Arks are wooden boxes, built by man, ordained by God, measured in cubits, covered in a solidified liquid, and intimately bound up with the presence of YHWH.
Whenever you have a (hollow) cube (or cuboid/box), you have 12 edges, 8 vertices, and 6 faces. 12 + 8 + 6 = 26. If the cube is solid perhaps it'd make sense to count the center "volume", getting 27 = 3 * 3 * 3 (imagine 27 little cubes arranged in a 3x3x3 big cube, each of them corresponds to a vertex, edge, face, or center of the big cube).
Not sure. Perhaps just to stick with it, to think hard about why we might be given so many numbers in Scripture (which often add very little to its story per se), and to consider whether any particular examples of numerical significance seem too much for coincidence. You don’t need to embrace every claim about the Bible and its numeric details to think there might be something to some of them.
Numerology is the belief in an occult, divine, or mystical relationship between numbers and other things, including names and words, in which numbers are assigned more or less arbitrary "meanings" and then those "meanings" are applied to the text or object in the direction of an overarching system which is somehow claimed to be "universal".
There is actually a huge difference, though, between numerology and the practice of gematria, and still more difference between numerology and the use of number as a strategy in the generation of text— for example, one might write a poem in 3 stanzas of 4 lines each, where each line consists 5 iambic feet, the whole completed by 2 further lines of the same measure. You might even call this a "sonnet". Everyone knows that gematria is a strategy of biblical interpretation— or rather, one should say, of biblical _commentary_, but few scholars so far have studied it as a strategy of biblical _composition_. And there are other ways that mathematics may be used as a strategy of composition as well.
Kindly let me share some thoughts about this. I don't want to take them down to my grave with me, because a lot could be said if we took to trouble to investigate it.
As everyone knows, our culture uses two systems of writing— ABC and 123. We would never confuse a string of numbers for a word, or vice versa. But where a culture has only one system of writing— call it ABG— not only may a _few_ words _look_ like numbers, but all numbers may, with a little imagination be seen as words, and also— this is the important part— all words may be read as numbers. This might even be a child's game, but then mature writers, drawing on that well-known child's game, may use those numbers to write a very interesting text.
There have been since ancient times at least four systems for reading words as numbers— the best-known today are the *decimal* system, where A=1, B=2, C/G=3, D=4 . . . I=10, K=20, L=30 and so on; and another, which we might call *positional*, where A=1, B=2, and so on, up to I=10, but then K=11, L=12, M=13, and so on, the number being the letter's position in the sequence of the alphabet. There were several others in use also, but i am alluding only to the mere existence of several such methods at this point.
Note that the only thing arbitrary about "interpreting" Scripture this way is the choice of method— are you going to use the decimal, or the positional value of each letter? Whatever method you use, the numbers are actually derived _from_ the Text, and no meaning has been imposed on it. However, one has, from the numbers derived, a basis for comparing passages. Those comparisons may be explored. It remains, however, to be seen whether this will be fruitful in some way, and how that might be the case.
If you treat words as numbers, then you may draw together words or passages that have the same gematric value— passages otherwise rather wholly unrelated. This may lead to startling or uncanny, and yet not _entirely_ imaginative insights.
In the jewish tradition, one fundamental rule is that such claimed insights may never contradict sound doctrine. They must fit with the rest of Judaism. Thus if, for example, your gematria leads you to conclude that there are many gods, you've gone astray. But working within the tradition, the gematric connections you turn up can give rise to interesting perspectives, or may somehow handsomely confirm religious intuitions.
The field where Hebrew gematria is practiced perhaps more than in any any other is of course the Torah. The Torah is a large, but not infinite set of words, each with a specific value. Even if you add the values of lexical roots, of the lexemes themselves without prefixes and suffixes, and of the words exactly as they appear in the Text with their prefixes and suffixes, the set is not unlimited. So the game has boundaries.
By the way, for a complete list of numbers and the words that correspond to them within the entire Torah, See Gutman G. Locks, _The Spice of Torah: Gematria_.
Space doesn't allow here a fuller discussion, but on yet another level, the Bible is full of patterns like those that James has noted above. It is interesting, but in no way surprising, that the words for "ark" each occur 26 times in Genesis and Exodus. I seem to recall reading somewhere that all the speeches of God in the Torah consist of a multiple of 17 words, but checking this is a project i keep meaning to get to. I checked a few examples, and they did. And even it isn't exactly true, one might still ask whether the exceptions form a pattern or otherwise seemed meaningful. The biblical writers were a lot more subtle than we often give them credit for. Number was only one instrument in their arsenal.
This leads to a discussion of Oulipo, or more properly, OuLiPo. Wikipedia informs us that Oulipo (_Ouvroir de littérature potentielle_, or "Workshop of Potential Literature") is [it still exists] a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques, including mathematical constraints. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members have included novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poets Oskar Pastior and Jean Lescure, and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud.
