{
  "name": "Biblical number meanings, by who supplied them",
  "description": "Every number this page covers, with what it is attached to in the King James Version, the verses, how often the word occurs, and — the column nobody else carries — who supplied the meaning: the text itself, the text reading its own number, a named later commentator, or nobody we could find.",
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "creator": "Numeluna",
  "source": "https://numeluna.com/bible-number-meanings/#number-table",
  "updated": "2026-08-15",
  "corpus": {
    "text": "King James Version",
    "edition": "Project Gutenberg ebook #10",
    "sourceUrl": "https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10/pg10.txt",
    "caveat": "This measures a 1611 English translation, not the Hebrew and Greek. Biblical Hebrew writes numbers as words rather than numerals, so a translation's choices affect every count here."
  },
  "method": {
    "provenance": "stated = the text says what the number is for · self-interpreting = one part of the collection reads another's number as a figure · supplied = a named later reader attached it, with a date and a locator · unsourced = no meaning in the text and none in the sources listed on the page.",
    "scope": "'unsourced' is bounded to the eight sources cited on the page. It means we found no meaning, never that none exists.",
    "frequency": "Cardinal-word occurrences in the KJV, compounds absorbed (so 'six hundred threescore and six' is one 666, not a six and a six). null for 1, which is parsed but excluded because 'one' in English is also a pronoun and an article, and for 3½, which the text writes three different ways."
  },
  "counts": {
    "rows": 17,
    "unsourced": 2
  },
  "rows": [
    {
      "label": "1",
      "key": null,
      "anchor": "one",
      "attachedTo": "The Shema: “The LORD our God is one LORD”",
      "verses": [
        "Deuteronomy 6:4",
        "Mark 12:29"
      ],
      "provenance": "stated",
      "supplier": "The text",
      "ref": 1,
      "meaning": "Oneness itself is the claim, not a count of anything.",
      "frequencyNote": "also a pronoun and an article",
      "note": "No frequency: “one” in English is also a pronoun and an article, so it is parsed but kept out of the curve as unreliable.",
      "frequency": null
    },
    {
      "label": "2",
      "key": 2,
      "anchor": "two",
      "attachedTo": "The witness rule: a matter is established at the mouth of two",
      "verses": [
        "Deuteronomy 17:6",
        "Deuteronomy 19:15",
        "Matthew 18:16",
        "2 Corinthians 13:1",
        "1 Timothy 5:19",
        "Hebrews 10:28",
        "John 8:17"
      ],
      "provenance": "stated",
      "supplier": "The text",
      "ref": 1,
      "meaning": "The minimum testimony that establishes a matter; one witness is explicitly not enough.",
      "note": "Stated in Deuteronomy, and the New Testament keeps the wording: “two or three witnesses” appears four times, and John’s gospel cites the law it is quoting.",
      "frequency": 639
    },
    {
      "label": "3",
      "key": 3,
      "anchor": "three",
      "attachedTo": "Jonah’s three days and three nights in the fish",
      "verses": [
        "Jonah 1:17",
        "Matthew 12:40"
      ],
      "provenance": "self-interpreting",
      "supplier": "The text",
      "ref": 1,
      "meaning": "Matthew reads Jonah’s three days as a figure for three more, so the Bible supplies its own reading.",
      "frequency": 358
    },
    {
      "label": "3½",
      "key": null,
      "anchor": "three-and-a-half",
      "attachedTo": "One span, written three ways: forty-two months, 1,260 days, and a time, times and half a time",
      "verses": [
        "Revelation 11:2",
        "Revelation 11:3",
        "Revelation 12:6",
        "Revelation 12:14",
        "Revelation 13:5"
      ],
      "provenance": "stated",
      "supplier": "The text",
      "ref": 1,
      "meaning": "A bounded stretch of trouble. The equivalence is the book’s own arithmetic, laid out inside the text.",
