The stars in the heavens - God promise to Abraham

This partly out of a discussion from a book
Abraham & Family: New Insights into the Patriarchal Narratives
by Hershel Shanks (Editor)
http://url2it.com/hji
Chapter 7 p67


The bible states the following when he talks to Abraham all translations
are from the CEV

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Gen 15:5 Then the LORD took Abram outside and said, "Look at the sky and
see if you can count the stars. That's how many descendants you will
have."
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++
Now the problem here is a person with the naked eye looking at the sky
will only see about 4,000 stars. To the biblical writer clearly 4,000 is
a gross underestimation.

A bit later it states
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Gen 22:17 "I will bless you and give you such a large family, that
someday your descendants will be more numerous than the stars in the sky
or the grains of sand along the beach.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++
Now the ancients may not have known how many stars in the sky but they
did have an idea of how many sands might be on the beach. Later
Archimedes wrote a famous article on the subject.

Now trying to resolve these two quotes one possible solution, the writer
of this chapter states that ancients might have had a telescope. He
claims that several lens such as the one of a rock-crystal lens found in
Nineveh examined by Sir David Brewster in 1852 might have been part of a
telescope. He also quotes an example of several lens found in Carthage.
If so, he speculates that maybe the bible writer knew there were many
more stars in the sky than seen with a naked eye.

I think that the ancient astronomers knew that the number of stars in
the sky would number only about 4,000 although the Biblical writer did
not.

That this telescope is dubious.
http://url2it.com/hjj

Also even if such an ancient telescope existed, the number of stars you
can see is still only in the tens of thousands. Unless you know that a
star can be a galaxy.

Any thoughts?