Why is 7 significant in the bible

A woman attending synagogue, who was made sick by a demon for eighteen years, is released from her bondage Luke At a Pharisee's house eating a meal with the host and several lawyers, Jesus heals a man with dropsy Luke Jesus heals a man born blind at the pool of Siloam John Ask a Question! The Meaning of Numbers: The Number 7 Used times 54 times in the book of Revelation alone , the number 7 is the foundation of God's word. Did Job suffer because he was self-righteous?

What do colors mean in God's word? Dictionary of Bible Names and Places. What was Jesus' greatest miracle? What does a rainbow symbolize? Important Cities of Ancient Israel. Genesis tells us that God created the heavens and the Earth in six days, and, upon completion, God rested on the seventh day Genesis 1 ; Based on this cycle of work and rest, God commands us to also labor for six days and then complete the week by resting on the seventh day, the day God set apart as the holy Sabbath Exodus The number seven also denotes completion at the Crucifixion, when Jesus spoke seven statements in agony from the Cross at the completion of His earthly duties:.

In the context of perfection, Jesus spoke in a grouping of seven when He was asked how we should pray Matthew Hallowed be thy name; Thy Kingdom come; Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven; Give us this day our daily bread; Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us; Lead us not into temptation; and Deliver us from evil.

Jesus again spoke in a grouping of seven when He used seven metaphors to describe Himself as the path to salvation, the perfect reward for a good and faithful servant.

Jesus tells us He is:. The bread of life John ; The light of the world John ; The gate to salvation John ; The good shepherd John ; The resurrection and the life John ; The way, the truth, and the life John ; and The vine John Likewise, when the prophet Isaiah described the coming Messiah, he listed seven qualities that the Savior would embody Isaiah The number seven is also linked to exoneration and healing.

Deuteronomy tells us that on every seventh year, the Israelites were to cancel all the debts they had made with each other and free their slaves Deuteronomy , In the context of healing, the prophet Elisha referenced the number seven when he directed Naaman the leper to bathe in the Jordan River seven times to be healed 2 Kings , Moreover, we see a link between seven and healing in the seven healing miracles that Jesus performed on the Sabbath, or, the seventh day of the week.

Jon: And then you get to day seven, God rests on the seventh day. And that one really stands out and Tim: That's right. In other words, the seventh day is part of Maybe think of a pyramid. Forget Lego blocks. Think of a pyramid. Tim: Well, maybe a pyramid made of Legos. I don't know. But the seventh day is like the top piece. It's the most visible and prominent, but it is actually one piece of a whole superstructure of networked patterns of time.

And so the smallest block is day and night. The daily repetition of the Shema, which corresponds to the daily morning and evening sacrifice in the temple, which corresponds to the daily maintenance of the lights, the candles of the menorah in the holy place.

Tim: We'll talk at length about it. Because there's seven of those lights in the holy place. Day one gives you the most basic little Lego block. Day four, within the scope of one year, it tells you all of the seven larger blocks that make up the whole years' worth of sacred time. Day seven points to the seventh day, which connects to the seventh year, which connects to the seventh time seventh year.

And so you put day one, four, and seven together, Genesis 1 is not just telling you about what kind of world I'm living in, it's giving you as a Israelite reader seeing that your life of worship rhythms is woven into the fabric of the universe.

I' don't know if quite said it that way before. Tim: What else would it mean? Because this is the first chapter of a book that's going to go on to tell you about all these things in the course of the narrative. Tim: Totally. At least when this came into existence. Nowadays, it's a much wider audience. But the awesome There's by whom these texts were written and for whom the first generations read it, they're seeing their own worship patterns reflected in the structure of Genesis.

And surely that's part of what it's for. Remember the opening line of Genesis 1? God created the skies and the land. Genesis , little epilogue, thus we're finished - the sky is in the land and all their host. And then what you get next is three lines of seven words about the seventh day. Tim: "And God completed on the seventh day the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from his work which he had done.

And God blessed the seventh day and he made it holy. Followed by a final summary clause because on it, he rested from all his work which God created to do, which links "the create" second last word there is it back is "create" which links you all the way back up to the first line of "create. Genesis , you get two times seven words. Now here we are at the last little stanza, and you get three times seven words with a little ski-jump sentence that launches you with the word "create" all the way back up to the beginning again.

