The Wonder Number Of The Bible

George Burnside

Wherever you go in the world you will find the Bible. It is the most widely distributed, most discussed Book. Homer has been translated into twenty modern languages, Shakespeare into forty, and all that Tolstoy declared into sixty tongues. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress has found its way into one hundred and eighteen different languages, but the Bible today is translated into well over one thousand different languages.

Like the wonders of nature, the Wonder Book is everywhere. That is not strange as they both have the same Author, and I plan to show that both the Bible and nature are built on the same wonderful mathematical plan, thus revealing but another proof that they both have the same Author.

As we draw nearer to history’s climax, the battle between truth and error will become more intense. With the fury of desperation the enemy will increase his war against truth “because he knows that he has but a short time.” Revelation 12:12. Error can only be overthrown by truth. Light alone can dispel darkness. Jesus, our Lord, used but one weapon when faced with the subtle temptations of the master-deceiver. That weapon was “It is written”. Matthew 4:4. The scriptures have out-reached, out-ranked, out-blessed, out-loved, out-looked, out-lifted and out-lived all other books and have weathered the storms of all ages. In these days when so many are staggering in the darkness of doubt and uncertainty, our protection against all delusions must be the Book of God. That alone provides the supreme test of truth. “To the law and to the testimony, if they speak not according to this word it is because there is no light in them.” Isaiah 8:20. God’s word is the standard of truth. God had made it so. You will recall that Jesus said, “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.” Luke 16:31.

Evidently God has given such conclusive evidence in His written word, that if this will not convince a person, nothing will. Again, Jesus our Lord said, “If you continue in My word, then are you my disciples indeed: and you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:31, 32.

The scriptures then can make you free, free from error as you know the Truth. Many are in slavery to the errors of the devil. The truth of this precious old book can free them, for it contains not only truth, but, thank God, it also contains life; for did not Jesus say, “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.” John 6.63. That is the reason why the Bible can change lives. The power of Christ to change lives flows through His word in converting, new birth power, as clearly stated in 1 Peter 1:23, “Being born again not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word of God which lives and abides forever.”

For many centuries students of the scriptures have noticed the significance of the numbers of the Bible, but in these latter times it has been discovered how closely the amazing and exceedingly marvelous construction of the Word of God closely harmonizes with the mathematical laws of nature.

“Number pervades nature, whether seen in weight, motion, time, force, distance, structure or vibration - everywhere the idea is suggestive of a Mind which counts, measures, weighs and regulates with minute and eternal purpose.” Number in Nature as Evidence of Creative Intelligence, by Edward White, page 21.

Number also pervades scripture. We shall compare the mathematical construction of the natural universe with the mathematical construction of the scriptures.

Beginning with the first book in the Bible, we read in Genesis that God told Abraham to number the stars if he was able. Here is the first mathematical problem, one which modern scientists have still been unable to solve. In the last book of scripture we are told to “count the number of the beast for it is the number of a man.” Revelation 13:18. In the first and last books we are told to count.

When we turn to that amazing mathematical prophecy of the longest time prophecy of the Bible, namely the 2,300 day prophecy, we find that the One speaking is named “Palmoni” or the “Wonderful Numberer”. Daniel 8:13 (margin). As it was the “Spirit of Christ” that spoke through and to the ancient prophets (1 Peter 1:11), this name evidently was one of our Savior’s many titles. The “Wonderful Numberer” has certainly given us a wonderful Book with the wonder number running all through its very structure. I cannot illustrate this more clearly than to give you here a copy of a letter which appeared some years ago in a newspaper.

“In the Sun, New York, Mr. W. R. Laughlin calls for a ‘Champion of orthodoxy’ to ‘step into the arena of the Sun’ and give him some ‘facts’. Here are some facts:

The first seventeen verses of the New Testament contain the genealogy of Jesus Christ. The genealogy consists of two parts. Verses 1-11 contain the genealogy from Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, to the Captivity, when the Jews ceased to be an independent people. Verses 12-17 contain the genealogy from the Captivity to Christ. Let us examine the first part of this genealogy.

