I came across an observation on Genesis (via another YouTube video, I’m afraid) by the late Jewish scholar Nahum Sarna. He noted in the 1960s that the unnaturally high ages of the three founding Patriarchs of Israel may actually be represented by one mathematical formula, suggesting that the ages had numerological and theological, rather than chronological, significance.
Abraham 175 = 7 x 52
Isaac 180 = 5 x 62
Jacob 147 = 3 x 72
Moreover, in case that were thought to be coincidental, the sums of the numbers (7+5+5, 6+6+6, 3+7+7) all add up to 17. Either Sarna, or some follower, has pointed out that, given that Hebrew gives its letters numerical values, “17” is the sum of the consonants in the word tob, that is to say “good” as used throughout the creation account, consisting of tet=9 waw=6 bet=2 (total = 17).
A plausible interpretation is that the first numbers (7,5,3) represent the decreasing virtue of the Patriarchs, from exemplary Abraham (who scores a perfect 7!) to sometimes dodgy Jacob, whereas the remaining squares increase exponentially to a perfect seven squared as, despite the failings of the Patriarchs, God progressively fulfils his covenant promises. The net result is, like the creation and all God’s works, good. Such a concealed meaning (to us moderns ignorant of the literary technique) is not alien to the text, but authentically interpretive.
Cumulatively I find the argument compelling, not least because I began to appreciate the astonishingly clever way the torah uses significant numbers through the work of another deceased Jewish scholar, Umberto Cassuto. His Exodus commentary points out the way key words in a passage are repeated seven times to underline the meaning. Since reading it, I’ve learned how the same significant word counts occur throughout the creation account, and beyond, in Genesis. I gather that similar “hidden” use of the symbolic numbers with which most of us are somewhat familiar (3, 7, 12, 40 etc) occur throughout the Hebrew Bible, as indeed they do in the New Testament (for example, Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus, as well as the Book of Revelation).
It’s a very Jewish, or at least a very biblical, compositional method, very hard to achieve, and I guess very indicative of the spiritual importance of the texts. To me, its all-pervasive occurrence, especially in Genesis, is the equivalent of writing in gold on purple parchment, only the royal magnificence is a feature of the text itself.
Distinguishing these numerical patterns from random coincidences can be quite hard, especially given our historical distance from the authors’ culture. For example, the ages of the patriarchs from Adam to Moses, in the Masoretic text, add up to 12,600, which matches ten times both the 1260 days of the two witnesses’ testimony in Revelation (elsewhere expressed as 42 months and 3 1/2 years) and the 42 stages of Israel’s wilderness sojourn. Is this fortuitous, or does it represent, somehow, the totality of human witness to Yahweh in various ages? Or is the whole thing fortuitous?
Easier to accept is the age of Moses, whose 120 year lifespan, as an Egyptian prince, is exactly the Egyptian ideal, which was surely never actually attained by any pharaoh. That his age is symbolic, rather than historical, is suggested by the fact that in Psalm 90, headed “A prayer of Moses the man of God,” Moses states the lifespan of man as 70, or perhaps 80 “by reason of strength.” When theology is not intended, longevity in Moses’s generation is in the same range as today’s, and the same as archaeology suggests. What I find interesting in Moses’ case is that the Egyptian numerology works differently from that of the three Patriarchs, which might suggest different cultural milieus for the original sources.
The same might be said of the extreme ages of the antediluvian line of Seth, which nobody has been able to explain as symbolic with any certainty. However, Cassuto observed that all the ages in the Massoretic text, as well as the ages at first parenthood, are multiples of five with occasionally the addition of 7 or 14 (e.g., 182 = 175 [35 × 5] +7). These are numbers more associated with ancient Meospotamia than Israel or Egypt, in line with the apparent origins of Genesis 1-11.
A complication of this is that other textual traditions, such as the Samaritan text and the Septuagint, give different figures here, as they do elsewhere. But Gordon Wenham has pointed out that all the Samaritan Pentateuch figures are multiples of 5 with
occasionally the addition or subtraction of 7 (e.g., 53 = [12 × 5] –7), that is expressing the same kind of system. Whilst this doesn’t help us unravel any symbolism, it strongly suggests that the ages are numerologically symbolic (and that the Hebrews recognised how), rather than being supernaturally long lives to be explained in terms of Creation Science. Genre rules, OK?
