Abarim Publications' online Biblical Greek Dictionary
επτα
The word επτα (hepta) is the cardinal number seven, but it needs to be remembered that the ancients did not live in an arithmetically accurate world such as ours. Most Greek numbers were actually words (such as our word επτα, hepta, meaning seven) and only rarely the Greeks wrote their numbers using single Greek letters to represent single numerical digits — see for instance the famous number 666 in Revelation 13:18, which is spelled χξς (ch-x-s). But in each case, all Greek numbers looked like words and were mostly treated like words: fuzzy and subject to poetic license. This in turn meant that daily calculus was more of an art than science — the reason why young Asian children are usually better at calculus than their Western colleagues is that Asian languages represent numbers more consistently and more conductive of calculus than Western languages. When children learn to think in numbers, the advantage shrinks. And when Europeans adopted Arabic numerals, the Renaissance commenced.
Unless the context was clearly arithmetical (like: you owe me 2 bits for 4 apples), in Greek texts numbers came with a symbolic value that was similar to that of regular words, and were likewise subject to experience. An army of "ten-thousand men" may have actually consisted of 6754 enlisted troops but nobody cared about the number 6754 and only about the colossal threat this army posed. In our modern world, large round numbers still have the symbolic meaning of "a whole lot", but in the Greek world, smaller numbers too had meaning beyond their arithmetic nature. This has led many an aspiring prophet down the garden path of numerology, only to find that this garden path is rather steep, short and decidedly inanimate of termination. That's not to say that there's nothing there; it's just to indicate that even the meaning with which numbers are charged require a controlled, contained and inspired approach.
The Hebrew word for seven is שבע (shiba'), which stems from a verb that means both "to be seven" and "to make an oath" (hence the name Elizabeth). It's also spelled identical to a verb that means to saturate (people with food or the earth with rain). Seven is the number of days in which God creates reality — because, no, the creation week is not the first week long ago but the grand super-structure of all evolution across all the ages; whatever evolves naturally, naturally evolves via seven stages (see for more our study of Genesis 1) — and by using the number seven, a Biblical author appears to mostly want to refer to the entirety of any natural cycle of growth or evolution that stands on any previous natural cycle of growth or evolution — hence the seven daughters of Jethro of Midian (Exodus 2:16); the seven pillar of wisdom (Proverbs 9:1); the seven deacons of the church (Acts 6:3; themselves an obvious nod to the proverbial Seven Sages of Greek tradition); the seven churches of Asia Minor (Revelation 1:4); and so on.
Our word επτα (hepta) meaning seven occurs a whopping 89 times in the New Testament, see full concordance, and from it come:
- The cardinal number εβδομηκοντα (hebdomekonta), meaning seventy. It's the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word שבעים (shib'im), which essentially is the plural of שבע (shiba'), meaning seven. This is rather striking, of course, because it seems to suggest that the Hebrew number sense may not have been always perfectly decimal (our English -ty indeed relates to "ten" so that the word "seventy" literally means "seven tens"), but rather based on squares, so that the word שבעים (shib'im), sevens, may have originally referred to "seven sevens" (an idea or ideal rather than some specific arithmetic amount).
In strictly decimal systems, seventy is seven times ten, and the Greek word for ten is δεκα (deka). Our word εβδομηκοντα (hebdomekonta), meaning seventy is used 5 times in the New Testament, see full concordance, most strikingly as the "seventy" whom Jesus sent out into the towns he would visit (Luke 10:1, 10:17). In modern folklore, Jesus is often depicted as a kind of wandering sage with twelve adoring disciples, but his operation obviously far exceeded that. His funding came almost directly from the state treasury (Luke 8:3) and his later spokesman Paul was deemed important enough to actually be granted audience with the Caesar (Acts 25:12), who at that time ruled about 50 million people, all wanting to have a word with him.
Note that our word εβδομηκοντα (hebdomekonta) was also (part of) the original name of what in Latin came to be known as the Septuagint: the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. As we discuss much more elaborately in our article on the name Jesus: there are certain things that the Hebrew language does that Greek (or Latin or English) cannot do. And those things, those innate qualities of the Hebrew language, are precisely those things that made Hebrew, and only Hebrew, suitable to be the cradle in which the Word of God could be deposited.
For someone born in the intellectually sophisticated world of Greco-Roman paganism (and that includes our modern Western world), it is entirely impossible to spontaneously discover the God of Israel — to give a hint: God is One, so unity if divine. This is why God is the God of love, of knowledge, of law, of order, of language, of wisdom, of life. He is the God of the equilibrium in the biosphere, of the law of conservation of energy, of the singularity that was never compromised. God is why all things that exist work together, while their working together is not a thing that exists per se or a priori but only as a thing that can be found by those who love God, who is One (Romans 8:28). But that in turn means that God does not exist, because if he would exist, he would depend on existence and existence would be greater than he. Instead, existence depends on him and he is greater than it. The Oneness that makes existence what it is, and that makes all existence possible, has primality over existence, and does, therefore, itself not exist. It will though, when all the world is One (Revelation 21:22-24).