And then you go, "Oh, I guess I'm supposed to reread the chapter. Isn't this amazing? Tim: No, but it's the God completes his work on the seventh day, herested on the seventh day, he blessed the seventh day. You get a little triad verb. Then you get a repetition. Why did he bless it and make it holy? Because on it, he rested. It's the only line in the conclusion that tells you why he blessed and sanctified it. So it stands out of a sequence of main sentences. Dude, we're just getting started on sevens.

Tim: Yeah, totally. People have known this for a long time. There was an Italian Jewish commentator, Umberto Cassuto, who has a majestic commentary on Genesis Here's some other ones. We've already mentioned some of these. They're seven words in Genesis There's 2 x 7 words in Genesis There's seven paragraphs in the seven days.

The concluding seventh day has three lines that have seven words each. Each of the keywords in Genesis are repeated in multiples of seven throughout the rest of the story.

So God appears 7 x 5 number of times. Tim: Land appears 7 x 3 21 times. Skies with heavens appear 7 x 3 times. So skies and land each appear 21 times. Tim: The phrase "light and day" appears 7 times within day one. The word "light" appears 7 times within day four.

The word "living creature" appears 7 times within days five and six. The phrase "and God saw that it was good" appears 7 times. This is interesting.

God speaks 10 times. Can I think I've got speaking, and the other times, 10 times that are going to be important? And in the book of Deuteronomy - did you know this? The phrase "ten commandments" is never used in the Hebrew Bible. Tim: God speaks 10 times. In other words, the phrase "and God said" appears ten times, but seven of those times are commands, "let there be.

So even within the ten, you get seven. Cassuto concludes this: "To suppose that all these appearances of the number seven are mere coincidence is not possible. This numerical symmetry is the golden thread that binds together all the parts of the section. Whoever organized this narrative wants to grind into, bur into our psyche the symbolic importance of seven as a sign of completeness and wholeness.

But also of seven as the culmination of a journey of one through six building up to seven. Because think about day one, day two, it's all building towards something. The light and the waters from the waters and the land.

Are we done? No, we're not done. We need to fill it with creatures. So we get the lights and we get the sky and the sea creatures. Are we done yet? No, we need the land and then humans who rule over all of it. But even the sixth day is not the culmination. It's that seventh day, which then sticks out Seven gains two meanings here: completeness and wholeness, but then also a journey towards wholeness building up to it.

That's helpful. I've never said it that way before. But I think that's right. Tim: In Genesis 1, seven, develops two key symbolic associations. One of them is that the seventh, one through seven all together is a symbol of completeness. Think about how days one through seven work together as a whole.

It's like the beautiful whole cosmos is a seven. But then also, the journey to get to that completeness requires you to go through 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. So then it's about a linear journey towards completing. Seven is the complete whole. Counting up to seven is a journey to reach the complete whole. In a way, we're back to creation, the wholeness of creation, and the liberation from chaos and death and slavery Jon: One is that there's a sense of order and completion and God is in charge of all of the times.

Jon: And because of that we should remember that we're not masters of our own time. But then the other idea is that the purpose of time is to culminate and rest. Jon: And when we're controlling our time, when we're fighting, we're using our own energy to fight against darkness and disorder.

There's also the sense of Sabbath, which is God will do that for you. The seventh day is about the complete harmonious order of God's world, the journey to the seventh day starting from darkness and disorder journeying 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 is about the journey from darkness and disorder into that completeness and harmonious whole. And so the seventh day contains both of those nuances.

It'd be good to develop a shorthand for that. Maybe one is completeness and the other one is Tim: I mean, liberation, which is importing the Exodus into it, but that's where it's all going.

In retrospect, Genesis 1 is about a kind of exodus of creation out of the darkness and disorder into Tim: Liberated into completeness. Oh, there you go. Liberation leading to completeness. But liberation and completeness are Tim: That's one main thing about Genesis 1 is think of where we start. And that sets the table for clarifying what does it mean for God to Shabbat, to cease and rest? Jon: So we're going to talk about God resting and what does that mean. Before we get into that, why seven?