      "frequencyNote": "written three different ways",
      "note": "No single frequency: the span is written three different ways, so there is no one word to count.",
      "frequency": null
    },
    {
      "label": "4",
      "key": 4,
      "anchor": "four",
      "attachedTo": "The four corners of the earth; the four winds",
      "verses": [
        "Isaiah 11:12",
        "Revelation 7:1",
        "Jeremiah 49:36",
        "Ezekiel 37:9"
      ],
      "provenance": "stated",
      "supplier": "The text",
      "ref": 1,
      "meaning": "Everywhere, in every direction; the text’s own word for extent.",
      "note": "Augustine later attaches three more meanings to it: the body of four elements, time in four parts, and the quarters of the globe.",
      "frequency": 203
    },
    {
      "label": "5",
      "key": 5,
      "anchor": "five",
      "attachedTo": "Counted as a plain quantity: five loaves, five of the ten wise",
      "verses": [
        "Matthew 14:17",
        "Matthew 25:2"
      ],
      "provenance": "unsourced",
      "supplier": null,
      "ref": null,
      "meaning": "None. The text attaches no meaning to five, and none of the sources below supplies one.",
      "note": "One of the most searched biblical numbers, and one of the two we have nothing to report for.",
      "frequency": 185
    },
    {
      "label": "6",
      "key": 6,
      "anchor": "six",
      "attachedTo": "The six days of creation",
      "verses": [
        "Genesis 1"
      ],
      "provenance": "supplied",
      "supplier": "Philo of Alexandria (1st c.), then Augustine (5th c.)",
      "ref": 5,
      "meaning": "Six is the first perfect number (its divisors add up to itself), so the world was made in six days because six was already perfect.",
      "note": "Augustine makes the same argument in The City of God four hundred years after Philo (reference 4). Whether he took it from Philo is unchased.",
      "frequency": 103
    },
    {
      "label": "7",
      "key": 7,
      "anchor": "seven",
      "attachedTo": "The seventh day, blessed and sanctified",
      "verses": [
        "Genesis 2:2",
        "Genesis 2:3"
      ],
      "provenance": "stated",
      "supplier": "The text",
      "ref": 1,
      "meaning": "Rest, and the first thing the Bible sets apart as holy, which is a unit of time, not a place.",
      "note": "The meaning printed almost everywhere else, completeness, is attested in the first century: Philo records “the perfecting number” as usage already in circulation (reference 5). Augustine later builds seven from its parts as three plus four, life plus body (reference 2).",
      "frequency": 376
    },
    {
      "label": "8",
      "key": 8,
      "anchor": "eight",
      "attachedTo": "Circumcision on the eighth day; the eight souls saved in the ark",
      "verses": [
        "Genesis 17:12",
        "Luke 1:59",
        "1 Peter 3:20"
      ],
      "provenance": "self-interpreting",
      "supplier": "The text",
      "ref": 1,
      "meaning": "1 Peter reads the eight saved through water as a figure for baptism, so a later book supplies the count and its meaning together.",
      "frequency": 33
    },
    {
      "label": "9",
      "key": 9,
      "anchor": "nine",
      "attachedTo": "The ninth hour: an hour of the day, and almost always ordinal",
      "verses": [
        "Mark 15:34",
        "Acts 3:1"
      ],
      "provenance": "unsourced",
      "supplier": null,
      "ref": null,
      "meaning": "None. The text attaches no meaning to nine, and none of the sources below supplies one.",
      "note": "The rarest of the small numbers as a plain count (rarer than eleven), and mostly used as an ordinal.",
      "frequency": 17
    },
    {
      "label": "10",
      "key": 10,
      "anchor": "ten",
      "attachedTo": "The ten commandments: the text names the count itself",
      "verses": [
        "Exodus 34:28",
        "Deuteronomy 4:13",
        "Deuteronomy 10:4"
      ],
      "provenance": "stated",
      "supplier": "The text",