And even if a native Greco-Roman pagan sets out on one's personal journey to find God (i.e. to bring God down into existence), she will be quickly picked up by any of the many predators that patrol the shores of need looking for an easy meal (i.e. some gullible wallet to sell nonsense to). But the step from Greco-Roman paganism into the Septuagint is far less formidable, because the Septuagint itself is pagan (because it's not One, and God's not in there). But it's a great deal more consistent and unified than any traditional many-gods world view. Anybody who sincerely seeks the God of Israel, may use the Greek texts as a stepping stone toward the Hebrew language, and find the God of Israel where he set up shop: in the Hebrew Bible. The purpose of the Septuagint as well as the New Testament is to guide people from the outer darkness to the inner sanctum of the Temple. The Greek and Latin Bible is the Temple's outer court, where many a merchant aims to lighten wallets and burden souls and many more dupe the gullible with pagan nonsense. But it's also the place where a small trickle, a single file of determined souls, wriggle their way up to a small door in the far end of it all, and enter the priestly court of Hebrew, where God is seated between the cherubim.
What the Septuagint and the New Testament are most emphatically not for is to promote the idea that Greek or any translation is good enough and does the trick. It doesn't. It does not for the same reason why you can't run a car on cool-aid or appreciate a painting by using your ears. It simply doesn't work. If you want to put a man on the moon, you must use mathematics. If you want an orchestra to perform your latest symphony, you must use notes. If you want to meet God, you must enter Hebrew. Someone who seeks communion with God but does so stubbornly in a language other than Biblical Hebrew is like the wife who tells her husband: "I slept with the neighbor but I was thinking of you the whole time." All this is illustrated by Ezekiel in his famous vision of the Seventy elders of Israel, who were doing vile things, each in front of his idol. The filth they were engaged in was translating the Hebrew Bible (into Aramaic, at the time) in order to replace it, and replace it by a graven image that "represented" it. A very bad idea. In fact, it's the mother of all bad ideas (or its father, if you will). Anyone who considers becoming an idolator should first ask the question: with what may we compare One or even unity? What might represent it? What might replace it and be even better?
The number seventy is the symbolic number of the "nations" of the world: there are seventy names recorded in the Table of Nations (Genesis 10:1-32), which correlates to seventy main language groups (there were no states back then, so a land or country was the same as its language basin). The purpose of God's covenant with Abraham, of course, was not anybody's private salvation (that's a Greco-Roman ideal) but the salvation of the entire world with everything in it (Genesis 12:3, Isaiah 2:2-4, Ephesians 1:10). The world will only be One when it is wholly governed by God's Law (Micah 4:2), which is the perfect Law of Liberty (James 1:25), which cannot be enforced but has to be voluntary and lovingly ascended to (Zechariah 8:23). This is why "God set the boundaries of the nations according to the number of the children of Israel" (Deuteronomy 32:8, see Genesis 46:27).
From our word εβδομηκοντα (hebdomekonta), meaning seventy in turn derives:- The adverb εβδομηκοντακις (hebdomekontakis), meaning "seventily" (or "seventy times"; it's a word like "twice", which means "two times"). In the New Testament this word occurs only in Matthew 18:22, and in the Septuagint it only occurs in Genesis 4:24. These two instances are obviously related and their contexts each other's antithesis.
- The adjective εβδομος (ebdomos), which is the ordinal number seventh. This word is used 9 times; see full concordance.
- The adverb επτακις (heptakis), meaning "sevenly", or seven times. Like the number seven itself, this number appears to also refer to a wholly complete process. Someone who sins "sevenly" (Matthew 18:21) is basically leading the entire process of his life off the deep end and into perdition. Someone who "sevenly" does something wrong, simply is like that and will not ever change. Jesus' response of seventy times seven forgivenesses is not about numbers but about intensity. Someone who's entirely messed up cannot be saved by counteracting every single failure with a corresponding remedy, but by massively overwhelming that person by the consistent application of a vastly more stable and fruitful lifestyle. This adverb is used 4 times; see full concordance.
- Together with the adjective χιλιοι (chilioi), meaning thousand: the cardinal number επτακισχιλιοι (heptakischilioi), meaning seven thousand (Romans 11:4 only).
| Greek numerals from one to ten | |||||||||
| one | two | three | four | five | six | seven | eight | nine | ten |
| εις (heis) | δυο (duo) | τρεις (treis) | τεσσαρες (tessares) | πεντε (pente) | εξ (hex) | επτα (hepta) | οκτω (okto) | εννεα (ennea) | δεκα (deka) |