In fact, the more ancient the literature, across the whole ANE, the more numbers are used for their significance rather than their mathematical accuracy. A fascinating article explains why this is, in terms of the relatively recent discovery of mathematics, including counting, when these texts were written. This is something that we would never even think of, as arithmetic is as fundamental to us as writing, which of course had its origins at the same time.
Broadly, before the Sumerians started writing things down, most non-verbal cultures had no means of counting, and so they limited “number” words, perhaps from one to three. These tended to be used descriptively, rather than arithmetically, so that “one” might mean “a little,” “two” “enough,” and “three” “a lot.” I’m reminded of my childhood friend Mike Walter, who feigned stupidity by counting “one, two, three… a lot.” But these guys weren’t stupid: its just that arithmetic had, counter-intuitively to us, not yet been invented. Presumably if necessary they could keep a tally on their fingers (making 5 a basic number) by holding them up, rather than counting.
The Sumerians began, for the first time in history, to keep written tallies of goods, and subsequently to name higher numbers. Gradually they developed both base 10 and base 60 systems, which the later Babylonians developed into a sophisticated mathematical system inextricably linked to their religious system, in turn linked to astronomy.
According to the linked article, for a long time only scholars could count, and they only used numbers in texts mathematically for purposes of trade and industry. Universally in literary texts, numbers were used for their symbolic significance, not for their mathematical value. Consequently, ancient readers would normally and naturally treat numbers as pointers to meaning, not as arithmetical measures.
Over time, of course, mathematics became more normalised, so that the chronology of the books of Kings, for example, derived from court chronicles, is accurate enough to cross-match with other ANE records to reconstruct a regional history and chronology. But the linked article suggests that before King David, such records were not kept, and so the writer of 1 Samuel had trouble with the chronology of King Saul:
[Saul] had not had a “recorder”. He was a primitive war-leader. So they took advantage of an ancient device. They knew that he had become king at an early age, and that he had died in his maturity, so they wrote “Saul was one year old when he began to reign, and he reigned two years in Jerusalem” (1 Samuel 13.1 literally). Translators constantly had difficulty with this verse because they did not understand the meaning that Saul began to reign while still a youth, and only reigned to adulthood, not reaching old age. It is especially significant that the writers did not try to invent figures. (They were not as casual with the truth as modern men like to make out.)
Here, if he’s right, we see the pre-arithemetical “1-2-3” pattern, as well as the truthfulness (rather than mathematical accuracy) of the Bible authors.
The interpretive significance of this for the Bible is more than just being able to dig out hitherto buried meaning, though that is of course both enlightening and inspiring. The real significance for our particular time is that it cuts through all the Young Earth interpretations of Genesis 1-11, for we probably ought to treat numbers in the book, by default, as symbolic rather than mathematical. We can’t follow Ussher in dating the creation to 4004BC because none of the ages in Genesis were ever intended as mere chronological mathematics. There was no chronological mathematics when the antediluvians, at least, lived. In my view, that encourages us to see the antediluvians as historical figures, with normal lifespans, rather than as mythical figures living for centuries. It also encourages us to ignore Pentateuchal ages for the mundane work of fitting the people and events into history. Those numbers are intended for deeper understanding than that.
By the same token, we would expect the seven days of creation to express theological, rather than scientific, truth. Gavin Ortlund has an excellent video on how many of the early Church Fathers recognised the symbolic nature of the creation account and reinterpreted the seven days in various ways. Their problem was that they were nearly as far removed from the thought-world of Moses or Abraham as we are, and in fact lacked our advantage of a broader knowledge of ANE thought from archaeology.
My own take on Genesis 1 is, as old readers will know, that it makes perfect sense as a phenomenological temple-inauguration account of the world, intended to integrate with the tabernacle-building account of Exodus. And what warrants the symbolic use of numbers more than a temple-inauguration? That is why there are so many significant numbers of key words in the text.
Whether I’m right or wrong, several millennia after the text was written, it is pretty clear that the current Young Earth Creationist position, largely originating from Morris and Whitcombe’s book in the 1960s, is as much an accommodation to modern mathematical concepts of time, and literature, as the Gap Theory and the Day Age theory were unwarranted impositions of Victorian science on an ancient text. Genesis needs rather to be understood in its own terms, if we are to comprehend the purposes of God in it.
