Numerology

2609 words long.

Published on 2024-03-02

The Bible is full of numbers. The arguments of mystics, philosophers, church fathers, theologians, and lay writers are full of explanations for those numbers. Most of those interpretations have been rejected by modern scholars, for good reason. This leaves us with a problem. The text makes it clear in some instances that those numbers have a symbolic meaning, but that meaning is wrapped in a riddle. The meaning is prophetic and that prophecy was given to the church for a reason. Unless we discover the meaning, how can we act upon its message?

This section of articles is adapted from the chapter "To Number our Days" which appeared in my book Peace, like Solomon Never Knew. That chapter had an entry for each number that was important to the arguments in the book. The article about the number 153 is an excerpt from the chapter "Answering Habakkuk" which appeared in Plague, Precept, Prophet, Peace. For insights into other numbers, consult "Appendix D: To Number our Psalms" from Peace, like Solomon Never Knew.

A Database Analogy

The problem with matching numbers in different parts of the Bible to discover relationships and derive insights is that most of those relationships are not real. The story of Lisa S. Davis of New York City is a good analogy. For eighteen years she got parking tickets and misdemeanor charges for things she never did. Her vehicle license renewals were held up. She was denied service by a rental car company and failed a background check for a new job. It all came down to her sharing the same first name, middle initial and birthday with another woman. Their records got crossed and the police, DMV and court personnel were unsympathetic. Again and again she had to plead guilty to things and pay fines just to move forward, then fight to have each overturned. The details of her story are an interesting read:

For 18 years, I thought she was stealing my identity. Until I found her

What was the ultimate cause of Lisa's misery? A bad, non-unique, database key. The four fields of the key (first, middle, last, and DOB) constitute the "JOIN CLAUSE" used in database queries in the government databases. The problem was that the "JOIN CLAUSE" matched together records - and people - that should not be matched. They formed a bad relationship.

Theologically, this happens when you apply poor hermeneutical principles when working with numbers. The strong bias among theologians today is to reject the vast number of possible connections based on numerical patterns a priori. No connections means no bad connections. Unfortunately, this stifles theological creativity.

I love numbers. Math has always been my favorite subject. In one of my books I count over twenty mathematical techniques that I applied to discover or prove my ideas related to the Bible. The current anti-mathematical bias is stifling to me because of the way I pursue knowledge and so I reject it. I reject it, but acknowledge the good reasons for it and attempt to avoid the errors of the past by substituting new hermeneutic principles to weed out bad database matches. In database programming, we call this adding a "WHERE CLAUSE". The "WHERE CLAUSE" is an expression that weeds out false matches. Numbers are vital for understanding prophecy because prophecy is about time and time is always measured by numbers. The key is to use numbers to foster creativity and suggest possible associations but never rely on the numbers alone to prove them. Always you must use other features of the text to prove the soundness of the interpretation. Those additional correspondences are your theological "WHERE CLAUSE".

The Many Sources of Numbers

Where do the Bible's numbers come from? If we are to make use of numbers drawn from the Bible, we need to know. The first challenge is to decide when and where the numbers are. The following list is not exhaustive.

