Psalm 119:164 – Seven Times
Seven times a day I praise you
because of your righteous judgments.
What’s with seven times?
The number seven is used quite a number of times in scripture, and represents completion or wholeness. I thought today rather than discussing the number seven as I understand it, I’d provide some examples.
There are some fairly well-known stories in the Bible that center around the number seven:
- The conquest of Jericho, in which Israel marches around the city once a day for six days, but then on the seventh day they march around it seven times, following which, famously, the walls fall down. (Joshua 6).
- Elisha heals the widow’s son, after he has stretched out on the child’s body, he sneezes seven times and opens his eyes. (2 Kings 4:8-37).
- When Naaman is healed, he is told to dip seven times in the Jordan river, and is then healed. (2 Kings 5:1-19).
- In 1 Kings 18, Elijah has his servant go look for signs of rain coming seven times.
- Psalm 12:6 (7 in Hebrew) says God’s word, often thought of as promises, are purified seven times.
- Proverbs 24:16 tells us that the righteous may stumble seven times and get up, but one stumble is enough for the wicked.
- … and we should not forget the three group of seven–seals, trumpets, bowls of wrath–in Revelation.
But Leviticus 14, discussing restoration of defiled buildings and objects, and 16, discussing the day of atonement are both very interesting in how many things are sprinkled seven times, and also the number of times waiting seven days is mentioned.
I’m not going to try to discuss any of this in detail. I just found it interesting to enumerate these cases, which certainly do not exhaust the use of the number seven in scripture.
How many times will you praise God today?
(The featured image was generated by Adobe Firefly using a prompt based on one generated by Jetpack, and improved by Gemini.)