“It’s vocabulary has 49 words, or 7 sevens, of which 42, or 6 sevens, are nouns; and 7 are not nouns. Of the 42 nouns, 35 - or 5 sevens - are proper names, and 7 are common nouns. Of the 35 proper names, 28 - or 4 sevens - are male ancestors of Jesus, and seven are not.

“The 49 words of the vocabulary are distributed alphabetically thus: Words under the first five letters of the Greek alphabet are 21 in number, or 3 sevens; under the second five letters, 14, or 2 sevens; under the next eleven letters, also 14, or 2 sevens. Again - these words have 266 letters, or 38 sevens; and these also are distributed alphabetically, not at random, but by sevens; thus words under the first three letters have 84 letters, or 12 sevens; under the fourth letter, 7; under the fifth and six, 21, or 3 sevens; under the eighth, 70, or 10 sevens; under the tenth, eleventh and twelfth, 21, or 3 sevens; under the thirteenth, 7; under the fifteenth to the twenty-first, 49, or 7 sevens; under the twenty-second, 7. It is thus clear that this part of the genealogy is constructed on an elaborate design of sevens.

“Let us now turn to the genealogy as a whole. I will not weary your readers with recounting all the numerical phenomena displayed therein. Pages alone would exhaust them. I will point out only one feature. The Greeks had no figures, but used instead the letters of their alphabet. Their first letter stood for 1, their second for 2, etc. Every Greek word is thus an arithmetical sum obtained by adding the values of its letters. The vocabulary of the entire genealogy contains 72 words. If we write its numeric value against each of these 72 words, and add them, we obtain for their sum, 42,364, or 6,052 sevens; and these 6,052 sevens are distributed alphabetically, not at random, but by sevens.

“It is thus clear that not only are the first eleven verses of this genealogy constructed on an elaborate design of sevens, but the entire genealogy is also thus constructed. One other feature: the 72 vocabulary words of this genealogy occur in 90 forms. If we add the numeric value of these 90 forms we get 54,075, or 7,725 sevens, with corresponding distribution into 7 alphabetical groups of sevens.

“Let Mr. Laughlin sit down and try to write some 300 words intelligently like this genealogy, and reproduce some numeric phenomena of equal or like design.

The passage which follows this genealogy, verse 18-25 of chapter 1, tells of the birth of Jesus Christ. It contains 161 words, 23 sevens. Its vocabulary has 77 words, or 11 sevens; and these 77 words occur in 105 forms, 15 sevens. Joseph is here addressed by the angel. Accordingly, of the 77 words, the angel uses 28, or 4 sevens; he does not use 49, or 7 sevens. Of the 105 forms the angel uses 35, or 5 sevens; he does not use 70, or 10 sevens. Alphabetically the 77 words of the vocabulary are distributed by sevens; the 105 forms are distributed by sevens; the 161 occurrences are distributed by sevens.

“The sum of the 77 numeric values of the vocabulary is 52,605, or 7,515 sevens; the sum of the numeric values of the 105 forms is 65,429, or 9,347 sevens, with corresponding alphabetical groups of sevens in both cases.

“The fact that the angel’s speech has also a scheme of sevens makes it a kind of ring within a ring, a wheel within a wheel. If Mr. Laughlin can write a similar story of about 160 words with the same or similar scheme of sevens in two months, he will do very well indeed.”

The second chapter of Matthew tells the story of the childhood of Jesus. It has a vocabulary of 161 words, 23 sevens, which occur in 238 forms, 34 sevens, and have 896 letters, 128 sevens, with a numeric value of 123,529, or 17,647 sevens; while the 238 forms have 166,985, or 23,855 sevens, each item having in turn alphabetical groups of sevens, which it would be too tedious to enumerate. This chapter consists of at least four logical divisions, and each division shows individually the same phenomena found in the chapter as a whole. Thus the first six verses have a vocabulary of 56 words, 8 sevens, etc. There are some speeches here: Herod speaks, the Magi speak, the angel speaks. Their numeric phenomena are so pronounced that though they are, as it were, a dozen rings within rings, wheels within wheels, each is perfect in, itself, though forming all the while only part of the rest.

