either Solomon’s Temple was built in Indiana or we have a serious problem. ¹

Or do we?

(The sea, by the way, was a humongous brass basin almost certainly used by the priests for ceremonial washings.)

When critics try (and some do) to make this argument seriously, i.e. to argue that this proves the bible is unreliable, they are committing the "ancients were idiots" fallacy. (This assumption is usually reserved for ancient Hebrews alone. The Aztecs, for example, are assumed to be cultural and scientific geniuses who invented String Theory, which they enjoyed discussing over high protein meals derived from eating members of their own species.)

Any civilization building anything circular would have known that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter is slightly greater than 3. The Mesopotamians of a much earlier era used the approximate value of 25/8 = 3.125. The Egyptians may have had a much better value long before Solomon’s Temple. Here we see the assumption of stupidity: The Hebrews either didn’t know what their neighbors knew or they did know but didn’t bother to put accurate information into their sacred writings, in spite of its potential effect of weakening claims regarding the veracity of the holy words.

Not that any of that matters, because what is provided in the Bible is a description (“He made”), not a blueprint (“Makest Thou”).

Even in the modern western world, we are often imprecise without being wrong. When I was in grade school, I clearly remember being taught that the circumference of the earth was twenty-four thousand miles, and its diameter was eight thousand miles. That results in a value for pi of 24,000/8000 = 3. Were my teachers necessarily scientifically illiterate? I think not.

It is known that eastern writing of the time was (as a matter of style) numerically imprecise—we often see this in biblical writings through the use of rounded numbers—for example in discussing Job's possessions:

Also, his possessions were seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred female donkeys, and a very large household, so that this man was the greatest of all the people of the East. (Job 1:3)

This does not demand that Job had exactly 7000 sheep, 3000 camels, etc., and only dispensationalists would insist that God's cattle ranch is comprised of exactly 1000 hills, no more, no less. ²

This potential mitigating factor, that the writers of that era (biblical or not) treated numbers differently than we do, along with the fact that they also treated quotes differently (as faithful to the content of someone’s statement but not necessarily the precise wording) are two inconvenient (for our critics) established truths that are often incorrectly (and with malice aforethought) labelled as Christian exegetical copouts. Also considered off-limits methods to counter the claims of our unsophisticated critics include arguing on the basis of a figure of speech, hyperbole, translation error, or proper context.

For their claims regarding biblical inconsistency with science to hold water our critics cannot relax their unspoken assumption that the ancient Hebrews were idiots and their demand that all contested passages be evaluated, not just hyper-literally, but also as if they were written using modern, western styles and practices.

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¹ Note that even today there is no technology to cast bronze into a prefect circle with a circumference of 30 cubits (about 52 feet). Also, the rim had a thickness. These both contribute to deviations and  uncertainties from the ideal ratio.

² Our unsophisticated critics generally ignore the mathematical discipline of tracking significant digits.