PART II, ARTICLE VIII: NUMEROLOGY MADNESS, SECTION IV

After this we are told that the number thirteen signifies sin and rebellion. Why not grant that it does? Joktan is singled out for special consideration here because he is the thirteenth in the order of Shem’s descendents (Genesis 10) and the Gematria of his name amounts to a figure of 169, or 13 x 13. That he was the thirteenth in order after Shem is debatable. But for the sake of argument, why not grant the wish? According to the PowerPoint, Joktan is supposed to be ‘the ancestor of sinful and rebellious people.’ But how sinful and rebellious? What is the measure? Isn’t every sinner sinful and rebellious? Did the people from Joktan’s line become any more sinful and rebellious than the people from the line of Peleg, Joktan’s brother? Abraham is from the line of Peleg (1 Chronicles 1.) Why was Abraham called out of Ur to begin a new line of people if it wasn’t because the people from whom he came were sinful and rebellious? Joktan is no more deserving of the number thirteen epithet than anyone else in his day. If one were to look into it, a bona fide saint from the Bible would soon be found to have a Gematria that could be cleanly divided into thirteens. I was going to try to find one, whereupon I immediately discovered that there are several Gematria models to choose from: Jewish, English, and Simple, each one with its own way of calculating. So I never minded. These three models give Joktan’s Gematria as 801, 426, and 71, none of which divide crisply into thirteens. On another site, I found that there are four ways of computing letters: according to ‘absolute’ value, ‘ordinal’ value, ‘reduced’ value, and ‘integral reduced’ value. “Each letter represents a different creative force,” it says there, which sounds eerily magical, and which reminds me of what charismatic churchgoers believe: that words, especially when uttered, have a power of their own. It is no wonder, then, that my superstitious ‘full gospel’ friend would be roused by Gematria. Anyway, it appears as though it does not matter what model or value system a person chooses to use, or even if a person chooses to come up with his own. It’s all about causing enthusiasm and discussion through a discovery of something that even the prophets and apostles were too unspiritual to investigate. Not knowing which model and value formula Panin and Bullinger used, and thus, which one my friend used to build his project, I will pose a question instead. Why not single out Judas? Does he not, or should he not, signify sin and rebellion even more than Joktan? Maybe coming up with a figure that would show Judas to be associated with the number thirteen is not so easily done. Could that not be the reason why the obscure Joktan is singled out instead of the infamous Judas? Well, this seems entirely likely. What I found from Dr. Bullinger is that to make Judas into some sort of number thirteen wonder-boy, one has to take, not only his first name, last name, or even his two names together, but this whole phrase: ‘Judas Iscariot, he that should betray him.’ Then you get a numerical value of 4,511, which divides itself neatly into 347-13s. That is not part of the PowerPoint, though. Why not? Because my friend must have recognized that it was too much of a reach. No doubt, like what happened to me, he must have run into farfetched numbering like that during his research. (Not that this whole business is not farfetched.) Maybe he is smarter than his masters in numerology.

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.