Interfaith Group
Related: About this forum"The Dawning of the Age Of Aquarius" started playing on my computer, as I found this Biblical quote
From the King James Version
Revelation 6:8.
In numerology, 6+8=14 and the one plus four in fourteen equates as 1+4=5; To further explain, six plus eight adds up to fourteen, which must be further reduced to five by adding 1+4. Is it the 5 of Cups, the 5 of Wands, the five of Pentacles or the five of Swords? No five in Tarot offers a positive meaning.
Does this scripture offer a positive meaning?
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
Death[me] and Hell[AT&T- when I was trained to sell cellular the FCC only cleared 666 frequencies. LOOK IT UP NSA IDIOTS!]lare upon[the NSA/CSS] those who think they control the world.
okasha
(11,573 posts)I'd suggest you avoid wishing Death and Hellfire on anyone while posting in this room, by the way.
Not nice.
Fortinbras Armstrong
(4,473 posts)You hit the trifecta!
hvn_nbr_2
(6,607 posts)I'm skeptical of your analysis but I do have a positive meaning for this verse.
Nothing in the Bible was written with chapter and verse notations, so applying numerology to chapter and verse numbers to find the meaning seems like a stretch to me. If the people who divvied the original text up into chapters and verses had divvied it up a little differently, would their after-the-fact divvying up change the original meaning? It doesn't seem likely to me.
Also the way people do numerology today by reducing numbers, using your procedure, to a number less than 10, depends completely on the nice neat notation of the modern decimal numbering system, which hadn't been invented yet when Revelation was written. Try doing a numerological analysis of 6 and 8 using Roman numerals: 6 (VI) + 8 (VIII) = 14 (XIV). Now, with the nice neat decimal system, you easily move forward as you have done. However, if your number system doesn't have nice neat digits to work with, what can you do next? Do you take X, I, and V to be separate "digits" or do you use X and IV as your "digits"? One way when you add them up you still get XIV and it isn't further reduceable; the other way you get XVI, which is equally not further reducible, so you can't even get a number less than 10.
Similarly, Tarot cards hadn't been invented when Revelation was written, so trying to find the Tarot in Revelation also seems anachronistic.
I'm generally skeptical of trying to find meaning in a single Bible verse, completely separated from its context, and this verse is a perfect illustration. Here is where I find a positive meaning in the verse, but only by looking at it in its context:
6:8 is the fourth seal of seven (six of which occur one right after the other) and the fourth of the Four Horsemen. Here is how I see the meaning of the seals: Seal #1: war. #2: conflict and violence. #3: famine, scarcity, and economic problems. #4: death from all sorts of unnatural causes. #5: persecution and calls for revenge. #6: natural disasters. Taken together, the seals summarize the woes of human life on earth, sort of a variation on the Greeks' Pandora myth, for Revelation's original Greek audience. Thus it is not a prediction of specific instances of all these conditions, but rather a generic description of the human condition. Coming near the beginning of the story, the seals present all the causes of human suffering as a problem and issue that the rest of the book will try to solve.
One final point: the King James Version's use of the word "Hell" there seems problematic to me, and all the modern versions that I've checked (New King James, NIV, New English, and Amplified) use "Hades," which in the ancient Greek worldview was simply the abode of the dead, where all the dead go after death, not our concept of hell. "Hell" distorts the meaning.