Explicit Numbers. Some numbers appear directly in the text, like the Ten Commandments in Exodus, explicitly numbered in the words of Moses.
Sizes of Collections. Some numbers are derived by counting things in the text, like the Seven Spirits of God in Isaiah 11:2. We know this collection is significant because the Seven Spirits of God are referred to collectively by that name in Revelation 3, 4 and 5.
Word Frequency. Some words or phrases appear many times in a passage, a Bible book, a Testament, or the whole Bible. We can count the number of occurrances to get a number. Due to the complexities of Bible translation and the fact that there are variations even among the currently approved Hebrew and Greek versions, this can be problematic and subjective. It can also be indispensable. Ecclesiastes repeats the phrase "under the sun" twenty-eight times, which number matches the number of "times" in the poem in Ecclesiastes 3. That observation was crucial to my decoding of the structure and message of Ecclesiastes in the book Peace, like Solomon Never Knew.
Math Puzzles. Yes, the Bible has math problems. I had to solve one in order to understand the meaning of the number 153, the number of fish that the disciples caught in the second miraculous catch of fish. By studying the Genesis flood account carefully, you can discover that the flood lasted 153 days.
Structural Elements. Once you discover the structure of a Bible book or passage, you will have broken it into parts that can be counted. Habakkuk is currently divided into three chapters in our Bibles, but it is really composed of seven sections. Observing the number seven is integral to understanding Habakkuk.
Numerical Sequences. One sequence explored in this section is found in Habakkuk. Each of the book's seven sections contains an increasing number of elements. The first section has one item, the second has two, the third three, on up to seven. The beginning of the analysis of Habakkuk is here: Habakkuk: Part 1
Gematria. Ancient Hebrew and Greek did not have separate symbols for numbers. The letters of their alphabets served double duty as numbers. They did not have a decimal system, so the value of a word - its "gematria" - is the sum of the values of each of the letters in that word. This means that every Hebrew or Greek word or phrase may be expressed as a number. That is a lot of numbers! This is a vast chasm into which many pious Christians and Jews have fallen over the millennia. The fanciful (and even heretical) Bible interpretations that spring from this technique are legion. I make sparing use of these numbers. One fruitful example is the gematria for Eloah (which means God), the singular form for Elohim. The value of Eloah is 42. Do you recall the comical science fiction work The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? In that book, a supercomputer solved the question of life, the universe, and everything and concluded that the answer was 42. Its author, Douglas Adams, was right: God is the answer!
Chapter and Verse Numbers. The most controversial and strongly discouraged sources of numbers are the chapter and verse numbers found in almost every modern Bible. This needs further discussion.

Chapter and Verse

Wikipedia helpfully tells us where the chapter numbers come from:

Cardinal Hugo de Sancto Caro is often given credit for first dividing the Latin Vulgate into chapters in the real sense, but it is the arrangement of his contemporary and fellow cardinal Stephen Langton who in 1205 created the chapter divisions which are used today. They were then inserted into Greek manuscripts of the New Testament in the 16th century. Robert Estienne (Robert Stephanus) was the first to number the verses within each chapter, his verse numbers entering printed editions in 1551 (New Testament) and 1553 (Hebrew Bible).

The verse numbers of the Old Testament are the products of Jewish scholarship. What follows is quoted from How did the Bible get its chapters and verses?

In the oldest Hebrew manuscripts (Masoretic), the Old Testament was divided into verses; however, the verses were not numbered. The verses were marked by the soph pasuq, which is a double point ( : ). In the Pentateuch of these ancient Masoretic texts, the number of verses of a parashah would be written at the end of the parashah. This notation helped the scribe make an accurate copy, specifically to guard against the addition of verses, and helped the teacher read and remember all the verses of the parashah.

It is theorized that the history of the Hebrew text goes as follows:

scripto continua
the separation of words and the introduction of vowel-letters, and
verse division.

Jewish rabbi philosopher, Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus, adopted Langton’s chapter divisions of the Old Testament and numbered the verses according to the verse divisions indicated by the soph pasuq. In 1523, he wrote the first Bible concordance in Hebrew, the "Meïr Netib," to facilitate the study of Biblical exegesis and to prevent Jews from converting to Christianity. It may be worthwhile to note that the verse numbers in Hebrew Bibles are at times off by one or more verses from the English verse numbers, because Christian Bibles do not count introductory verses (i.e. Hebrew Bible Psalm 20:2 is the same verse as the Christian Bible Psalm 20:1).

The above article goes on to caution Bible students not to infer special significance from these numbers:

In understanding how chapters and verses came to the Bible, it is important to realize that they were completely arbitrary. They were not applied with any logical or consistent method, do not represent literary units, and do not define the author’s unit of thought. The Bible was not intended to be read in bits and pieces! Chapters and verses are simply a reference point and should not be used to influence the interpretive approach of the Bible student!

