The Numbers Game!

The more you read the Bible, the more you notice that certain numbers keep showing up again and again. Israel was divided into twelve tribes, there were twelve Apostles;  Noah's Ark had to wait forty days of rain, Moses took the tribes out of Egypt by wandering forty years in the desert, and he, like Elias and Christ fasted for forty days. Carry this over into modern life, an you find that the  Catholic Church fast forty days during Lent.
  It all adds up once you know the system. What do all these numbers mean? People everywhere have always ascribed significance to numbers, counting things very carefully and making sure that the " "right" number of things happen the "right" number of times. It's the same everywhere you look: In China, ancient Egypt, Greece, Babylon, Rome, ancient Israel. every culture has its own distinctive set of "lucky" numbers, but the meanings ascribed to certain numbers seem to show up everywhere.  The number of something  is an easily grasped symbol, even to people who can't read, as immediate as colors  or basic shapes. And the Church has always used this widespread system of number-meanings
as an extra way of conveying information about God and the plan of salvation.
 Basically, these traditions started in the middle East, just after people first began writing things down. The Egyptians understood a great deal about geometry, apparently, but they didn't get carried away with it.  They just used it to measure every day things like land, beer, and the pyramids, , and then let it go at that.
 But the early Greeks, with their penchant for abstract thinking, thought that numbers were the key to all knowledge. They couldn't get enough. The first one who thought it all out was "Pythagoras,"  wo used the ratios and relationships of simple geometry to outline the structure of the universe, the way we use atomic theory today. He calculated the beautiful ways of harmony, how the notes sounded by chords make harmonic tones if the lengths of the chords are all interrelated in simple numerical ratios. We still use his musical principles today, because he was right.
 And his name still rings through grade schools all over the country because he was the one who came up with the Pythagorean Theorem (" the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides,") That Theorem is about the extent of his claim to fame today, that and the musical theories. But in antiquity, Pythagoras was seen as a combination Einstein and Mahatma Gandhi. He gave numbers a religious function; he apparently concluded that things weren't just measured by number but somehow caused by the number, and that you could see the mind of God at work by looking at the ways that number work.  He developed a whole philosopher-
" lover of wisdom"-- to refer to those who followed it.
His saying and the writings of his disciples had an immense influence on philosophy for centuries.
 Even Plato's Republic  records a lot about the ways of thought and life.
  It was largely through Pythagoras that the ideas of numbers as divinely meaningful took root in the Mediterranean world. There are no Greek equivalents of our figures 1,2,3,4, 5. and so on, which we got from the Arabs much later. Instead, the Greeks, the Babylonians, and other ancient people, just used letters of their alphabets to signify  numbers. Basically, their letter "A" meant 1,B was 2, an so on. This idea was  taken up later by the Roman's, for whom letters like X, I, V, M, and C served as numbers.  
 The most interesting effect of this kind of alphanumeric notation  is that sooner or later you get to thinking that words have a numerical value as well as a literal value-- you can compare texts not just for what they say, but also  what they add up  to. But the study of  number-- letter correspondences became a serious discipline about 300 years before Christ, when Alexander the Great conquered Babylon. After this ancient center of mathematical study opened its gates to the lively number-- games of the Greeks.  the study off of letters as numbers took on a whole new vitality, spreading quickly from one end of Alexander's  empire to the other. Before long, the 'Hebrews" combined this new hybrid science with their own ancient traditions of this kind and came up with something more systematic. and more mystical than anyone had ever known. before. Because the "Hebrews" also used letters as numbers, they could add up the numerical values of the letters of any word or subtract one word from another, just as you would subtract one string of numbers from another. A  numerical relationship words or phrases in the Old Testament made scholars think about possible mystical connections between them, which stimulated a great deal of meditation on the sacred texts.  It's often about as profound as a crossword puzzle, but sometimes it really does spark some spiritual insight.
 The Rabbi Simon the Just ( about 250 B.C.) noted that the word " Torah" ( faith) and the "Hebrew"  phrase for "deeds" ( works) 0f loving kindness both add up to 611-- which took as a sign of the parallel importance of faith and words, an idea that the Church would agree with, however you figure it. The principals of  number- letters had been active in Hebrew literature, for perhaps a thousand years before that. The writers of the Old Testament purposefully encoded significant numbers in the words that they used. For example, when we look at Genesis 14;14. When  Abram heard that his kinsman had been taken  prisoner, he called out trained men born in the house, 318,  and went in pursuit..."  Why 318 ?  Were there really so many men born in Abrams's house?  Maybe; but the number really refers to Eliezar, the only servant of Abram's that is known by name-- the letters of that name, in Hebrew add up to exactly 318. Similarly, when Abram became Abraham and Sarai,  became Sara, their "numbers" changed, associating them with a different set of phrases in scripture that, to the initiate, " explain"  the new roles they have to play in Gods plan. whole books have been filled with such correspondences. Whole libraries, have been filled with such books. After the first century, there was truly no end to the making of books of "gematria", because all educated people in the Mediterranean world knew the language of numbers. There's a coy little "Latin graffito" in Pompeii, for instance, that does this. " I love her whos number is 545," it runs, One of the Sibylline oracles  ( in early prediction) written in Christian times but purported to be by the female prophets of ( antiquity), announces the coming "Child of the great God" his way."
                             The whole sum I will name:
                               For eight ones, and as many tens on these,
                              And yet eight hundred
                               will reveal the name. Everybody in the audience would have understood the reference, because the name Jesus in Greek adds up to 888.