“If Mr. Laughlin can write a chapter like this as naturally as Matthew writes, but containing in some 500 words so large a number of intertwined yet harmonious mathematics - if he can write a chapter like this in five years he will do very well indeed.

There is not, however, a single paragraph out of the hundreds in Matthew that is not constructed on exactly the same plan. Only with each additional paragraph the difficulty of construction increases, not in arithmetical but in geometrical Progression. For he contrives to write his paragraphs so as to develop constantly fixed numeric relations to what has gone before and what follows. Thus in his last chapter he contrives to use just seven words not used by him before. Or, again, he contrives to use just 140 words, 20 sevens, not used elsewhere in the New Testament. It is thus easy to show that Mr. Laughlin would require some hundreds of years to write a book like Matthew’s. How long it took Matthew I do not know. But how he contrived to do it between AD 30, when Christ was crucified (and the Gospel could not have been written earlier), and AD 70, when Jerusalem was destroyed (and his Gospel could not have been written later), let any sane man explain.

“Anyhow, Matthew did it, and we thus have a miracle - an unheard of literary mathematical artist, unequalled, hardly even conceivable. This is the first ‘fact’ for Mr. Laughlin to contemplate for a few moments.

“A second fact is still more important; Matthew uses just 140 words, 20 sevens, found nowhere else in the New Testament. How did he know that Mark, Luke, John, James, Peter, Jude, and Paul would not use those words? Unless we assume the impossible hypothesis that he had an agreement with them to that effect, he must have had the rest of the New Testament before him when he wrote his book. The Book of Matthew, then, was, written LAST.

It so happens, however, that the Gospel of Mark shows exactly the same numeric phenomena. Thus the very same passage which Mr. S. K. Waters calls so triumphantly in the Sun, ‘a forgery’ presents among others the following phenomena: It has 175 words, or 25 sevens. Its vocabulary has 98 words, 14 sevens; of these the Lord uses in His speech; 42, or 6 sevens. In like manner, of the 175 words in these last twelve verses of Mark, the Lord uses 56, or 8 sevens. And all this, too, with the usual alphabetical distribution into groups of seven in each case.

“And again, of the 98 words of the vocabulary, 84, or I sevens, are used before by Mark; and 14, or 2 sevens, are used here. Mark, then, is another miracle, another unparalleled mathematical literary genius. And as in the same manner in which it was shown that Matthew wrote last, it is also shown that Mark, too, wrote last, we have this fact established: Matthew surely wrote after Mark, and Mark equally surely wrote after Matthew.

It happens, however, to be an additional fact that Luke’s Gospel contains exactly the same phenomena as those of Matthew and Mark; and so does John, and so do James and Peter, Jude and Paul. We have then no longer two great unheard of mathematical literati, but eight of them, and each wrote after the other.

“7. And not only this: As Luke and Peter each wrote two books, as John wrote five, as Paul wrote fourteen, and it can in the same manner be shown that each New Testament book was written last, we have 27 books each written last. Moreover, it can be shown in the same manner that each of the 537 pages of the New Testament (in the Greek edition of Wescott and Hort) was written last. And the same can be shown to be the case with each of the paragraphs of the New Testament, of which there are at times several to the page.

“The phenomena are there, and there is no human way of explaining them. Eight men simply cannot each write last; 27 books, 537 pages, perhaps thousands of paragraphs, simply cannot each be written last. But once assume that One Mind supervised the whole, and the problem is solved as simply as an algebraic equation. But this means literal verbal inspiration of every jot and title of the New Testament. There remains only to be added that by precisely the same kind of evidence the Hebrew Old Testament is proved to be equally inspired.”

