Seventy-Two

Seventy-two turns up in many places. Some of these appearances are connected by history: later writers knew earlier texts and repeated the number on purpose. Others come from simple arithmetic. A few are coincidence. This page sets out the examples with their sources, and keeps the facts apart from the meanings people have read into them.

Each example is marked:

1. The 72 Names in Exodus

Fact. Exodus 14:19, 20 and 21 each contain 72 Hebrew letters. Rashi, commenting on the Talmud at Sukkah 45a, explains how these verses are read together to give 72 three-letter Names, and identifies two of them in a prayer recorded in Mishnah Sukkah 4:5. The Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) also notes a rabbinic "Seventy-two Lettered Name" (citing Leviticus Rabbah 23 and Genesis Rabbah 44).

See The 72 Names for the full list and how it was checked.

2. The seventy-two elders and the Greek Torah

Fact. The Letter of Aristeas, a Greek work from Alexandria, tells how King Ptolemy asked for the Jewish Law to be translated into Greek. The high priest sends "six elders from each tribe" (sections 32, 39 and 46). "They were seventy-two in all" (section 50). The work "was completed in seventy-two days" (section 307). Britannica describes the letter as a pseudepigraphal work, "probably" from the mid-2nd century BC, written as if by an earlier author and containing historical inaccuracies. So the story is ancient, but it is not a reliable eyewitness record.

Fact. The Babylonian Talmud tells a parallel story: King Ptolemy "assembled seventy-two Elders" and placed them in "seventy-two separate rooms," and each produced the same translation (Megillah 9a).

Fact. The Greek translation is known as the Septuagint, from the Latin word for "seventy," a rounded form of the seventy-two.

Interpretation. Twelve tribes times six is seventy-two. In this story the number stands for all of Israel taking part in the work together.

3. The seventy-two sent out in Luke

Fact. In Luke 10:1, Jesus appoints a further group of followers and sends them out "two by two." Ancient manuscripts disagree on the number. The New International Version reads "seventy-two" with the footnote "Some manuscripts seventy; also in verse 17." The King James Version reads "seventy."

Interpretation. Many readers connect this number to the list of the world's nations in Genesis 10. On this reading, the sending points to the whole world. This is an interpretation, and scholars do not agree on which number Luke first wrote.

4. Seventy-two disciples of Confucius

Fact. Chinese tradition speaks of Confucius teaching seventy-two disciples. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (entry by Mark Csikszentmihalyi) lists "teaching of 72 disciples" among the traditional accounts of his life, and notes that the historian Sima Qian's chapter on the disciples names 77.

Interpretation. As in the Septuagint story, seventy-two here works as a round, complete number for a circle of students rather than an exact headcount.

5. Seventy-two in the circle of the sky

Fact. A circle has 360 degrees. Divided into five-degree slices, it gives exactly 72 parts. In later Western esoteric tradition (the Golden Dawn system, collected in modern reference works such as Stephen Skinner's The Complete Magician's Tables), each of the 72 Names is assigned one five-degree slice of the zodiac.

Fact. The Earth's axis slowly wobbles, so the equinoxes drift against the stars. Britannica gives the drift as 50.4 arcseconds a year, with a full cycle of 25,772 years. That works out to about one degree every 71.6 years, close to 72.

Interpretation. Some writers treat the closeness of the precession rate to 72 as meaningful. It is a measured value that changes slightly over time, so we present it as a striking near-match, not as proof of a design.

6. Seventy-two angels in Renaissance Kabbalah

Fact. Christian Kabbalists of the Renaissance and after (Johannes Reuchlin, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in Book 3 of his Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Athanasius Kircher, and Lenain in La Science Cabalistique, 1823) turned the 72 Names into 72 named angels. This is a later layer, distinct from the Jewish sources in section 1.

Why does 72 recur?

Interpretation. Three plain reasons explain most of the pattern:

  1. Arithmetic. 72 divides neatly: 6 times 12, 8 times 9, 360 divided by 5. Twelve tribes, twelve signs and a 360-degree circle all lead to it.
  2. Inheritance. Later writers knew earlier texts. A reader of Luke likely knew the Septuagint story; Renaissance Kabbalists knew the Exodus Names.
  3. Wholeness. In several of these stories, seventy or seventy-two stands for "everyone": all the tribes, all the nations, all the students.

Symbolic reading (Column C). For contemplation, 72 can be held as a number of completeness reached through order: the circle cut into equal parts, the people gathered from every tribe, the Name spelled out in full. That reading belongs to the reader. The facts above stand on their own without it.

Sources