Numbers in the Bible

Numbers appearing in the Bible can bring out the crazy in people.

Sometimes, numbers in the Bible are used because they are recording parts of the narrative. So in Genesis 14 we read (ESV) “When Abram heard that his kinsman had been taken captive, he led forth his trained men, born in his house, 318 of them, and went in pursuit as far as Dan.” Similarly, I wrote previously about Abraham petitioning God to lower the number of righteous people to be found in Sodom for whose sake the city would be spared: 50, then 45, then 40, then 30, and so on. Obviously the specific numbers matter here because each one is less than the last, but there isn’t the sort of mystical significance that some people seek, such as the misguided Bible Code.

Then there’s the category where things are less historical and descriptive, like Jesus selecting 12 disciples in a way reminiscent of the 12 tribes of Israel. (This is partly the action of God the Son rather than the choice of the author of the Word, but I think at this level of analysis it’s fair to treat them equivalently as being the direct will of God, both what Jesus does and what the Word of God has opportunity to truthfully record.) Some numbers, like 12, 7, and 40, seem to show up in Scripture again and again in a way that must mean something more than isolated historical events.

The best go-to explanation for this that I’ve come across is in Dennis Prager’s commentary The Rational Bible (Genesis), where contends that the recurrence of numbers is meant to remind us of the numbers’ specific previous uses. Thus, the Bible begins with God creating the world in 7 days; 7 is therefore meant to remind us of that pattern and His action, reflected in our weeks with their smaller rests. The deliberate nature of the week has been noticed by secular authors: Matt Parker’s Humble Pi points out that the orbits of the moon around earth and the earth around the sun give us months and years, but weeks are a purely cultural thing.

I think this makes a lot of sense. It avoids the alarm-raising treatment of numbers as having some independent mystical identity that some would-be numerologists suggest, while also avoiding the treatment of the Word of God as something to be decoded rather than read and understood according to the rules of plain language. That it was intended to be accessible is evident from its mere diction—the New Testament is famously written in a colloquial dialect of Greek, called koine or “common.” It also grounds our reading of those numbers in the concrete narrative of the Bible: we aren’t just supposed to notice “something” mystical when we see the number 7, for example, but to think back on its previous use in the narrative (this is, after all, what an artist typically intends when they repeat a symbol or motif) all the way back to, with 7, its centrality in the creation of the world by God.