To the foregoing letter several replies were printed in the Sun, but not a single answer.

Turning to the Old Testament we find the Wonderful Numberer’s hand at work. In the opening chapter of the Bible and in its first verse we find seven Hebrew words and these seven words have twenty-eight letters or 4 sevens. The numeric value of three nouns in this verse “God”, “heaven”, and “earth” is exactly 777. The first three verses have fourteen letters, the last four words have fourteen letters, or 2 sevens; the fifth and sixth words have seven letters. There are in fact over 30 different combinations of seven in this first verse of the Bible. The setting apart of the “seventh day” of this world’s creation as a holy day is well known. In the words of a great Bible commentator:

“In six days the great work of creation had been accomplished and God rested on the seventh day, and sanctified it; because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.” All was perfect, worthy of its divine Author.

“After resting upon the seventh day, God sanctified it, or set it apart, as a day of rest for man. Following the example of the Creator, man was to rest upon this sacred day. God saw that man needed His holy Sabbath, even in Paradise. He needed the Sabbath and always will need the Sabbath to remind him more vividly of God and to awaken gratitude because all he enjoyed and possessed came from the beneficent hand of the Creator.” So to ever remind man of that holy seventh day Christ stamped seven all through the Scriptures in the most amazing way. In fact, the Hebrew word translated “week” means seven, because all their reckoning was from the Sabbath. Reminders of the seventh day were stamped all through their ritual. The week of weeks brought Pentecost (Leviticus 23). Their sacred year was a week of months (Leviticus 23). A week of years brought the Sabbatic year (Leviticus 25); while a week of weeks of years brought the Jubilee (Leviticus 25). The consecration of Aaron and his sons to the priesthood lasted seven days (Exodus 29:35). “Seven days thou shall make an atonement for the altar and sanctify it” (Exodus 29:37). The period of ceremonial uncleanness was often limited by seven days (Leviticus 12:2). Defilement from a running issue, or from an issue of blood, lasted seven days (Leviticus 15:13-19). The suspected leper was to be shut up for seven days and even after he was pronounced clean he was still to tarry in his tent another seven days (Leviticus 13:45). Miriam, on account of her leprosy, was shut out of the camp seven days (Numbers 12:14). The house or garment infected with leprosy was likewise to be shut up for seven days.

Defilement by contact with the dead also lasted seven days (Numbers 19:11), as also the purification of the men after the slaughter of the Midianites (Numbers 31:19).

The feast of unleavened bread was to last “seven days”. The feast of tabernacles also lasted seven days, “You shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days and you shall keep it a feast unto the Lord, seven days in the year; it shall be a statute forever in your generations; you shall celebrate it in the seventh month; you shall dwell in booths, seven days.” (Leviticus 23:36, 39).

At the siege of Jericho seven priests, bearing seven trumpets, marched round the city with the men of war, for seven days, and on the seventh day they went round it seven times, when the city fell and victory was won. The week with its concluding day, Sabbath, was therefore deeply engraved in various ways on the whole ritual and history of Israel. In fact, all through the sacred scriptures the number seven is stamped.

Thus we have some three hundred earthly Sabbaths, lining the road for the people of God, pointing each with outstretched hand, like so many guide posts, in the same direction, agreeing with overwhelming unanimity in their sacred testimony to the glorious fact that there “remains a Sabbath for the people of God.” Hebrews 4:9 (margin). Or as the Spanish Bible says, “There remains the Sabbath for the true people of God.”

Not merely in the books of Moses is this law of weeks to be traced. It pervades all and embraces not Jews only, but all mankind. Of the whole human race the words are true “The days of our years are three score and ten, and if by reason of strength they be four score years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow, for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” Psalm 90:10. Human life is a week, a week of decades - and the last decade, the evening of life, is the time of rest rather than action.

The last book of the Bible is likewise studded with sevens, as the Milky Way is studded with stars - Seven Churches, Seven Candlesticks, Seven Stars, Seven Angels, Seven Thunders, Seven Seals, Seven Trumpets, Seven Vials, Seven Last Plagues. The words: “Jesus Christ”, “Jesus”, “earthquake”, “follow”, “prepare”, “place”, “worthy”, etc., are used but seven times in Revelation as well as seven “blessings”, from “Blessed is he that reads and they that hear the words of this prophecy and keep those things which are written therein” (Revelation 1:3) to the seventh in Revelation 22:14: “Blessed are they that do His commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city.”

The God of the Bible is also the God of nature and it is a noteworthy and amazing fact that the same system of sevens is stamped on nature.

We have seven continents, seven seas, seven notes in music. It has been claimed that we change completely every seven years. Life is divided into seven periods - infancy, childhood, youth, adolescence, manhood, decline and senility, As Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It -

“All the world’s a stage
And all the men and women merely players
They have their exits and their entrances
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven stages ...”

The human body seems to be stamped with seven, it consists of seven main parts - head, neck, trunk and four limbs, seven in all. He is able to see, hear, breathe, smell, taste, eat and speak. He has two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and a mouth - seven in all.

If some may think this arrangement of sevens is merely accidental we would remind them that the same number or its multiples mark the period of gestation and the incubation of many birds. I read that the common hen sits three weeks, 3 x 7; the pigeon two, 2 x 7, after having laid eggs for two weeks, 2 x 7. The seal calves on the rocks and suckles its young for two weeks, 2 x 7. The ova of salmon are hatched in 140 days, 20 x 7. The hatching of the ova of insects occupies in a large number of cases intervals varying from two to six weeks. Here are but a few of many one could give. The ova of the glowworm occupy six weeks, 6 x 7 and. the mole cricket four weeks in hatching. The period of the humble bee in the larva is seven days. In day papiliones it is four weeks, 4 x 7; in moths six weeks, 6 x 7.

This mystical number seven is not confined to the vegetable and animal kingdoms, but I understand in the realm of chemistry, music or art, we find the number seven playing an important part.

Both sound and light are also subject to the law of seven. How has it come about, for instance, that the human ear responds to seven distinct intervals in a scale of one octave? In the rainbow there arc seven colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. An octave again.

Seeing that in all nature the number seven has a leading place we would expect the same in the Bible, the Wonder Book of the “Wonderful Numberer”.

Dr. Billinqer holds the opinion, with which Dr. H. Grattan Guinness concurs, than “man appears to be made on what we call the seven-day principle. Man’s pulse beats on the seven-day principle, for Dr. Stratton points out that for six days out of the seven it beats faster in the morning than in the evening, while on the seventh day it beats slower.” God made man on the seven day principle. Man needs a Sabbath. “The Sabbath was made for man” and God commanded man to keep it. This command cannot be broken with impunity for it is woven into his very being. He may sing: “Free from the law, oh happy condition” and say “I’ll do and rest as I please”. He might as well say of his eight-day clock, “It’s mine and I will wind it up when I please.” Unless it is wound according to the principle on which it is made, it will be a useless clock. So, man may ignore God’s laws but “whatsoever a man sows that shall he also reap.” Man breaks God’s laws and they break him. We cannot impose on God’s laws.

Truly in these careless days God has not left His Word to be the play thing of scoffers. The amazing fulfillment of those remarkable prophecies of the Book of God for ever silences every unbeliever who will face the facts. The investigation of archaeologists in Bible lands has forever verified the historicity of this precious old Bible of ours. And now the discovery of its mathematical construction bears witness that its author is the author of all nature. God is placing all this evidence for men “so they are without excuse.” Romans 1:20.

Will you not accept this wonderful Book of Truth today? Walk in its light, trust and believe on the Savior it reveals and someday soon you will enter the eternal home that it guarantees to those who follow Christ.

May God help you to do this and to do it now. Remember it may be now or never. What a tragedy if it was never.