BIBLICAL SYMBOLIC NUMBERS

¨     Thomas 52
 His disciples said to him, "Twenty-four prophets have spoken in Israel, and they all spoke of you."

This chapter intends to give an impression of the vast scale on which number symbolism is used in both the Old- as the New Testament Bible books. It is not the intention to give a complete overview of all symbolic numbers mentioned in the Bible, because this is not the intention of this article and apart from this, also because there are simply to many numbers mentioned in the Bible. Anyone that has ever opened a Bible knows that there are books in which almost more numbers than words appear. The genealogic registers like in the one of Adam in Genesis 5 or the extensive enumerations in the book of “Numbers” are definitely worth studying, however the quantity of numbers mentioned is so overwhelming that it is very difficult to draw conclusions from these examples. The logical coherence is missing and for that reason these numbers are prone to multiple interpretations. For this reason this chapter will concentrate on the most known and accepted symbolic numbers that are mentioned in the Bible, trying to provide logical explanations for their popularity. Through the discussion of these numbers it will become clear how extensive and symbolically important they were for both Jews and Christians.

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