PART II, ARTICLE VIII: NUMEROLOGY MADNESS, SECTION III

Soon after this, we are told that the first and last letters of each of the seven words, computed together, add up to the value of 1,393, or 199-7s. Why count the first and last letters of each word? Why not count all the letters except the first and last ones? Obviously, the first and last letters are counted in order to come up with all those sevens. 

Further on, we are shown that if we combine the particle ‘eth’ with the article ‘the’ used twice, we come up with a value of 406, or 58-7s. But why choose that particle and that article? And why double up on the article? Is doubling up on the article not the only way to make small parts of the sentence add up to a large number that is divisible by seven? This is an odd choice of things to add up from the word of God. And it is a deceptive way to do it.

Next, the last letters of the first and last words of the verse are said to amount to 490, which is divisible by many sevens. But why not choose to add up the first letters of the first and last words instead? Could it be that they would not amount to a large number that is divisible by seven? 

After this, fifteen features of Genesis 1.1, like the few that I have mentioned above, are said to issue forth such a manifestation of sevens that the odds of them manifesting like that by coincidence, are one chance in 33 trillion. The problem is that since the numerical wonders are the result of Ivan Panin’s cherry-picking, as I have pointed out, all this arithmetic proves is that manipulation by Panin, not the hand of God, has been the cause. And if Panin caused the wonder through manipulation, then the odds are no more than about one chance in one. When I was a boy, one of my uncles taught me a card trick that can make the trickster look like a genius simply by the selective questions that are posed. Panin’s numerology gimmick reminds me of that.

PART II, ARTICLE VIII: NUMEROLOGY MADNESS, SECTION II

Near the beginning of this PowerPoint, the number seven is said to have something to do with the idea of perfection. This claim is true; or at least the number seven is accorded special favor in the Bible. The number seven is clearly emphasized to manifest a pattern. There are seven days, seven seals, seven angels, seven trumpets, seven thunders, seven vials, seventy times seven, and so on. All of this is valuable because it is biblical. After mentioning that the number seven is prominent in Scripture, however, my friend did not draw attention to the sevens that are found in Revelation or something obvious like that. Here are some of the number patterns that he chose to focus on. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This verse contains seven Hebrew words, consisting of twenty-eight letters collectively. Twenty-eight divides itself into four sevens. The first three words have fourteen letters; and fourteen just happens to be seven times two. The three nouns add up to a value of 777, or 111-7s. That, in part, is the teaching. But what value is this information to us? People are supposed to believe that the Bible is the word of God because of this? What about the second verse? What about the third? Indeed, what about verse number seven? That one should be loaded with sevens, right? But what if the seventh verse contains more than seven Hebrew words? In fact, it contains seventeen words. I looked it up. Yes, seventeen has the number seven in it. But seventeen is not exactly the perfect number, is it? Nor is it divisible by seven. Does this mean that the Bible is imperfect? Does this mean that it is fallible? If we were to believe in Gematria numerology, and at the same time believe in consistency, is that not what might be suggested to our mind? How can verse number seven fail us like that?  

Not only do the first three words of his chosen verse have fourteen letters, which is double the amount of seven, but the other four have fourteen as well, which is double the amount of seven again. Fine, but does this not mean that the number fourteen should be special? Well, at least fourteen is twice as many as seven, I guess. But why not count the letters of the first four words together, and then the letters of the other three? Is it not because the values would not amount to fourteen that way? Then it says that the fourth and fifth words have seven letters, and that the fifth and sixth have seven letters too. Notice how selective this is. Why take the fourth and fifth and then the fifth and sixth? Why not the fourth and sixth? Or why not the first and third? Is it not because the number seven might not rear its magical head through those combinations?

PART II, ARTICLE VIII: NUMEROLOGY MADNESS, SECTION I

 

A friend of mine gave me a copy of a PowerPoint presentation that he had prepared for a course that he was on. The color, glitter, imagery, and mathematical subtlety made the presentation so close to compelling that I came close, for fear of committing iniquity, to never writing this critique of it.

So this friend showed me a PowerPoint presentation that he had made for a course that he needed to take. Then he gave me a copy of it to keep. Being a Christian, he wanted to show the teacher and class something from the Bible. So, for whatever reason, he chose to focus on an abstruse kind of ‘biblical’ numerology, which, as it turns out, is more heretical than biblical, though I confess to have been positively impressed when I first saw his presentation of it. 