      "ref": 1,
      "meaning": "A complete set, counted and labelled on the page rather than by a reader.",
      "note": "The ten plagues are the opposite case: the text delivers them one at a time and never adds them up. That count is ours.",
      "frequency": 176
    },
    {
      "label": "12",
      "key": 12,
      "anchor": "twelve",
      "attachedTo": "Twelve tribes, twelve apostles, twelve gates",
      "verses": [
        "Revelation 21:12",
        "Matthew 19:28"
      ],
      "provenance": "supplied",
      "supplier": "Augustine, Exposition on Psalm 87",
      "ref": 3,
      "meaning": "Three times four (the Trinity times the quarters of the globe), read as the Church reaching the whole world.",
      "note": "The text counts twelves everywhere and never says what twelve means. Both halves of Augustine’s sum come from outside the verse.",
      "frequency": 156
    },
    {
      "label": "40",
      "key": 40,
      "anchor": "forty",
      "attachedTo": "Forty days and forty nights; forty years in the wilderness",
      "verses": [
        "Genesis 7:12",
        "Exodus 24:18",
        "Matthew 4:2"
      ],
      "provenance": "supplied",
      "supplier": "Augustine, On Christian Doctrine II.16.25",
      "ref": 2,
      "meaning": "Ten taken four times: knowledge laid across time, four being the divisions of the day and the year.",
      "note": "The gloss printed almost everywhere else (testing, probation, preparation) has no owner we could find. No verse says it and no commentator we read claims it.",
      "frequency": 93
    },
    {
      "label": "70",
      "key": 70,
      "anchor": "seventy",
      "attachedTo": "Seventy years serving the king of Babylon; the seventy elders",
      "verses": [
        "Jeremiah 25:11",
        "Jeremiah 25:12",
        "Exodus 24:1"
      ],
      "provenance": "stated",
      "supplier": "The text",
      "ref": 1,
      "meaning": "A fixed term with an end announced in advance.",
      "note": "Seventy’s relation to seven is the text’s own, twice over: Lamech’s seventy and sevenfold, and seventy times seven. The decomposition 70 = 7 × 10 is unpinned and is not claimed here.",
      "frequency": 60
    },
    {
      "label": "153",
      "key": 153,
      "anchor": "one-five-three",
      "attachedTo": "The fish in the net, counted exactly and left unexplained",
      "verses": [
        "John 21:11"
      ],
      "provenance": "supplied",
      "supplier": "Augustine, twice: Tractate 122 on John, and On Christian Doctrine",
      "ref": 6,
      "meaning": "The sum of every whole number from one to seventeen, seventeen being ten plus seven; and, by another route, fifty taken three times plus three.",
      "note": "Two derivations by the same man in two works, both arithmetically correct (references 6 and 2).",
      "frequency": 1
    },
    {
      "label": "666",
      "key": 666,
      "anchor": "six-six-six",
      "attachedTo": "The number of the beast, with an explicit instruction to calculate and no name given",
      "verses": [
        "Revelation 13:18",
        "1 Kings 10:14",
        "Ezra 2:13"
      ],
      "provenance": "supplied",
      "supplier": "Irenaeus of Lyons, c. 180",
      "ref": 7,
      "meaning": "Three candidate names that total 666 in Greek (Evanthas, Lateinos, Teitan), with Teitan rated highest and the question deliberately left open.",
      "note": "Nero is not among them. That reading first appears among German scholars in the 1830s (reference 8). Three of the four biblical 666s are accountancy.",
      "frequency": 4
    },
    {
      "label": "144,000",
      "key": 144000,
      "anchor": "one-four-four-thousand",
      "attachedTo": "The sealed of the twelve tribes, counted out tribe by tribe",
      "verses": [
        "Revelation 7:4"
      ],
      "provenance": "stated",
      "supplier": "The text",
      "ref": 1,
      "meaning": "Twelve thousand from each of twelve tribes. The multiplication is the text’s own and it is done in the open, across four verses.",
      "frequency": 3
    }
  ]
}