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70

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Origin 1908 to 1965

Seventy is 2 x 5 x 7 and one of the great round numbers of the Hebrew Bible. Genesis 10 lists seventy nations descended from Noah, which became the standard Jewish figure for the peoples of the world; seventy of Jacob's household go down to Egypt at Genesis 46:27; seventy elders ascend with Moses at Exodus 24:1 and receive a share of his spirit at Numbers 11:16-25; Jeremiah 25:11 sets the exile at seventy years; Psalm 90:10 gives the human span as seventy. The Septuagint takes its name and its abbreviation from the tradition of seventy translators, given as seventy-two in the Letter of Aristeas. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 7.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
1908 to 1965 1
Origin Period
500 BCE to 300 CE 2
Origin Period
The arithmological reading of the first numbers, one as source, two as division, four as justice, seven as virgin, ten as completion, reaches us through Platonic and Neopythagorean writers of the centuries after Plato. Burkert's finding is that it cannot be traced to Pythagoras himself, whose activity was religious rather than mathematical: the doctrines were credited backwards to him. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore
Origin Period
The system that gives a number a personality, and a person a number, was assembled in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century out of New Thought material. Balliett's The Philosophy of Numbers appeared in 1908; the chart positions, pinnacles and cycles were added by her successors over the next fifty years. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Place of Origin
The Greek world, and above all the Greek cities of southern Italy where the Pythagorean societies were established; the arithmological literature itself is later and largely eastern Mediterranean. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore
Place of Origin
The United States, and specifically the New Thought circuit of the north-eastern seaboard; Balliett worked from Atlantic City. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Attributed Author / Compiler
Attributed by the tradition to Pythagoras. Burkert's study is the standard demonstration that the number-doctrines carrying his name are the work of later hands, and that almost nothing in them can be shown to go back to the sixth century BCE. The attribution is recorded because it is what the tradition says, not because it holds. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore
Attributed Author / Compiler
Mrs. L. Dow Balliett, who published the first version of the modern system in 1908 and to whom Dudley devotes a chapter. What later authors added, the pinnacles, the challenges, the cycles, the personal year, is theirs, and this atlas's own numerology-position entries cite four different authors between 1908 and 1965 for what is presented as one system. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Origin of the Name
Pythagorean numerology is a twentieth-century label. The system it names has no demonstrable descent from Pythagoras, from the Pythagorean societies, or from the ancient arithmological literature; the letter-value chart it rests on was drawn up in the United States after 1900. The name borrows a pedigree, the oldest move in the subject. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
Largely abandoned as a comparative category 1
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
Numerology has been sold since Balliett as a basis for decisions: which name to take, which date to marry on, which house number to buy. Dudley's survey of what numerologists sell is the standard critical account and its finding is blunt, numbers have power over minds, not over events. These entries record what the tradition says, not advice. 1
Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern System
The modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 7 + 0 = 7. Whatever the system says of 70 it therefore says of 7, because it holds no separate doctrine for the higher numbers. The stated exceptions are 11, 22 and 33, which it leaves unreduced and calls master numbers. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Numbers 11 has Moses gather seventy of the elders of Israel to share the burden of the people, and the table of nations in Genesis 10 was read in later Jewish tradition as an enumeration of the peoples of the world. 3Tradition: Hebrew Bible
Learn More
Seventy Nations, Seventy Elders

Seventy functions in the Hebrew Bible as the number of a complete assembly, and it does so consistently enough that the usage is clearly conventional.

The table of nations in Genesis 10 lists the descendants of Shem, Ham and Japheth, and the traditional count of the peoples named is seventy. That figure became the standard Jewish reckoning of the nations of the world, and it underlies the rabbinic idea of the seventy languages and the seventy guardian angels of the nations. It also stands behind the tradition that the seventy bulls offered across the days of Sukkot are offered on behalf of the seventy nations.

Seventy of Jacob's household go down to Egypt at Genesis 46:27 and Exodus 1:5. The Septuagint gives seventy-five, a discrepancy that Acts 7:14 follows, so the two numbers descend into different traditions.

Seventy elders ascend the mountain with Moses at Exodus 24:1 and 24:9, and at Numbers 11:16-25 seventy elders receive a share of the spirit that was on Moses, the foundational text for the later institution of the Sanhedrin, which numbered seventy-one with the head of the court included.

Seventy years of exile are set at Jeremiah 25:11 and 29:10, a figure Daniel 9 reinterprets as seventy weeks of years. Whether the seventy years is an exact count depends on which events are taken as its endpoints, and the ancient sources already treat it as approximate.

Psalm 90:10 gives the days of our years as threescore years and ten. The Hebrew Bible therefore uses seventy for a full lifetime, a full assembly, a full generation of exile and the full set of nations.

The Septuagint and the Seventy-Two

The Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures is called the Septuagint, from the Latin for seventy, and abbreviated LXX. The name comes from a legend that will not sit still at seventy.

The Letter of Aristeas, a Jewish work in Greek usually dated to the second century BCE, tells how Ptolemy II Philadelphus, wanting the Jewish law for the library at Alexandria, wrote to the high priest in Jerusalem, who sent seventy-two elders, six from each of the twelve tribes, with a scroll. The seventy-two worked on the island of Pharos and completed the translation in seventy-two days. Later retellings, in Philo and then in Christian writers, embellish the story considerably, adding that the translators worked in separate cells and produced identical texts, which the Letter itself does not claim.

So the tradition gives seventy-two and the name gives seventy. The rounding is ancient and nobody has satisfactorily explained it; the likeliest account is simply that seventy was already the conventional number for such a body, and the more awkward seventy-two was smoothed to it.

The same wobble occurs in the New Testament. At Luke 10:1 Jesus appoints and sends out either seventy or seventy-two disciples, and the manuscript evidence is genuinely divided, with strong early witnesses on each side. Modern critical editions and translations differ, and the choice is often read against the seventy or seventy-five nations of Genesis 10, since the mission is being presented as a mission to the world.

Historically, the Letter of Aristeas is not a reliable account of how the translation happened. What it records is how Alexandrian Jews wished to present a translation that had already become authoritative.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Disciplines That Use This

Numerology, Disciplines

The modern numerological system assigns this number a meaning, which is why the atlas records it as a subject in its own right, though this does not endorse what the discipline says about it. This link shows only that the discipline works with this particular number; the readings of the number itself belong to whichever tradition holds them.

Source Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras WroughtUnderwood Dudley
Sources
1. Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought
Underwood Dudley, Mathematical Association of America (Spectrum series), 1997View the Source
2. Weisheit und Wissenschaft: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos und Platon (Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism)
Walter Burkert, Harvard University Press, 1962View the Source
3. The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)
Anonymous (multiple authors)Genesis 10 (70 nations); Numbers 11:16 (70 elders)View the Source
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