The practice of assigning numerical values to letters may be traced as far back as the time of the Assyrian empire many hundreds of years before the time of Christ. The letter L in the Roman numeral system is equal to the number fifty. This is the idea. Assigning numerical values to letters in the Bible is a branch of Jewish mysticism known as Gematria. Alfred Edersheim informs us a little of what Gematria is. Gematria means ‘geometry’ or ‘calculation’ and is about ‘the numerical value of the letters in a word.’ Gematria is one of the many made-up rules of ‘Jewish traditionalism’—that traditionalism so often and so strongly denounced by the Lord in the Gospels. Gematria is a ‘rule’ that gives ‘free vent to every kind of fancifulness.’ This kind of numerology was used by Rabbis for the purpose of airing speculations and glossing over displeasing facts, like, for instance, the ‘objectionable idea of Moses’ marrying an Ethiopian’ (Alfred Edersheim, Sketches of Jewish Social Life in the Days of Christ, pp. 211, 212.) This information and judgment corroborated my appraisal of my friend’s PowerPoint project: The Mystery and Poetry of Numbers.

Some persons, like my friend, have mixed the arcane field of Gematria up with the fact that the Bible exhibits numerical patterns in what it tells us about. Moses was forty years in Egypt, forty years in Midian, forty days on Mount Sinai, and forty years in the wilderness, for example, which Old Testament pattern of hardship is continued by Jesus being tempted for forty days while fasting. There are numerous other numerical patterns. The tribes of Israel number twelve; Jesus chose twelve apostles; the crown on the head of the woman in Revelation 12 has twelve stars; the tree of life has twelve kinds of fruit; and the New Jerusalem has twelve pearly gates, twelve angels at the gates, twelve jeweled foundations, and stretches out to twelve thousand furlongs. This is an obvious pattern. It has nothing to do with letters of words having numerical values. The Bible exhibits number patterns for many reasons: because God is orderly; because patterns are beautiful; and because patterns make things easy to remember, which is important, for example, if we instance the number forty, for we might one day be desperate to seek out solidarity and solace in hardship, which is made easy by a search for this number in the Bible. So there is a bad kind of numerology; this is Gematria, for which use no basis can be found in the Bible. And there is a good kind of it; this is obvious in the repetitions of numbers, especially the numbers seven, twelve, and forty. When I refer to numerology in a bad light in this article, it is Gematria that I have in mind.  

So the premise of my friend’s presentation is that each letter of both the Hebrew and Greek alphabets has a numerical value. Keep that in mind, or this article will make no sense. His sources are Ivan Panin and E. W. Bullinger. I don’t know if this friend of mine knew about the nature and roots of Gematria when he put his project together. The word ‘Gematria’ is used in his PowerPoint, at least. In this critique of his PowerPoint presentation, I will assume that the numerical values that are submitted agree with whatever standard they were borrowed from. I will deconstruct his PowerPoint project sparingly, not exhaustively.

PART II, ARTICLE VII: THE USE OF VOICE AND COLOR IN POETRY, SECTION IV

As pointed out, the poem about the wheel barrow contains sixteen words: “so much depends/upon/a red wheel/barrow/glazed with rain/water/beside the white/chickens.” The full text of Isaiah 1.18 has thirty-four words in the King James Bible: “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” But, coincidentally, it has only sixteen words in the Hebrew, the same number as in the poem by Williams about the wheel barrow. The LORD, through his prophet, is as economical about the way of salvation as a frugal poet is about the pastime of a boy. The way of salvation is often compacted in few words in the Bible in order for a sinner to be saved by a glance. The reader’s eye can ricochet on a verse and have the substance of it pass through his eye and into his mind. What do we so often hear from saved sinners but that their change came about through quick and close contact with one single verse? Moreover, Isaiah 1.18 could have been even briefer than it is. There are two illustrations of transformation in it of virtually the same import: from ‘scarlet’ color to ‘white as snow’ and from ‘crimson red’ to the color of ‘wool.’ Without the second illustration, there would be only eleven words. God can present the way of salvation in eleven words. He can reduce it to that. A person has no time to read the Bible? Has he time to read one verse? Has he time to read part of a verse? Has he time for eleven words? He has no time to meditate on what he reads? Can he meditate on eleven words? He has lots of time to reminisce. But he has no time to reason with the LORD? We tend to talk a lot about our childhoods, don’t we? But do we reason with the LORD about everlasting-hood? Do we reason with the LORD about where we are ultimately going and how to get clean enough to get to an eternity in heaven instead of a lockdown in hell from which no escape will be possible?       

Williams was a poet who used color to convey feeling through a nostalgic voice. Isaiah was a prophet who used color to teach the way of salvation through the voice of the LORD. Like the poem by Williams, Isaiah’s verse is a sentimental monologue, full of tender feeling: “Come now…though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” The voice in the verse of a modern poet can soothe us; the voice in the verse of an ancient prophet can save us.

