What These Numbers In The Bible Really Mean

While the Bible is probably best known for its use of words — like "God is my shepherd, I shall not want" or "For God so loved the world" — the Bible is also a book full of numbers. Heck, there's even a whole book in there actually called Numbers. In fact, if you were to sit down and read even just a few of the more famous books of the Bible, it wouldn't take long before you started to notice the repetition of a few key numbers, like 7, 12, or 40. You might start to suspect there was something to these numbers apart from their literal value.

And you would be right! Many different numbers have significant symbolic weight throughout scripture, making the passages in which they appear more poetically resonant as things occur in groups that present echoes of perfection, or judgment, or unity. Here is just a small handful of the many symbolic numbers in the Bible and what they can mean.

As anyone with a little bit of knowledge of geometry can tell you, three is a solid and stable number. While the popular claim that triangles are the strongest shape might be debatable, triangles are definitely valued in engineering for their strength, and of course, three legs on a stool are significantly more stable than two. As a result, the number 3 appears many times throughout the Bible as a symbol of completeness, stability, and strength. Within Judaism, there are three Patriarchs — Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — and three pilgrimage festivals — Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. Prophets such as Elijah and Daniel are shown to call upon God or pray three times for additional efficacy in their requests.

The number 3 is arguably even more significant in Christianity, as the crucified Jesus remained in the grave for three days, a symbolic echo of the time the prophet Jonah spent three days in the belly of a big fish. Additionally, the doctrine of the Trinity is central to orthodox Christianity, which teaches that God exists as three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Three disciples — Peter, James, and John — bore witness to Jesus' transfiguration into a divinely glorious figure on a mountaintop, where he was joined by Moses and Elijah (which adds up to ... well, you get it). As the song says, "Three is a magic number."

The number 4 is used in biblical contexts to represent the Earth and the natural world. This symbolic connection should still be a fairly resonant one even for modern audiences, because whether we do so consciously or not, we still associate the natural world with things grouped in bunches of four: the four seasons, the four cardinal directions, the four classical elements, and so on. The Bible similarly makes these associations, so that 4 can in a sense represent totality, in the way that "the four corners of the Earth" means everything everywhere. This exact phrase is used, for example, in Isaiah 11:12.

In the famous prophetic vision of Ezekiel, in which the prophet sees the chariot-throne of God, the throne is being guided by four "living creatures" (elsewhere identified as cherubim) made up of four types of animals — lion, bull, eagle, and man, representing the four "kings" of the animal kingdom; wild, domestic, sky, and everything — who can see and move in the four cardinal directions without turning. These four creatures later show up in Revelation and even later become symbols for the four Gospel writers. In the body of literature about God's throne, four archangels, again representing the four corners of Earth, surround God's fanciest chair. Another famous quartet representing the whole world is the four rivers that flow out of the Garden of Eden in Genesis.

If 7 is the number of perfect completion, it makes sense that the numbers adjacent to it in either direction have metaphorical weight as well. Six, naturally, would represent coming just short of perfection, and as such is used sometimes to represent either humanity (created on the sixth day) or the evil of Satan (as in the notorious number 666, on which more later). It stands to reason as well, then, that if 7 represents the end of a cycle, 8 would represent the beginning of a new one. As a result, the number 8 comes to have weight as the representation of new beginnings. Notably, after God flooded the Earth in Genesis, there are eight survivors left to repopulate the world: Noah, his wife, their three sons Ham, Shem, and Japheth, and their unnamed wives.

Similarly, in the Jewish tradition, male children are circumcised on their eighth day of life (including Jesus, which is why January 1 — eight days after Christmas — is the Feast of the Circumcision in some churches). The feast of Hanukkah, which celebrates the rededication of the Temple after it had been desecrated by Antiochus, lasts for eight crazy nights, as you may have heard. The dedication of the Tabernacle, sort of a precursor to the Temple, also occurred over an eight-day ceremony, as described in the Book of Numbers.

Just as a seven-day week leads to 7 being seen as a number of perfection, so too does a 12-month year relate to 12 becoming another one of those perfect numbers of completion, like 3, 7, and 10. In the case of 12, however, the set here seems to relate specifically to authority, both human and divine. For example, Israel is built around 12 tribes descending from the 12 sons of Jacob (kinda). God tells the Israelites in the Book of Leviticus that it is the job of the priests to set 12 loaves of unleavened bread with incense in the Temple every week, to be changed out on the Sabbath. The prophet Ezekiel foretells that the New Jerusalem of the Messianic Age will have 12 gates, one for each of the 12 tribes.

The number 12 is significant in Christianity as well. Perhaps most notably, Jesus selected 12 apostles to be the primary teachers of his message following his ascension into Heaven. The author of Revelation again reflects imagery from Ezekiel when he describes that not only will the 12-gated New Jerusalem have walls 12,000 stadia long, it will house 144,000 righteous people (12,000 from each tribe of Israel). Revelation also features 12 angels at 12 gates, 12 fruits on the tree of life, and 12 jewels on the crown of Christ's bride, among others.

If you take two symbolic numbers and multiply them, you often arrive at another symbolic number, and even sometimes one that combines the metaphorical power of its factors, like you're combining food items in Breath of the Wild or something. For example, the number 70 is the product of 7 and 10, two numbers that represent totality and legal power, so when they're combined, you end up with a number that often represents the whole world and its judgments. In traditional Jewish thought, there were 70 nations of the world, with a total of 70 languages and 70 angels guarding them (that is, one angel prince each). Tradition says that when the Hebrew Bible was first translated into Greek, the translation was done simultaneously by 70 rabbis (sometimes 72) sequestered from each other who nevertheless presented 70 identical translations. For this reason, the Greek Old Testament is known as the Septuagint (from the Latin word for 70).

In the Book of Numbers, Moses appoints 70 elders to serve as judges. God condemns Israel to spend 70 years in captivity in Babylon (at least according to the prophet Jeremiah; modern scholars would say more like 50 years). Similarly, the prophet Daniel says that Jerusalem will suffer for 70 times 7, or 490, years for its transgressions. No one knows exactly what this 490-year period is meant to refer to, but there has been much analysis and speculation over the years.

Maybe the most infamous number in all of the Christian Bible is 666, the so-called number of the Beast. This number appears in the Book of Revelation in conjunction with the Beast of the Apocalypse, whose name is said to be a number, namely 666. The mark of the Beast will be a representation of this number, and in the end times, no one will be able to buy or sell without this mark. Specifically, Revelation 13:18 says, "This calls for wisdom. Let the person who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man."

Now, this could be understood to mean that 666 represents humankind, as the number 6 stands for both humanity and falling short of perfection, as we mentioned above. However, the prevailing view among scholars is that this number refers to a specific person who would have been viewed by first-century CE Christians as a Beast. If you write the Greek spelling of the name Nero Caesar in Hebrew, you get the equivalent of NRON QSR, the numerical value of which adds up to, you guessed it, 666. If you use the Latin spelling, you get NRO QSR, which adds up to 616, a variant number that appears in several early manuscripts of Revelation. As ominous as the number sounds these days, 666 was just a way for Christians to secretly name their oppressor.