The group defines the term littérature potentielle essentially as "the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy". Classical poetry is actually one form of a "constrained writing technique", insofar as it constrains its discourse to certain patterns of lines, or rhymes, or verses, or syllables, and so forth. The oulipians did a lot with mathematical patterns and how they might be used in producing literature. The 26 occurrences of the significant word "ark", mentioned above, which appears in two different forms in two different books— the number of occurrences itself being significant— is another kind of "oulipian" constraint. About that, I have personally made some preliminary investigations into keywords in Mark and discovered that Mark seems to have used this technique in generating his text an astonishing number of times. But in fact it doesn't seem uncommon throughout Scripture.
I have a friend who has extensively studied the cantillation marks of the Hebrew Bible. I can point to all kinds of number games which in Scripture that seem to form definite patterns, or obey certain rules, or where numbers themselves fall into some pattern. This happens so many times that the only conclusion possible is that they are as deliberate as Isaiah's puns. Alberto Cavasola (see academia.edu) has pointed out the biblical writers' use of that specific set of primes known as "cuban primes" in the Bible's chronology. It's deeply theological. One notes all kinds of phenomena like this, even as an amateur.
A sacred text seems to be one that is true on all levels— it "works" not only as a story, but as music, as math, as poetry, as wisdom. We have barely understood the surface of the Bible.
My point here is that number may be used to impose on, or to read into a text all kinds of arbitrary "symbolism" based on presuppositions that are not part of the text itself. This is "numerology".
But it may also be used to discover connections within the text, which are made by the text itself, either by seeming chance or by design. Or it may be used by the text's author himself, either as a constraint within which to generate meaning, or as a means of packing more meaning into a text.
Who cares, for example, that the disciples caught exactly 153 fish when Jesus appeared to them at the lake, after the resurrection. Or is it of interest that 153 is not only the _summation_ of all the numbers from 1 to 17, but also the _product_ of 9 x 17? And that 9 + 17 = 26? And that 26 is the gematric value of YHWH, as James pointed out above. For have you ever looked at which words in the Torah have the gematric values of 17 and 153? There are several of each, but one and only one of each that is significant, and one and only one place where they occur together, and i do mean right together. It might be of interest to find out where that is. Since John was the one who wrote "153" the allusion to that one and only one passage may deepen our insight into what he was thinking about Jesus.
Whenever you have a (hollow) cube (or cuboid/box), you have 12 edges, 8 vertices, and 6 faces. 12 + 8 + 6 = 26. If the cube is solid perhaps it'd make sense to count the center "volume", getting 27 = 3 * 3 * 3 (imagine 27 little cubes arranged in a 3x3x3 big cube, each of them corresponds to a vertex, edge, face, or center of the big cube).
Beautiful!
That's mind-blowing. Thanks for sharing. What would you say to someone who is all too sceptical of numerology as a means for interpreting the Word?
Not sure. Perhaps just to stick with it, to think hard about why we might be given so many numbers in Scripture (which often add very little to its story per se), and to consider whether any particular examples of numerical significance seem too much for coincidence. You don’t need to embrace every claim about the Bible and its numeric details to think there might be something to some of them.
Thanks!
Numerology is the belief in an occult, divine, or mystical relationship between numbers and other things, including names and words, in which numbers are assigned more or less arbitrary "meanings" and then those "meanings" are applied to the text or object in the direction of an overarching system which is somehow claimed to be "universal".
There is actually a huge difference, though, between numerology and the practice of gematria, and still more difference between numerology and the use of number as a strategy in the generation of text— for example, one might write a poem in 3 stanzas of 4 lines each, where each line consists 5 iambic feet, the whole completed by 2 further lines of the same measure. You might even call this a "sonnet". Everyone knows that gematria is a strategy of biblical interpretation— or rather, one should say, of biblical _commentary_, but few scholars so far have studied it as a strategy of biblical _composition_. And there are other ways that mathematics may be used as a strategy of composition as well.
Kindly let me share some thoughts about this. I don't want to take them down to my grave with me, because a lot could be said if we took to trouble to investigate it.
As everyone knows, our culture uses two systems of writing— ABC and 123. We would never confuse a string of numbers for a word, or vice versa. But where a culture has only one system of writing— call it ABG— not only may a _few_ words _look_ like numbers, but all numbers may, with a little imagination be seen as words, and also— this is the important part— all words may be read as numbers. This might even be a child's game, but then mature writers, drawing on that well-known child's game, may use those numbers to write a very interesting text.
There have been since ancient times at least four systems for reading words as numbers— the best-known today are the *decimal* system, where A=1, B=2, C/G=3, D=4 . . . I=10, K=20, L=30 and so on; and another, which we might call *positional*, where A=1, B=2, and so on, up to I=10, but then K=11, L=12, M=13, and so on, the number being the letter's position in the sequence of the alphabet. There were several others in use also, but i am alluding only to the mere existence of several such methods at this point.