PART II, ARTICLE VII: THE USE OF VOICE AND COLOR IN POETRY, SECTION III

A writer often speaks in another person’s voice—almost all the time in works of fiction. But speaking by proxy occurs in non-fiction as well. This is the case from Genesis to Revelation, even when Job is voicing his side of the debate, for example, because all of Scripture is the word of God. The Spirit of God is not only breathed into Scripture. In some places, God speaks out from it to address the reader directly. The following Bible verse (Isaiah 1.18) is attributed to Isaiah, but it is the voice of God that we hear:

Come now, and let us reason together,

saith the LORD:

though your sins be as scarlet,

they shall be as white as snow;

though they be red like crimson,

they shall be as wool.

Whether this verse of poetry speaks to you or not will depend on your standing with God and how receptive he has made you to his word. As universal as this verse is, speaking as it does to each sinner in need of cleansing from sin’s pollution, the original correspondent was the southern half of God’s children, the kingdom of Judah. As did the poem by Williams, Isaiah’s words identify me. My sins were as scarlet and crimson but now are white as snow and wool. The voice of the LORD has gone out beyond Old Testament Judah and forward in time. I heard God’s voice of reason and I hear it regularly. Like a poet, Isaiah reaches beyond the grave in the words that he wrote, not merely to resonate through the voice of mortal man, but to reason and to save through the voice of God.

Unlike the poet, Isaiah did not use up a lot of stationery to compose his verse. God inspired; Isaiah wrote; the verse was completed. Like in The Red Wheelbarrow, Isaiah’s verse is colorfully qualified, and the same two colors are employed. Sins are scarlet and crimson, and then white as snow and wool. Instead of describing kinds of sin, Isaiah simply paints them red—the color of blood—the color of penalty and redemption, murder and sacrifice. Then suddenly he paints them white—the color of purity and righteousness. Sins are depicted as red and then white to convey the effect produced by atonement: the covering of sin with righteousness divine. Only by the shedding of blood are sins made white. The contrast of red and white will suggest pictures from the Bible: blood running over wool—even drops of blood on snow. In Isaiah’s day the lamb was led to the slaughter to cover the sins of Judah. When the lamb was cut, the blood spilled over the wool—a sacrifice made for sin. Red sins are dyed white in the crimson tide of a sinless lamb.

Sins are pictured red, Isaiah’s color for guilt; then they are pictured white, the color of purity. The change is effected through the blood of the innocent victim. By bleeding for the sins of the guilty, the innocent victim provides a pure covering for the sinner. The sinner becomes, in the eyes of God in the court of heaven, white like the lamb whose blood is the color of sin. From God’s holy perspective, sin’s penalty and the innocent blood must come together to atone for sin; atoning blood is required to reconcile man to God. It is the only medium through which sinners may be cleared of guilt. An innocent victim must become guilty red, the color of sin that needs whitening. Sins are turned white by the blood of a pure victim; the red stain of guilt is dyed white like snow through sacrifice. “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow,” the prophet says. “Scarlet in the Greek is called ‘dibasson’, because it is ‘twice dipped’, and the art of man cannot wash out the dye again. But though our sins are of a scarlet colour, God’s mercy can wash them away” (Thomas Watson, The Doctrine of Repentance, pp. 78, 79.)  

