It is Sunday. I’ve been running. When I passed some people on their way to church, someone said, “The number 2 in the Bible means society.” For some reason, that stuck.
Two people, two sides, two faces. Maybe society, I thought. Makes sense. Hegel said that to know yourself, you need another — consciousness needs a mirror. You can’t have a story with one person. Not even a tragedy.
Since the days of Covid, when they replaced holy water with sanitizer, I don’t go to church anymore.
But I kept thinking. If 2 stands for society, what about the rest? Why does 3 keep showing up? Father, Son, Spirit. Peter denying three times. Christ rising on the third day.
Maybe numbers aren’t just numbers. Maybe they’re fingerprints left by something that counted long before we did.
The Bible, it turns out, runs on rhythm. Seven days of creation. Forty days of rain. Twelve tribes wandering with twelve kinds of trouble. It ticks like an old watch, gears turning behind the words.
Nothing in that book feels random. Every number, every turn of phrase, carries weight, as if language itself were keeping time.
One means God, alone and absolute. Two means tension, the world split in half. Three is completion, the triangle that holds its own. Four is the world itself, solid and square. Six is man, tired and flawed. Seven is the finish line. Eight, the restart. Ten means law and order, a kind of divine traffic code. Twelve means everything has been sorted and assigned its corner. Forty means someone is in for a long test.
And then there is 153, the strange one. The exact number of fish in the net when Christ appeared on the shore. Not 152. Not 154. Just 153. The Pythagoreans called it the triangle of 17, the bridge between worlds, between the square and the oblong, matter and spirit.
Maybe John the Apostle slipped it in as a quiet signal to those who listened in numbers. Maybe it is the kind of harmony that cannot be heard, only felt.
By the end, I looked at the Bible like a codebreaker who realized the code was never meant to be solved. Maybe these numbers were not divine math at all. Maybe they were rhythm, a heartbeat, not a formula.
I leaned back, looked at my notes, and thought: maybe God was a jazz musician after all. The numbers are the downbeat, the changes, the walking bass line.
But the solo will always be yours.