Some modern Bible editions have begun to drop the verse numbering altogether. I am going in the opposite direction. Did Stephen Langton and Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus get it right? Were they as the King James version put it, "rightly dividing the word of truth" (2 Timothy 2:15)? The only way to know is to test the hypothesis, not reject it out of hand. I do not know if ALL the chapter and verse divisions were divinely inspired and communicate numbers that we can and should use in our interpretation of Scripture. I do know that SOME of them were.

In Job Rises, I painstakingly analyzed the chapter divisions of Job and proved that they are placed ideally and communicate prophetic insight. I used measures of standard deviation on the word counts and dissected and mapped the chapter boundaries to the literary and prophetic structures. Crucially, I compared the prophecies in each chapter to events drawn from the history of Israel and the Church to show that each chapter corresponds to a different generation. The methodical and regular arrangememnt of both text and prophetic fulfilment proves that the chapter boundaries map unerringly to historical eras of mostly uniform length (apart from the first two generations when Adam and Methuselah lived longer).

In Plague, Precept, Prophet, Peace, I applied similar techniches to 1 & 2 Timothy and the Psalms as a whole. The two letters to Timothy comprise ten chapters in all. They map nicely to the Ten Commandments and to regular eras of Church history. Likewise, the Psalms as a whole have a unifying prophetic structure as do the first twenty-eight Psalms, with a second, complementary structure.

In both Peace, like Solomon Never Knew and Plague, Precept, Prophet, Peace, I repeat this exercise for the Gospel of Matthew. In the first book I showed how the twenty-eight chapters map precisely to the twenty-eight times of Ecclesiastes. In the second, I show how the Ten Commandments may be split into fourteen imperatice statements. Each imperative statement then corresponds nicely to two consecutive chapters of Matthew.

In Peace, like Solomon Never Knew, I performed a similar exercise for Proverbs. "Appendix E: The Plan of Proverbs" shows how the first three chapters are an introduction, but the subject matter of the remaining twenty-eight chapters correspond in order to the twenty-eight times of Ecclesiastes 3.

In much of the analysis, the principle goal was to ratify the placement of the chapter divisions. However, in "Appendix D: To Number our Psalms" of Peace, like Solomon Never Knew, the goal was to show that for select Psalms, even the Psalm number had prophetic significance. That carried over into the next book, Plague, Precept, Prophet, Peace. The former book used the Psalm number to express a number of years between key events in history as a part of a prophecy. The latter book showed how the Psalms used their sequence to define the spiritual significance of many numbers. The Psalms are like a Numerology Primer. Thus Psalm 1 shows all three members of the Trinity at work. Psalm 2 is about the Son. Psalm 3 is about the Father. Psalm 7 is about the Holy Spirit. And so on and so forth.

Numerical Mysteries

The upshot of all this is that the Bible makes extensive use of numbers. It also includes a structured definition for many of those numbers. Careful study will help us find where the Bible defines a number which can guide us in using it correctly in our interpretation.

My books are rife with the use of numbers in novel ways. The remaining articles in this section on Numerology are but a taste of what I have discovered, drawn mostly from but two chapters. I hope that you become as entranced by God's numbers as I have. They measure time and they measure steps along a journey. They tell the story of our long road back to heaven.

Numbers also help us solve unsolvable riddles and pierce impenetrable mysteries. If I had to vote on what are the top three unsolved mysteries in the Bible, they would be:

When will Jesus Christ return?
Who is or will be the Anti-Christ?
What secret message did the voice of the Seven Thunders give to John in Revelation?

Jesus told us that only the Father knows the answer to the first question, so any answer to that will smack of heresy. Somebody else may make progress on the second, but I have not. That leaves the third question. The angel in Revelation 10 told John to seal up the words of the Seven Thunders and not write them down. He did not disobey. That means that we can't know anything about what they said, right? Not exactly. Why? Because he told us something about those thunders. We have their number. Using the Word frequency technique as defined above, we can't find out what the thunders told John, but we can find out what they told Job, Moses and David! You see the Seven Thunders have spoken before. See this article (which is in the "End Times" section) for how I cracked that mystery:

Voice of the Seven Thunders

If not for the use of the principles of numerology, I would never have discovered this, nor many other marvelous things. Who knows what you may find if you learn to do likewise?

List of articles in this section: