Bible 04 – Cycles and Symbols

If we are to understand the Bible, we cannot ingore the context within which it was written. Just as science is the technology that shapes our worldview today, the authors of the Bible used symbology to shape their worldview. In order to understand scripture, we have to look through the eyes of these ancient writers and understand the technology they used to describe their world.

The ancients saw science and religion as one and the same thing, and they expressed their knowledge in symbolic language. Without the keys to this language, their knowledge is invisible to us, just as another civilzation would not be able to understand our technolgy if they did not understand our forms of scientific notation. So, let’s consider some of what we know about the symbolic language of the ancients.

Whereas we only use numbers to quantify things, for the ancients each number also had a symbolic meaning, which is to say that each number represented a principle or law of nature. The Greek philosopher Tahles said, “God’s first thoughts were in numbers.” He and the other early philophers saw a direct relationship between mathematical and spiritual truth.

When you combine the propensity to take numbers literally, as it is commonly done today, with the symbolic use of numbers as is found in the Bible, you come up with all kinds of ridiculous conclusions about what the Bible says. These ridiculous conclusions serve to discredit the wisdom of the Bible and lead us to believe that in order to accept what the Bible says, we have to separate our rational and intuitive aspects of mind. This “divorce” has literally torn the world apart. And if we do not admit our ignorance of the deeper wisdom of the ancients, it threatens to destroy it altogether,

The prime example of this is the current debate about the age of the earth. Because it says that the earth was created in seven days and that each day is as a thousand years to God, a Seventeenth Century minister calculated the age of the earth to be 6000 years. Because of this, a deep schism now exists between fundamentalists and scientists, which has led to important political polarizations regarding pollution and global weather patterns. But if we examine the symbolic meaning of the number 1000, these parts of the Bible suddenly take on three-dimensional qualities.

Since each number has its own symbolic meaning, representative of what we now call scientific principle, combining different numbers indicated the relationships between the principles they represented. The number one, in this instance, indicated unity, the condition in which there is no “other.” In modern scientific language, we would express this concept as an “integrated system,” one where everything has a functional relationship to everything else. But since you can have multiple integrated systems that don’t necessarily integrate with each other (but nonetheless could oppose one another), the ancient writers of the Bible modified the number one with their own type of exponential notation, the zero. Zero symbolically represents universality. Three zeroes indicate that the laws or governing principles of the universe are absolutely unified – the universe is an integrated system. “Know, O Israel, the Lord our God is One.” Jesus reiterated this principle when he said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Scientifically, we could say that mathematics is One. NASA uses the same math here on earth as it does to calculate the trajectories of spacecraft millions of miles out in space.

Forty is another number that stumps most theologians: forty days and nights of rain for Noah, forty years in the house of Pharaoh for Moses followed by forty years wandering in the wilderness, and forty days in the desert for Jesus. If you believe that God in fact wrote the Bible Himself, then forty must have been one of His favorite numbers! But forty is actually an exponential value of the number four, which symbolically represents the principle of crystallization or solidification. And because forty is always used in the context of time, we know that adding a single zero means that what we are really talking about is process. It also indicates that process has a cyclical quality to it, that it is ongoing. It happens in time, but it is not restricted by time. We know this as the spiral – each cycle of evolution places us one level higher than where we began. So, Jesus’ forty days in the desert is a story of the process he went through in order to prepare for his mission.

Forty weeks is the human gestational cycle. Four years is how long it takes to graduate from college, at which time we are “matriculated.” Four-year-olds reach a new level of independence from their mother, typically starting pre-school at that age. Interestingly enough, the grand cycle of time in Hinduism is the Yuga, which “lasts” 400,000 years. This, of course, was never meant as a literal length of time, because it is used in the context of eternity or timelessness – the symbolic number four raised to the level of one hundred, then placed in its cosmological context by raising that to the level of 1000. This points to the largest frame of reference, the ultimate or eternal interpretation of the symbolic meaning of the number four.

The number twelve symbolizes the Zodiac, the twelve aspects of the personality of God. Because of this, twelve also represents wholeness of being. When the Bible says that only 144,000 people will be allowed to enter into heaven, the writers assumed that the reader would know that they did not mean it as a literal number. Multiplying a number by itself, or squaring it (square = four), and then adding three zeroes to it, raises the meaning of the symbolic number twelve to the level of absolute universality.

This just barely scratches the surface of how symbols are used in the Bible, and it shows that our tendency to take them literally is a product of our current scientific mindset. Unless we understand that the teachings of the Bible were written in story form, and that the stories were written in symbolic language, we cannot understand the teachings themselves. We will always try to overlay our way of thinking onto theirs. So far, that really hasn’t worked very well for us.