A Personal Lamb is prefigured for atonement, then, not only in animal sacrifices, but in poetic verses. Now the blood of Jesus Christ has done away with typical sacrifices; and thousands of new appeals to ‘reason together’ about this intersection of history have been composed in the forms of sermons and hymns by members of God’s Church. “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?/Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?/Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour?/Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?/Are you washed in the blood,/In the soul cleansing blood of the Lamb?/Are your garments spotless?/Are they white as snow?/Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?” (Elisha A. Hoffmann, Are You Washed in the Blood?) So fully did the pure Lamb of God suffer for sin that the apostle Paul says that on the cross he was ‘made sin.’ His scarlet blood covers guilt with whiteness; his blood, the color of sin, is the purifying element: the only way given by God, through grace and faith, to appropriate righteousness in exchange for damning iniquity. Isaiah 1.18 speaks of atonement; Jesus Christ is the atoning Word. The KING of KINGS and LORDS of LORDS is the only lasting solution for sin, for he is the final sacrifice for it, without benefit of which each and every sinner is doomed to be covered in his own red guilt forever. “He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still” (Revelation 22.11.) The Lamb of God is termed the ‘lamb to the slaughter’ in Isaiah 53. As prophesied, the pure Lamb was bled to turn red sins white. “And in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been slain” (Revelation 5.6.) By virtue of his immaculate blood, the unjust, the filthy, the unrighteous, and the unholy may be as white as wool and snow—as white as the righteousness of Christ in the eyes of a presently offended God. The verses surrounding Isaiah’s compacted poem on atonement are instructive for showing us some of the necessary connections and benefits that attend forgiveness (which forgiveness is on the ground of atonement), as well as the consequences that follow should the sinner refuse to reason with God. To ‘put away the evil of your doings’ (Isaiah 1.16) speaks of repentance. To ‘learn to do well’ (verse 17) is to gain understanding for doing good works, several of which are mentioned: as relieving the oppressed, pleading the widow’s case, and defending the fatherless. To be doing good works is a mark of having repented. He that is willing and obedient (verse 19); that is, willing to repent, willing to do good, and willing to have his sins made white ‘shall eat the good of the land,’ which land, spiritually considered, can be nothing and nowhere but heaven. He who chooses to rebel instead of reason ‘shall be devoured with the sword’ (verse 20.) As with the poem by Williams, Isaiah 1.18 hangs on its first words, “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD.” The Lamb’s blood can dye red sins white. But the sinner must be willing to reason with the LORD regarding the way of righteousness. The LORD desires to reason together. Does the sinner disbelieve in the doctrine of creation? There is an answer to that. “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38.4.) Does the sinner have a personal matter against God? “Produce your cause, saith the LORD; bring forth your strong reasons, saith the King of Jacob” (Isaiah 41.21.)

PART II, ARTICLE VII: THE USE OF VOICE AND COLOR IN POETRY, SECTION II

This modern poem will say little to some people. Perhaps, at first glance, it might seem simplistic and irrelevant. But this efficient poem will engage the memory of many a man who has lived in the country. 

If a poem does not identify you, relate to you, or speak within your range of knowledge, you may be helped by identifying the poet—by finding him out through an external source. The poem above identifies me as a boy; therefore I have not found it necessary to seek information from outside to settle the poem’s meaning. If my interpretation is askew, it will be due to lack of research; but no harm will be caused. A good poem can convey parallel interpretations. 

Someone ‘needs’ this wheel barrow badly. What is the wheel barrow like? Because the rain glazes on it, it is plain that the red wheel barrow is new. Because so much depends upon it, it may be that it was recently acquired to get a job done. Maybe it belongs to a boy who will depend upon it to make his summer’s wages. But the message, probably, is more carefree than this. It seems unlikely that Williams speaks as a detached observer, though that is possible. I believe that his description of the wheel barrow points back to his leisurely experience as a boy. The words, moreover, are words that a boy would use. The chickens, for example, are not called leghorns, but merely white. The plainest English is used to impress the reader with what the poet feels. The poet muses. He feels. Then he fashions a poem to share the feeling that his musing has dredged up. This poem, I have little doubt, is the product of reminiscence. It was not gotten right without pitiless pruning. The whole recollection is reduced to sixteen words, not one of them unnecessary. The wheel barrow, for example, is beside ‘the’ white chickens, not just ‘white chickens,’ indicating that other chickens might have been near, though not ‘beside.’   

The poet colors his poem in qualifications: the wheel barrow is red; the water is rain water; the rain water is glazed; all of this beside the chickens, which chickens are white. The feeling of the poem, however, hinges on the first three words: ‘so much depends.’ How exhilarating is the sight of a red wheel barrow to a boy: how it looks beside white chickens—a wheel barrow so new that rain water still glazes it! It is no longer raining, else the water would run, not glaze. So the boy is preparing to go out and work his wheel barrow in the fragrant air. There’s mud and rocks and puddles of water. So much depends on that red wheel barrow. To the boy, the happiness of the day depends upon it. What an easy pleasant life on his way to the barn with his shiny new wheel barrow.

Williams Carlos Williams died the year before my life started. Not long after he died, I became the farm boy that his poem calls to mind. If he was like most writers, Williams accomplished what he set out to do: reach beyond the grave to cause someone to feel. I do not know anything about his worldview. But I know that he was a sensitive man, at least during the composition of his Red Wheelbarrow. The voice in this poem is the voice of a boy inside a man. According to Robert DiYanni, “A poem in which a speaker addresses a silent listener is called a ‘dramatic monologue.’’’ (Robert DiYanni, Literature, p. 429.) Since every poem must address a silent listener, I would not set much weight on Mr. DiYanni’s scheme of classifying. Nevertheless, what he says does elicit the notion that Williams’ poem must be, if not a dramatic monologue, then a ‘sentimental’ one, given its nostalgic tone.

