I have just been reading Richard Hays’ fantastic book,
Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. In one of his footnotes he mentions that Karl Barth draws attention to the fact that, in 1 Kings 20:15 we read:—
Then he numbered the young men of the princes of the provinces, and they were two hundred and thirty two: and after them he numbered all the people, even all the children of Israel, being seven thousand.
Barth believes that this verse, following, as it does, hard upon the heels of 1 Kings 19:18, should be given due attention. Hays quotes Barth:—
It is these seven thousand men, and not the unfaithful majority, who represent Israel as such. By ‘leaving them’ God holds fast to Israel as such, and it is decided that He has not rejected His people. When therefore … the solitary Elijah is consoled by reference to these seven thousand men, he does not stand alone, but as the holder of his commission he is invisibly surrounded by these seven thousand. … Even in his loneliness he stands effectively before God for the whole of Israel, for Israel as such. In just the same way Paul does not stand alone. … He can and must, therefore, appeal to his existence as a Jew and as a Gentile missionary as a valid proof that God has not rejected his people.
Could this be a clue to what Paul means by all Israel? Does Paul quote 1 Kings 19:18 in Romans 11 thinking of this wider context? Gill comments that Jewish commentators had connected the two 7,000s, though he questions it. Could Paul have chosen the verse aware of interpretative traditions in his own time that made this connection? It certainly is a tantalizing possibility. I personally doubt the connection, but I still wonder… It is rather too interesting to pass without note.
Another interesting occurrence of the number 7,000 is in Revelation 11:13, which reads:—
And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men seven thousand: and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God of heaven.
David Chilton takes this as an inversion of the remnant imagery of 1 Kings 19:18 and Romans 11:4. He claims that 7,000 was symbolic of the
numerous nature of the remnant and its perfect
completeness, but that it denoted a minority. He goes on to maintain that in the New Covenant the situation of the remnant is reversed. It is now the minority that is destroyed and the overwhelming majority that turns and is saved. I believe, like
James Jordan, that many in apostate Israel were turned to the gospel just before the fall of Jerusalem in AD70. However, I would question whether we should see (or maybe ‘how’ we should see) here the ‘overwhelming majority’ that Chilton sees. I am not aware of any historical basis for saying that a sizeable proportion of the Jewish nation turned to Christ just before the fall of Jerusalem (I’m not sure that Chilton can be arguing this).
The presence of Elijah earlier on in the chapter (vv.5-6) complicates matters. Somehow or other this 7,000 does suggest a link with the 1 Kings narrative. For it to suggest that
symbolically the people of God are no longer the besieged minority but now constitute the conquering majority might strike people as a facile solution to a complex problem (does a
symbolic but not
actual majority really mean much? etc.), but it is the line that I am taking at the moment. Reading Chilton again, this could well be what he means, but it is not entirely clear to me.
The wording of Revelation 11:13 is interesting. It speaks of ‘names of men’ not just ‘men’. This, in my mind at least, suggests that these men are significant men. I think that the apostle John may have 2 Kings 24:16 in the back of his mind here:—
And all the men of might, even seven thousand, and craftsmen and smiths a thousand, all that were strong and apt for war, even them the king of Babylon brought captive to Babylon.
Reading these two verses together leads me to believe that John is speaking about the strength of the city being broken. However, he is holding this imagery together with the imagery of the inverted remnant.
I have also been pondering reasons why 7,000 should be a symbolic number for Israel, apart from the obvious 10^3 X 7 interpretation. Seventy was always an important number for Israel (Exodus 24:9; Numbers 11:16f.; Ezekiel 8:11; the number of the Sanhedrin, etc.), but there is less Biblical support (that I can find) for the significance of the symbolism of 100. The only suggestion that I could come up with is from the parable of the lost sheep: the full number of the flock is one hundred and Christ was seeking the lost sheep of the house of Israel. However, this is to my mind a rather tenuous argument and the two numbers combined would not make much symbolic sense. This seems to me to be a dead end (and perhaps a good time to end this post!).