Why the number seven as the number for completeness? Why not the number nine? It could have been nine or fifteen or three. Those all would create nice symmetry as well. Tim: Yeah, three is a nice symmetry. In fact, it's simpler than seven, isn't it? Actually, I had a hard time finding resources in terms of ancient historians for any kind of consensus on the matter. However, the most repeated connection in the whole thing is actually phases of the moon.

So a lunar cycle is - and here I'm quoting from an older work by a guy with a last name Farbridge wrote a classic work called Numbers Symbolism in Biblical and Semitic cultures. The lunar cycle is Tim: The biblical Hebrew word for month is "Chodesh" and its way of talking about the moon cycle - the month.

So you break that number down and what you get is a lunar month is - what? A lunar month is essentially Tim: What you often find is ancient calendars Semitic and ancient Babylonian calendars that do a number of cycles of seven and then they have different ways to make up for Tim: Exactly.

What you can also do then is instead of using the moon, do lunar cycles, which is what modern Western calendars are based off of lunar cycle. Tim: That actually gets you a little cleaner. Because essentially you can do a solar year and then every four years you just have to add one extra day. Jon: And then every like thousand years, you don't skip that leap year.

Then because of that, we can stay on track for one year. Tim: Well, there you go. Here's something fascinating. That's true. Ancient historians in biblical scholarship have been trying to trace back the origins of the Sabbath practice in ancient Israel. And so it's true they can spot certain cycles of time like an ancient Sumerian or Babylonian culture that use a seven structure somewhere but never as consistently as in the Jewish calendar.

In the Jewish calendar, it's all about sevens. Actually, the Sabbath cycle is independent of the moon cycle. The Sabbath doesn't follow the moon. And so then some people debate, well, did it originally follow the moon cycle and then eventually it diverged from it?

But by the time you get to the shape of the Hebrew Bible, the final shape on the Second Temple period - again and always it's like a quilt - is organized way older materials. But the final shaping of the collection is second temple, then, even by that time, the seven-day cycle independent of the moon cycle is ancient even but for the Jewish people who are putting together the Tanak. In other words, the Sabbath cycle as a cycle of seven doesn't coincide with any natural phenomenon.

Tim: Nope. Which means that sometimes, there are some of Israel's feast days that connect with the first day of the month, and that stays independent. Like Rosh Hashanah is the first day of the seventh month of the religious calendar.

And sometimes that's a Sabbath, sometimes it's not. Jon: It's interesting to think about how at some point in human history, it just became a normal We have the, you know, the sun and the moon of stars, but even so, the sun creates the days and that's really obvious. That's obvious. But then you watch us lunar cycle, why break that up into four weeks? Someone had to just decide like, "You know what, it makes the most sense for us to repeat our lives in a pattern of seven-ish?

Tim: Well, the strict seven-day cycle is the ancient Israelite Jewish thing that passed into Western culture through Jewish Christian tradition. Babylonians used sevens partially but not consistently, not universally. Their calendar was not like the Jewish calendar. I haven't done the homework here in terms of ancient Greek and Roman calendars. Here's something. You and I have grown up in a culture where the seven day week is taken for granted.

We don't even understand this religious tradition, the Jewish Christian tradition was a minority ethnic-religious group for most of its earliest history. The way they operated in their calendar was at odds with the world around them and their ways of accounting for calendar. And as we can't even imagine that. Jon: If you lived around Jewish people, and you're walking around and they'd be like, "Hey, it's Sabbath.

Think of why what we're most visible to the Canaanites or Greeks and Romans that would make Israelites and Jews stick out. Kosher food loss, circumcision, especially in the Greek and Roman era where everybody hangs out at the public pass, all the men, whether you're circumcised or not.

It's public knowledge. And then calendar, they don't work. And so especially in the Greek and Roman era, the Sabbath practice earned in propaganda or anti-Semitic propaganda, ideas that the Jews are lazy. This is where that comes from.

Eventually, in the Roman Empire, Jews gained special exemptions for taxes and legal status as a legitimate religious group. So it was legal and acceptable that didn't work, and could pay certain taxes to Jerusalem.

But it still was like in eyes of their neighbors they just are kooks. Jon: Making up the meaning of your calendar is kind of like November. You know like where everyone just grows a mustache, and it's like, "Why are you doing that?

It's November. This is a made-up thing.