What about numerology?

Question 60054.

Biblical numerology covers two quite different things, and a good deal of confusion comes from muddling them. One is the observation that certain numbers recur in Scripture with evident significance, which is plainly true and worth studying. The other is the practice of treating numbers as carriers of hidden meaning, calculating with names and dates in order to unlock secrets, which is another matter entirely.

So let me separate them carefully. I want to affirm what Scripture actually does with numbers, and I want to warn against a practice that has led sober people into some very strange places, including several confidently announced dates for the return of Jesus that came and went without incident.

What biblical numerology usually means

Numerology in the technical sense, as distinct from the study of biblical numerology as literary pattern, is the belief that numbers have inherent power or meaning, and that by manipulating them you can discover truths not otherwise available. It has ancient roots in Pythagorean thought, in Jewish gematria and in various occult traditions, and it appears today in everything from lucky number superstitions to elaborate systems for decoding Scripture.

The distinctive move is the direction of travel. Instead of reading a text and noticing that a number carries weight, the practitioner starts with a number, applies a calculation and arrives at a conclusion the text never states. Once that door is open there is no way of shutting it, because the method can generate almost any result from almost any input.

That is the central objection to biblical numerology when it is practised as a method of calculation. It is not falsifiable. A system that can prove anything proves nothing, and the enormous variety of contradictory conclusions reached by sincere practitioners is the evidence.

Biblical numerology and the legitimate patterns

Having said that, only a careless reader would deny that numbers carry significance in the Bible. Seven runs through Genesis 1, through the feasts, through the sevenfold sprinkling of blood, and through Revelation with its seven churches, seals, trumpets and bowls. It is associated with completeness, and the association is drawn from the text rather than imposed on it.

Forty marks periods of testing and transition: the flood, the wilderness, Moses on the mountain, Elijah’s journey, the temptation of Jesus. Twelve is bound up with the tribes and then with the apostles, and reappears in the description of the new Jerusalem. Three occurs at significant moments, and forty two months and 1,260 days recur in prophecy with an evident relationship to each other.

This is not biblical numerology in the occult sense. It is literary and covenantal patterning, the sort of thing any careful reader of any ancient text would notice, and it is legitimate because the significance is demonstrable from usage rather than asserted by calculation. I have written on the wider question in whether biblical numbers are literal or symbolic.

What Scripture says about divination

The Law is uncompromising about techniques for obtaining hidden knowledge. Deuteronomy lists the practices that were an abomination in the land, including divination, fortune telling, omen reading, sorcery and consulting the dead, and you can read the list at Deuteronomy 18:10 to 12. The reason given is instructive: the nations do this, but as for you, the LORD your God has not allowed you to do so.

God’s alternative in that same passage is a prophet, that is, a word given by revelation rather than extracted by technique. That distinction runs right through Scripture. Knowledge of God’s will comes as a gift He speaks, not as a prize we calculate, and every system that promises otherwise is offering a shortcut around relationship.

The Hebrew word for divination in that passage is qesem, and it covers a range of techniques for obtaining supernatural information. Where biblical numerology becomes a way of extracting hidden data from the text, it has crossed into that territory whatever the sincerity of the person doing it.

The Bible code phenomenon

In the 1990s a book proposed that hidden messages could be found in the Hebrew text by reading letters at equidistant intervals, and that these encoded predictions of modern events. It sold extremely well and persuaded a number of Christians who ought to have known better.

There are two decisive problems. The first is textual. Equidistant letter sequences depend on an exact letter count, and the Hebrew manuscripts contain small variations in spelling, so there is no single letter sequence to work from. Shift one letter anywhere and every result downstream changes.

The second is statistical. Researchers applied the same method to War and Peace and to the Hebrew edition of Moby Dick and found comparable predictions of assassinations and disasters. Given a long enough text and enough freedom in the search, patterns will appear. That is a fact about large numbers, not about inspiration.

What is the number 666?

The obvious question in any discussion of biblical numerology is the number of the beast, since it is the one place where Scripture itself asks for arithmetic, and Revelation itself invites calculation, saying let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. So Scripture does present one number as a puzzle.

Note two things about it. First, the calculation runs in the safe direction: it identifies a person, and it will be intelligible to believers living when that person appears. It is not a general method for decoding the rest of the Bible. Second, the history of confident identifications is not encouraging. Nero, various popes, Napoleon, Hitler, Kissinger and assorted modern politicians have all been fitted to the number by people who were certain at the time.

That record should teach us caution rather than enthusiasm. The number is given so that the church in that day will recognise the man, not so that we can play with it now. And Jesus was explicit that no one knows the day or the hour, which puts a permanent stop to date setting of every kind.

Why this matters pastorally

I have watched what an appetite for hidden knowledge does to believers. It creates a two tier church, with the initiated and the ordinary. It shifts attention from the plain commands of Scripture, which are difficult enough to obey, to the thrill of secrets, which cost nothing to hold. And it eventually produces disillusionment when the predictions fail.

There is also a spiritual danger in cultivating a taste for techniques that promise access to what God has not disclosed. That appetite is the very thing the occult trades on, and a Christian who has trained himself to look for hidden codes has made himself easier prey for other things that promise the same. I have written on the wider issue in whether horoscopes open doors to demonic activity.

The remedy is not less interest in Scripture but a better kind of interest. The riches of the Bible are on the surface, in the sense that they are in the words and their meaning, and a lifetime is not enough to exhaust them.

Gematria and the Hebrew tradition

Some readers will have met the claim that biblical numerology is a legitimately Jewish practice, since Hebrew letters double as numerals and rabbinic literature contains a good deal of gematria. That much is historically accurate. Letters do carry numerical values, and Jewish interpreters have played with the resulting sums for a very long time.

The question is what weight that practice can bear. Within the rabbinic tradition gematria functions mostly as homiletical decoration, a way of making a point memorable rather than of establishing it. Nobody argues a legal ruling from a letter count. When modern writers take the technique and treat it as a source of doctrine, they are using it in a way the tradition they appeal to never did.

There is also the awkward fact that the New Testament, written in Greek, never once uses the method to establish anything. The apostles argue from grammar, context, typology and the flow of redemptive history. If biblical numerology in the calculating sense were a valid interpretive key, you would expect to find at least one apostolic example of it, and there is none.

A simple test to apply

When you meet a claim resting on biblical numerology, ask whether the conclusion could be reached by an ordinary reader from the plain sense of the passage. If it could, the numbers are illustration and no harm is done. If it could not, then the meaning is being supplied by the technique rather than by the text, and the technique has become the real authority.

Ask also what the claim is for. Does it help you love God and your neighbour, repent of something, trust more firmly? Or does it chiefly give you information about dates and identities that you can do nothing with? Scripture is given to make us wise for salvation and equipped for every good work, which is a very practical purpose.

That test will not settle every case, but it will filter out a great deal of nonsense before it reaches your heart.

So, now what?

Enjoy the patterns. Notice the sevens, the forties and the twelves, and let them show you the artistry of a Book that was written across many centuries and hangs together. That is honest observation and it will deepen your reading. The study notes on Revelation 13 are a good example of careful handling of a numbered passage.

But refuse the calculators. If a teaching requires a formula to unlock it and cannot be shown from the plain sense of the text, leave it alone, however impressive the arithmetic. What would change in your Bible reading this week if you gave the time you might spend on hidden meanings to obeying something you already understand?

The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.

Deuteronomy 29:29, ESV