The Symbolism of 7 in Genesis 1:1

The first two sentences in the Bible are beautiful.

Genesis is organized into ten distinct sections, but before those ten sections begin, there is an introduction: that great story of creation in Genesis 1. In this story, we are introduced right in the very first sentence to the three main aspects of every narrative: character, plot, and setting.

It goes like this:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

The time is the beginning, and the narrator wastes no time introducing us to the main character and the primary action of the story—not just of Genesis, but of the entire work.

Characterization Through First Actions

He does something very interesting with characterization here. Every author characterizes in different ways; the techniques of how they unfold and tell us about their characters will differ. Sometimes an author will slowly unfold a character by giving us a lot of details about their daily life or how they look. Often those details are not particularly important to the central plot, but they give us a general impression of who this person is.

The biblical narrators, in contrast, do something distinctive: the first words and the first action of a character are very important. They matter for two reasons. First, the first word and first action are particularly revelatory of the nature of that character, telling us something essential about their essence. Second, they will prove important later in the narrative. When a character is introduced, what they say and do first will come up in interesting ways throughout the rest of the story.

That is no less true of the character of God. The narrator has selected this first action because it reveals something central about his nature, and because it will be central to the plot of the entire story: namely, his creative capacity, the creative action by which he creates the heavens and the earth.

The Architecture of Seven

Our narrator has also done something much more subtle. Not only has he told us that this character creates, but he has told us something about the nature of that creation itself.

As we read Genesis 1, we are often so accustomed to this creation story that we sort of glide over a lot of the details. But the narrator is just as concerned with the means—the way in which this character creates and organizes the stuff—as he is with bringing it into being in the first place. He tells us something subtly, almost secretly, that we might easily miss. I certainly did at first.

It works like this: in the Hebrew text of the first sentence, there are exactly seven words. In the second sentence, there are 14 words—that is, seven times two. Here we have the beginning of a great symbolic architecture built on the number seven.

There is more. Across this account, there are seven days, and there are seven paragraphs. Seven times our narrator tells us, “and God saw.” Seven times the phrase “on the earth” appears. Seven times we read, “and it was so.” Then, 21 times—seven times three—the word “heavens” occurs. “Earth” occurs 21 times as well. The word “God” appears 35 times—seven times five. In this entire opening creation section, there are 469 words, which is exactly 67 times seven.

Am I crazy? No. What is the author doing? Like the metrical precision of a sonnet or the mathematics of Bach, this demonstrates deliberate precision, because the text is simply perfect.

What our narrator is doing here is subtly characterizing God and the world he has made. This numerical structure, this repetition of sevens, is meant to quietly communicate the exquisite design and the otherworldly orderedness of his creation and his character. Our narrator has practiced what we are all taught in our beginning literature classes: that it is better to show than to tell. And perhaps he has taken it one step further. It is not only better to show than to simply tell; it is better to show subtly. That is what our narrator has done: he has subtly shown us that our character and his creation are simply perfect.

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