PART II, ARTICLE VII: THE USE OF VOICE AND COLOR IN POETRY, SECTION I

 

The involuntary association of words, objects, or persons with colors is called ‘synesthesia.’ As a boy, my synesthesia had mainly to do with girls. Each girl in my class at school had her own color. Some girls were black, others yellow, one was orange; there was even a blue girl and some silver ones. Girls did not dye their hair back then; and the girls in my school, all of them, were Caucasian. So my mental images of girls as crayon colors had nothing to do with race or dye. Natural tones and hues evoked girls’ true colors. How spectacular it was to have these crayon girls distributed randomly about the room! As a man, my synesthesia has mainly to do with words. And as a Christian, it has mainly to do with biblical words. One day awhile ago I read and liked a poem that was overtly colorful. This triggered my synesthesia so much that biblical associations were automatically suggested. That is how I came to write this unusual article. 

I faintly remember the first poem that I wrote. It was a sentimental tribute to a black farm cat that we called Bob. Typical of amateur poetry, the element of rhyme predominated. My teacher, not expecting much and pleasantly surprised by my little strength, scored me ten out of ten for that project. No poetry assignments were to follow, unfortunately. I thought infrequently of poems after that, and grew up.

It wasn’t until about the age of thirty that, as a man set apart, I thought of poems again. I had been reading the Bible in a desperate search for truth while intermittently exposing myself to literature. During the couple of months that it took me to read the Bible for the first time, I was undergoing an awakening to literature. In my daily perusal of the Scriptures, I discovered incomparable poetry. No poetry in the philosophical mold can equal Ecclesiastes; no poetry in the form of devotion is comparable to the Psalms; no poetry in dialogue can arrest us like the book of Job; no poetry is as colorful, dreadful, and multi-layered as the book of Revelation. To further slake my thirst for poetry I bought several anthologies and I read their poems from beginning to end. I read commentaries. I studied technique and structure. I learned how to identify things like unrhymed iambic pentameter, which stretched my patience and failed to stick. I tried to read Milton and even Chaucer, gave up, and then tried again. Despite the impediments of complex rules and archaic language, I relished my new exploits. I had been awakened. It may be that my awakening was part of the illumination that the Holy Ghost imparts in the born again experience; I am not sure. But I still think that the awakening preceded the regeneration. Notwithstanding my uncertainty as to the sequence of these divine acts or how or if they were mingled and mixed, I know that around that time I was unexpectedly blessed with a palate to taste the written word. Until this happened, poetry was no more attractive and comprehensible to me than calculus was. Unless the poem was straightforward and simple like the one that I wrote as a child, I did not understand it any better than a poet knows how to pound sand. I do not mean by the awakening that I became instantly or particularly able to interpret poems. I mean that I could now detect in the poem the importance of beauty and philosophy to the poet. The poet was not being purposely obscure, after all. He was trying to convey his idea as concisely, truly, and prettily as possible. He was trying to convey the ideal of his idea. I do not mean that my awakening shed light on poetry of the postmodern sort, however, for no one can be awakened to see something sensible in lines that were never meant to communicate sense. Every thinking person will see nothing but randomly written words or phrases in postmodern verse, for this kind of poetry is written to disclose whatever the reader wishes to see in it, and therefore, no certain idea. So I recognized that the poet had a distinct outlook that he wished to make known and that to some degree this outlook I could now perceive. I further noticed that even when the poet spoke through a voice that was not his own, he was revealing something about his beliefs. Each person writes, after all, what his mind dictates it is mannerly for him to compose. One cannot hide from responsibility by speaking in the voice of another. Is the ventriloquist not responsible for what his dummy says? The poet’s voice is a significant factor, if not the chief one, in determining the thrust of a poem. I am not referring to the voice that conveys the tone of a poet’s work as a whole. I refer to the specific voice that speaks out from the particular verse—the voice chosen by the poet to tell his poem. For example, in a poem the poet may speak as a soldier, a father, or the boy that he used to be; or he may speak for someone else entirely. It does not take the reading of his whole body of work to confidently insist that the voice of Leonard Cohen may be fairly coined as indecent spirituality, or devotional indecency. That is his voice generally considered, even though this or that poem of his, taken strictly in context, might not exhibit this voice.  

So to interpret a poem, the poem’s voice must be identified. Where the poet is coming from must be determined. In the poem that I wrote in grade five or so, I spoke in the voice of a boy. In the following poem by William Carlos Williams, the voice is that of a man about being a boy. Perhaps it is the voice of Williams himself:

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

(Robert DiYanni, Literature, p. 491.)