Biblical Mathematics: [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

It's very honest of the author to admit several times that he hadn't finished studying this topic before publishing his book, but this doesn't help my confidence in what he had to share!

I do believe that Biblical numbers serve a secondary purpose, and I think the author has some excellent points with regard to the single-digit numbers. But he has some very vague and confusing things to say later on: "When TWENTY-THREE for DEATH is added to THIRTY for BLOOD of Christ, the sum is FIFTY THREE. When THIRTY-SIX for the ENEMY (the one overcome) is subtracted from FIFTY-THREE, the remainder is SEVENTEEN for VICTORY." Huh?! (Capitalization is the author's, and it gets very annoying throughout the text).

And sometimes, when he can't find what he wants in the Bible, he just counts the number of times a word or a name occurs, for example, "The number THIRTY-TWO is associated with a COVENANT. The THIRTY-SECOND time Noah's name is found is where God made a COVENANT with him." The modern-day arrangement of the Bible is not chronological ... and so the "nth" occurance of any specific word or name is really more coincidence than anything else.

Sometimes he counts the number of words in a verse using either the Greek/Hebrew or the English translation, whichever will serve his purpose and make his point. I'm very disappointed in what feels like a forced conclusion to his theory on numbers in the Bible.

Dr. Vallowe has suceeded in making numerics accessible to and meaningful for Bible students. This book not only presents God's use of key numbers in the Bible in layman's terms, but also provides a basis for further investigations. Although one may disagree with Dr. Vallowe's conclusions about the meaning of certain numbers, his methods derive solidly from the Biblical context in which the numbers are used. Through this timely book, God releases a long-awaited blessing to His people so that in these last days His Word may be understood in greater fullness and detail. Move over, E. W. Bullinger; Ed Vallowe has written the seminal introduction to the subject of Biblical numerics.

I don't doubt Ed Vallowe's love for God or his fervor to serve him, but I think that his focus on numerology is at best misguided and at worst potentially damaging to less discerning Christians. The book's purpose is to "prove" that God wrote the Bible because all the numbers in the Bible somehow line up according to the numerical framework Vallowe describes. The problems with this are twofold:

1) You could never "prove" such a thing. At best, you could provide evidence for or against it. And...

B) It doesn't work.

While you'd get little argument from most scholars that some of the numbers in the Biblical text have symbolic meaning (12 tribes, 12 disciples, 40 days in the desert, 40 days and 40 nights of rain, etc.) but it's hardly obvious that every number up to 40 has some specific meaning, or that compounding them yields a compounded meaning, or that these meanings are consistent throughout scripture.

Furthermore, Vallowe's assertion that not just the numbers in the text, but the chapter and verse numbers themselves have this meaning, is just preposterous. For example, the number 13 is, in many places, symbolic of evil or a bad omen or whatever. Vallowe says it means "Depravity and Rebellion", but the famous "love Chapter" is in I Corinthians 13, and verse 13 of that chapter reads:

"And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love."

Sounds pretty depraved and rebellious, doesn't it? How Vallowe justifies that, not to mention the hundreds of other examples of inconsistencies you could imagine, is beyond me.

Worse yet, he says that his "system" only works in the King James Version of the Bible, not in other translations. Fair enough, but rather than deducing from that fact that perhaps his numerology theory is flawed, or at best, limited to the KJV, he instead concludes that any other translation of the Bible is somehow faulty!

Imagine the gaul you have to have to dismiss hundreds of years worth of Biblical scholarship because his half-baked theory doesn't mesh with their translations! And with all the older texts that have been found in the last 400 years, his insistence upon using an outdated translation based on outdated texts is both ignorant and selfish.

Unfortunately, Christians who don't understand how to actually study the Bible often see this kind of stuff and think they're finding some kind of hidden meanings, while really they're missing out on the real beauty of scripture: The words.