The Number Seven

No number is more loaded with meaning in the religions of the Middle East and the Mediterranean than seven. It stands for fullness and completion, the point at which a cycle is finished and something holy begins. It appears in creation stories, in the rhythm of the week, in the structure of heaven and in the movements of worshippers.

The Hebrew Bible opens with it. In the first chapter of Genesis God creates the world in six days and rests on the seventh, which he blesses and makes holy. The Sabbath became the heart of Jewish life, and the pattern spread outward: every seventh year the land was to rest, and after seven times seven years came the jubilee. Passover and Sukkot last seven days in the land of Israel. Mourners sit shiva, from the Hebrew word for seven, for a week after a death, and seven blessings are recited at a wedding. The menorah, the golden lampstand made for the Tabernacle and later kept in the Temple in Jerusalem, had seven branches. It is still a central emblem of Judaism and appears on the state emblem of Israel.

Christianity inherited these sevens and added more. The Book of Revelation is written in a pattern of sevens: letters to seven churches, a scroll with seven seals, seven trumpets and seven bowls of wrath. Medieval theologians fixed the number of sacraments at seven, a list confirmed by the Council of Florence in 1439 and the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century; most Protestant churches recognise only two. Pope Gregory the Great around 590 gave the West its list of seven deadly sins, and devotions grew around the seven last words of Christ on the cross.

In Islam the Qur’an describes God creating seven heavens, one above another, and Muslim tradition tells how the Prophet Muhammad passed through all seven on his night journey. Pilgrims at Mecca perform the tawaf, walking seven times around the Kaaba, and then walk seven times between the hills of Safa and Marwa, recalling Hagar’s search for water for her son Ishmael. At Mina they throw seven pebbles at each of the pillars that represent the devil. Al-Fatiha, the opening sura recited in every prayer, has seven verses, and many commentators identify it with the ‘seven oft-repeated’ verses mentioned in the Qur’an.

Why seven? Historians usually look to the sky. The ancient observer saw seven bodies moving against the fixed stars: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Babylonian and Greek astronomers called them the planets, the ‘wanderers’, and gave each a god. Hellenistic astrologers then assigned each hour and day to a planet, and the resulting planetary week spread through the Roman Empire from about the first century CE. Its traces remain in many languages: Saturday is Saturn’s day, Sunday the Sun’s and Monday the Moon’s, while French mardi and mercredi keep Mars and Mercury.

The Moon offers a second clue. Its four phases each last about seven and a half days, so seven is a natural way of dividing a lunar month. Mesopotamian texts also show a fondness for seven in myth and magic, from groups of seven gods to seven demons, and many scholars think the biblical writers shared that wider cultural world even as they gave the number their own meaning in the Sabbath. Later thinkers, Jewish, Christian and Muslim, added a philosophical gloss: seven is three plus four, the union of the divine and the earthly.

Seven appears further east as well, though not always for the same reasons. In Hindu tradition the seven sages are the seven bright stars of the Great Bear, and the bride and groom seal their marriage by taking seven steps together. Buddhist legend says the newborn Buddha took seven steps, with lotuses springing up where he trod. Zoroastrian teaching describes seven creations, each protected by a holy being.

Not every famous seven is ancient. The best example is the system of seven chakras, energy centres said to run along the spine, each with its own colour from red at the base to violet at the crown. Chakras do come from Indian tantric traditions, Hindu and Buddhist, but these texts describe different systems, with four, five, six or more centres, and do not use the rainbow scheme. The version most familiar today rests largely on one sixteenth-century Sanskrit text by a Bengali author, translated into English by John Woodroffe, writing as Arthur Avalon, in The Serpent Power (1919). It counted six centres plus a thousand-petalled lotus above the head. Theosophists, psychologists and New Age writers then reworked the system, matching it to glands, personality traits and the colours of the rainbow, and that modern Western form spread back to yoga studios worldwide.

The week itself is a quieter survivor. Attempts to replace it have failed: revolutionary France introduced a ten-day week in the 1790s, and the Soviet Union experimented with five- and six-day weeks between 1929 and 1940, but both returned to seven. Jews, Christians and Muslims each mark one day of the seven as special, the Sabbath, Sunday and Friday congregational prayer.

Other sevens remain part of living ritual. Jews still keep the seventh day and light candles before the Sabbath begins. Millions of pilgrims each year walk the seven circuits of the Kaaba. Christians in many churches still prepare for the seven sacraments. For much of human history, seven has been the number that tells people when something is complete.