Let’s Play with the Numbers
The law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul. The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple. Psalm 19:7 NIV
Law – Anyone who reads Today’s Word knows that the Hebrew word for the translation “law” is tôrâ. Perhaps you also know that the Greek translation is typically nómos, found throughout the apostolic writings. If we consult any lexicon, we’re likely to find something similar to this:
The word tôrâ means basically “teaching” whether it is the wise man instructing his son or God instructing Israel. The wise give insight into all aspects of life so that the young may know how to conduct themselves and to live a long blessed life (Prov 3:1f.). So too God, motivated by love, reveals to man basic insight into how to live with each other and how to approach God. Through the law God shows his interest in all aspects of man’s life which is to be lived under his direction and care. Law of God stands parallel to word of the Lord to signify that law is the revelation of God’s will (e.g. Isa 1:10).[1]
But unless you really dig, you might not find these comments from López or Fabry:
The noun tôrâ occurs 220 times in the MT—208 times in the singular and 12 times in the plural. In three books it occurs more than 20 times (36 times in Psalms, 22 in Deuteronomy, and 21 in Nehemiah); in another seven, it occurs between 10 and 20 times . . . It appears with almost identical frequency in three literary complexes: 43 times in DtrH, and 44 times each in the prophets and ChrH. Both the total of 220 occurrences and the individual data appear not to be accidental but the result of systematic calculation. In fact, 220 is 22 X 10. The number 22 corresponds to the letters of the alphabet and is therefore a “round number” signifying totality, 10 is likewise a round number. As a result the total number of occurrences of tôrâ in the OT gives the impression of reflecting a deliberate attempts to convey perfection and totality. In further support of this theory, we may note that in Deuteronomy, one of the most important and esteemed books of the OT with respect to the usage of tôrâ, the term appears 22 times, while in ChrH, no less important than Deuteronomy in this respect, it appears 44 times (2 X 22). And tôrâ also appears 44 times in the prophetic books.[2]
Such a hypothesis presupposes a systematic redaction and modification of the final text of the Hebrew Bible as a whole, a process that current theories of the formation of the canon would view as most unlikely.[3]
What should we conclude? Was the text deliberately altered to make these mathematical connections, or was it simply an “accident”? Or do we suggest that the “divine author” engineered the sequences? When Fabry wrote his comment more than twenty years ago, the scholarship of Tov, White, Martín-Contreras, Brook, and others was not yet published. A lot of rethinking has happened since the general release of the Dead Sea Scrolls. A lot of things happened in Babylon before the proto-Masoretic text emerged. Was it human engineering? Perhaps we need to take a second, second-look. Maybe the Hebrew Bible isn’t as spontaneous or random as we thought. Maybe Matthew’s mathematical genealogy is just the tip of the iceberg.
Topical Index: tôrâ, mathematics, occurrences, canon, Psalm 19:7
[1] Hartley, J. E. (1999). 910 יָרָה. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 404). Chicago: Moody Press.
[2] García López, tôrâ, TDOT, Vol. XV, p. 612.
[3] Heinz-Josef Fabry, tôrâ, TDOT, Vol. XV, p. 612.
Thus, if this suggested “human engineering” is in fact deliberate, we have a prime example of God’s willingness to humbly “stoop” to accommodate humanity’s weakness (specifically, Israel’s fallen and culturally conditioned hearts and minds) so as to further his purposes for his covenant people— that they might draw other nations to him— in conjunction and consistent with God’s ultimate and supreme self-revelation on the cross! (Moreover, what an astonishing display of inspired literary creativity, narrative art, and craftsmanship!)
“What is a human being”— even one who bears Your image— “that you think of him?… and a child of humankind that you care for him?” (Psalm 8:4)
[As per Walter Brueggemann, Divine Presence amid Violence— Contextualizing the Book of Joshua]: there are those narratives of Scripture that read somewhat cooly and detached— a bit like an official memo, “in which everything is obvious, acceptable, reasonable, taken for granted, and not to be questioned.” These are texts and narratives that are conveyed in a manner and convey material that may be described as “standard fare.” “Taken as a mode of evidence…they are hardly revelatory, for they disclose little or nothing.”
And then there are texts and stories that disclose what was not known. These texts and narratives “offer a different mode of presentation, a different epistemology, and a different universe of discourse”. “This is narrative art” that invites its community of readers/hearers to bold imaginative faith, by which its text and narratives “reveal that faithful imagination is more powerful” than [any] dominating technique of discourse. And this is a community “not without its own peculiar rationality that believes that the world is ordered, governed, and powered by an Authority” whose person and ways cannot be known in an abstract ground latent in human reason, consciousness, or brute nature itself… but only in the ground of God’s desire and freedom to reveal himself as he determines he may be known… and that in his supreme cruciform revelation—on the cross of Christ!