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And Abimelech said unto Abraham, What mean these seven
ewe lambs which thou
hast set by themselves? And he said, For these seven ewe
lambs shalt thou take of my hand,
that they may be a witness unto me, that I have digged this well. Wherefore he called
that place Beersheba; because there they sware
both of them.
Genesis 21.29
From the Seven days of Creation to the Seven Seals of Revelation,
Scripture is saturated with
the Number Seven. Just listing all the occurrences would take several pages.
Essentially all biblical scholars, regardless of their stance with
respect to the meaning of numbers in Scripture, have recognized the special symbolic use
of this Number. It is simply impossible to miss.
The discovery of the symmetric sevenfold Canon Wheel and
its corresponding representation in the form of the
Menorah is like a capstone to the study of the Number
Seven in Scripture. We now can see this number emerging from all levels
of the Biblical
revelation. It is found in the microstructure of the text (e.g. the seven words and
28 letters of Genesis 1.1), in the plain message of the text (as mentioned above) and
now with the advent of the Canon Wheel we see it shine in the largescale structure
of the entire Bible. The question now is this:
Why did God do this? What
is the meaning of the Number Seven? Why did He indelibly mark
his Word with this Number?
| Hebrew | Sheva |
| English | Seven |
| German | Sieben |
| Old Saxon | Sebun |
| Sanskrit | Sapta |
| Latin | Septem |
| Greek | Hepta |
The answers to these questions yield great insight into the Mind of God, His Wisdom, and
the Promise revealed in His Holy Word.
I begin with the meaning of the Hebrew word for seven,
 (Sheva), and roots that are closely
related to it. This word is often transliterated as Sheba, with a hard Bet (b), but as
far as I can tell, the soft Bet (v) is more accurate.
The sidebar compares the word for Seven in various languages. Note that words
with both the hard Bet (b) and soft Bet (v) appear in the list.
The phonetic
resemblance is striking, especially since there is a strong similarity between
the Hebrew and Sanskrit which are supposedly independent language groups.
Sheva is closely related to two
other triliteral roots spelt with the same
three consonants that differ only in vowel points.
Thus, there are three Hebrew
roots that look identical. Here are three representative entries from Strong's
Concordance:
| Strong's # | Meaning |
| S# H7646 | saba: satisfy, fill, full, plenty, satiate |
| S# H7650 | shaba: sware, charge, oath |
| S# H7651 | sheba: seven |
The triliteral root (Shin - Bet - Ayin)
therefore carries three fundamental meanings:
1) Seven
2) Full/Complete
3) Oath/Sware.
These three ideas are found associated throughout
the Bible. For example, the reason for seven angels with seven final
plagues is explained in terms of fullness in Revelation 15.1:
And I saw another sign in heaven, great and marvellous, seven angels
having the seven last plagues; for in them is
filled up the wrath of God.
Thus we have one very obvious answer to our question:
God marked the Bible with the
Number Seven because it is the fulness of God's revelation!
Yet there is more, much more. The relation between the Number Seven and the idea of
an oath is explained
in the passage from Genesis 21 quoted at the head of
this page. This is especially insightful because these passages reveal the etymology
of Sheva/Sheba in the surface text of Scripture. Here, the Bible is serving as
its own etymological dictionary.
Genesis 21,
which corresponds to Shin within the chapter sequence
of Genesis, gives a detailed introduction
to the various meanings of the Shin KeyWord
(Sheva/Saba). I begin with the question posed by the verse itself "What is the meaning
of these seven ewe lambs?" The next verse gives the answer:
And he said, For these seven ewe lambs shalt thou take of my hand,
that they may be a witness unto me, that I have digged this well. Wherefore he called
that place Beersheba; because there they sware both of them.
The name Beersheba means Beer (well) of the Sheba (Oath). Thus Scripture clearly
displays the Number Seven with its associated meaning of Oath,
and we have another
very obvious answer to our question:
God marked the Bible with the
Number Seven because it is His Oath! His Promise! His Covenant!
This further integrates with gematria. The fundamental Greek word for Scripture
is  (graphe). Its
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