Seventy

Souls, elders, palms, years and bullocks are counted; the nations are a tradition; and of everything the number touches, only wine and secret is a gematria.

Seventy, in the Tanakh, is nearly always something somebody counted. Souls going down to Egypt. Elders at the tent. Palm trees at an oasis. Years of an exile, years of a life. The number is written out in words, the way any language writes a number, and reading it requires nothing but reading. That makes this piece a close cousin of the article about forty: the counts come first, and the one real gematria waits at the end.

The letter that carries seventy on its own is ayin. ע=70 The word for seventy does not come to seventy: שבעים is four hundred and twenty-two.

שבעים=422

And the value seventy is not rare. 1,282 spans of our index carry it under the standard method, 1,031 of them single words, across 83 different spellings. Hold that in mind whenever two seventies are said to meet.

Seventy souls

The Torah gives the size of Yaakov’s family at the descent to Egypt three times, once in each of three books, and the count does not vary. Bereshit says it at the end of a census that has just been walked name by name.

Shemot opens on the same number, looking back.

And Devarim uses it as the small end of a promise kept, seventy against the stars of the sky. There the word stands under a prefixed bet, with seventy souls, which is worth noticing now because this page will be counting spellings later.

The elders, and the court of one more

The second great seventy is commanded rather than tallied. In the wilderness, when Moshe says he cannot carry the people alone, he is told to gather seventy men.

The verse ends with three words that turned out to carry a court in them: and they shall stand there with you. The Mishnah in Sanhedrin rules that the great Sanhedrin numbered seventy-one, and derives it from this verse: gather seventy men, it quotes, and Moshe over them, seventy-one. It then records that Rabbi Yehudah says seventy. Whether the great court is seventy or one more is itself a dispute in the Mishnah, which is a very Jewish thing for the number seventy to be.

The same chapter lists what only that court could judge: a tribe, a false prophet, a kohen gadol, a war that is not obligatory. The Rambam, in the opening chapter of his laws of the Sanhedrin, does the same arithmetic from the same verse, and it is he rather than the Mishnah who gives Moshe’s own place a prooftext, hanging it on those three closing words. He fixes the court’s first seat in the Mikdash, and adds a detail the Mishnah does not: the judges sat in a half circle, like half a round threshing floor, so that the nasi and the av beit din could see every face. A body built to deliberate is built so that everyone can be seen. All of that is in our own copies of the sources below, and every one of them can be opened from this page.

Twelve springs, seventy palms

One seventy is pure landscape, and the Torah counts it anyway. Straight after the sea and the bitter water at Marah, the camp arrives somewhere good, and the verse pauses to number what grows there.

Twelve springs, seventy palms. Forty years later the itinerary in the thirty-third chapter of Bemidbar walks the same ground and repeats the counted pair word for word, which is the Torah doing its own concordance work. The tradition has always heard the twelve and the seventy of Israel itself in that pair, the tribes and the souls, and this page will not argue with it; the verse, for its part, simply counts trees. The springs are einot, the plural of עין, which is also the name of the letter that carries seventy. That is a pleasing coincidence and nothing more, and it is worth disarming a common error while standing next to it: the letter ayin is seventy, but the word that names the letter is not.

עין=130

Seventy years

The pair of words seventy years stands thirteen times in the twenty-four books, and they are not one story. Seven of the thirteen are the Babylonian exile. Three lay a seventy on Tyre. Two are ages in Bereshit’s genealogies. One is a life, and the life is where to start.

The mishnah of the ages near the end of Avot keeps the psalm’s measure: five to Scripture, thirteen to the commandments, and seventy to the hoary head, the seivah. The psalm says how long the days of our years run; the mishnah says what a person should be by then.

The seven are the exile. Yirmiyahu fixes the length of Bavel’s dominion twice, once as a sentence and once as a promise, and the promise is the version with the way home in it.

That number then travels through the books like almost no other. Zechariah’s angel asks about it. The Chronicler carries it into the last chapter of the last book, the land keeping its sabbaths until seventy years were made full. And Daniel is shown reading it.

A prophet’s number, read in a book by a man in the middle of it: the Tanakh rarely shows its own arithmetic being studied, and here it does.

One spelling, and six stands that are not seventy

The spelling שבעים stands 72 times in the twenty-four books, and that is a spelling count, which by now is this section’s oldest warning. Six of the 72 are not the number seventy at all. Five are weeks: a fortnight in Vayikra’s laws of childbirth, and four in Daniel, where the same consonants are shavuim rather than shivim. One, in the song of Channah, is the sated, spelled with a sin that the consonantal text cannot tell from a shin.

Daniel is the place to see it. The verse that opens the answer to his reading, later in the same chapter, begins with this spelling twice in a row: the first carries a qubuts and is weeks, the second does not and is seventy. What those weeks mean has a literature of its own, and this page reads none of it and will not quote the verse into a paragraph about spelling. The letters are the point, and the door at the foot of this page shows them: one spelling, standing beside itself, being two different words. A reader who takes a spelling count for a word count will misread every number on this site.

The nations and the bullocks

The most famous seventy of all is one the text never states. Bereshit 10 walks the descendants of Noach’s three sons, family by family, and closes the chapter like this.

The tradition counts seventy nations in that table, and seventy languages with them, and builds on the count everywhere. The chapter itself never totals its own list. The seventy of the nations is the tradition’s count, made by choosing whom to include, and the usual places it is taught are not in this site’s library, so it is named here in general terms and given no address. The table, at least, is ours to point at.

Once a year the Torah counts its way down to the same number without ever saying it. The mussaf offerings of Sukkot open with thirteen bullocks on the first day.

Then twelve on the second day, eleven on the third, ten, nine, eight, and on the seventh day seven.

Add the seven days and the bullocks come to seventy. That arithmetic is done on the verses themselves and anyone can redo it. The reading that pairs the seventy bullocks with the seventy nations, the festival offering brought for the whole world, is the Gemara’s, in a tractate we do not hold, so the pairing is named and not quoted. The descending count itself has already done work elsewhere on this site: it is the pattern Beit Shammai leans on for the Chanukah lights, in the article about thirty-six.

Wine in, secret out

After all that counting, one classical gematria. An old saying has it that when wine enters, a secret comes out. The saying is Talmudic, and the tractate that carries it is not in our library, so it is named here and not quoted, with no daf given. What is usually said alongside it, that the two nouns carry the same value, is the commentators’ observation, and that half is checkable on this page.

יין=70 and סוד=70

Wine is seventy and secret is seventy, and the arithmetic holds. What the equation cannot tell you is anything the saying did not already know. The letters were always going to add up to something; the tradition kept this sum because the sentence it decorates is true.

Which seventy is which

The books keep counting past this page’s examples: seventy sons of Gideon, seventy days of Egypt weeping for Yaakov. So it is worth closing the way this section likes to close, by sorting the pile. The souls, the elders, the palms, the years, the bullocks and the days of weeping are counts, written in words, and gematria has nothing to do with them. The seventy nations are a tradition’s count, made on a table the text leaves untotalled. The court of seventy-one is a mishnah’s ruling with a dissent attached. Only wine and secret, of everything here, is a gematria, and the letter ayin carries the value all by itself. A number this busy is exactly where the distinctions earn their keep.