Note that the only thing arbitrary about "interpreting" Scripture this way is the choice of method— are you going to use the decimal, or the positional value of each letter? Whatever method you use, the numbers are actually derived _from_ the Text, and no meaning has been imposed on it. However, one has, from the numbers derived, a basis for comparing passages. Those comparisons may be explored. It remains, however, to be seen whether this will be fruitful in some way, and how that might be the case.
If you treat words as numbers, then you may draw together words or passages that have the same gematric value— passages otherwise rather wholly unrelated. This may lead to startling or uncanny, and yet not _entirely_ imaginative insights.
In the jewish tradition, one fundamental rule is that such claimed insights may never contradict sound doctrine. They must fit with the rest of Judaism. Thus if, for example, your gematria leads you to conclude that there are many gods, you've gone astray. But working within the tradition, the gematric connections you turn up can give rise to interesting perspectives, or may somehow handsomely confirm religious intuitions.
The field where Hebrew gematria is practiced perhaps more than in any any other is of course the Torah. The Torah is a large, but not infinite set of words, each with a specific value. Even if you add the values of lexical roots, of the lexemes themselves without prefixes and suffixes, and of the words exactly as they appear in the Text with their prefixes and suffixes, the set is not unlimited. So the game has boundaries.
By the way, for a complete list of numbers and the words that correspond to them within the entire Torah, See Gutman G. Locks, _The Spice of Torah: Gematria_.
Space doesn't allow here a fuller discussion, but on yet another level, the Bible is full of patterns like those that James has noted above. It is interesting, but in no way surprising, that the words for "ark" each occur 26 times in Genesis and Exodus. I seem to recall reading somewhere that all the speeches of God in the Torah consist of a multiple of 17 words, but checking this is a project i keep meaning to get to. I checked a few examples, and they did. And even it isn't exactly true, one might still ask whether the exceptions form a pattern or otherwise seemed meaningful. The biblical writers were a lot more subtle than we often give them credit for. Number was only one instrument in their arsenal.
This leads to a discussion of Oulipo, or more properly, OuLiPo. Wikipedia informs us that Oulipo (_Ouvroir de littérature potentielle_, or "Workshop of Potential Literature") is [it still exists] a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques, including mathematical constraints. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members have included novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poets Oskar Pastior and Jean Lescure, and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud.
The group defines the term littérature potentielle essentially as "the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy". Classical poetry is actually one form of a "constrained writing technique", insofar as it constrains its discourse to certain patterns of lines, or rhymes, or verses, or syllables, and so forth. The oulipians did a lot with mathematical patterns and how they might be used in producing literature. The 26 occurrences of the significant word "ark", mentioned above, which appears in two different forms in two different books— the number of occurrences itself being significant— is another kind of "oulipian" constraint. About that, I have personally made some preliminary investigations into keywords in Mark and discovered that Mark seems to have used this technique in generating his text an astonishing number of times. But in fact it doesn't seem uncommon throughout Scripture.
I have a friend who has extensively studied the cantillation marks of the Hebrew Bible. I can point to all kinds of number games which in Scripture that seem to form definite patterns, or obey certain rules, or where numbers themselves fall into some pattern. This happens so many times that the only conclusion possible is that they are as deliberate as Isaiah's puns. Alberto Cavasola (see academia.edu) has pointed out the biblical writers' use of that specific set of primes known as "cuban primes" in the Bible's chronology. It's deeply theological. One notes all kinds of phenomena like this, even as an amateur.
A sacred text seems to be one that is true on all levels— it "works" not only as a story, but as music, as math, as poetry, as wisdom. We have barely understood the surface of the Bible.
My point here is that number may be used to impose on, or to read into a text all kinds of arbitrary "symbolism" based on presuppositions that are not part of the text itself. This is "numerology".
But it may also be used to discover connections within the text, which are made by the text itself, either by seeming chance or by design. Or it may be used by the text's author himself, either as a constraint within which to generate meaning, or as a means of packing more meaning into a text.
Who cares, for example, that the disciples caught exactly 153 fish when Jesus appeared to them at the lake, after the resurrection. Or is it of interest that 153 is not only the _summation_ of all the numbers from 1 to 17, but also the _product_ of 9 x 17? And that 9 + 17 = 26? And that 26 is the gematric value of YHWH, as James pointed out above. For have you ever looked at which words in the Torah have the gematric values of 17 and 153? There are several of each, but one and only one of each that is significant, and one and only one place where they occur together, and i do mean right together. It might be of interest to find out where that is. Since John was the one who wrote "153" the allusion to that one and only one passage may deepen our insight into what he was thinking about Jesus.
I'll leave you with the fun of finding out.