I gotta have my orange juice.

In his lectures on the book of Acts, James Jordan argues that in Acts 27, Luke is deliberately portraying a picture of the transfer of God’s kingdom from Israel to the church. The ship is a kind of Roman ark that has carried God’s people, but in order to survive and enjoy the fulfillment of God’s promises, everyone must now follow the man appointed by God (v. 24) on an exodus. Thus Luke is urging his readers: Rome and especially the temple in Jerusalem are both sinking; Rome’s protection for Israel and the church is ending; salvation is now found only in the church.

Obviously the parallels to Jonah‘s ship (and whale) and the ark are significant. In some ways this is an extension of those cases, as we must now abandon the ship-whale for salvation and instead follow Paul.

Jordan notes in support of his reading that midnight on the 14th day of the month is the same time as Passover (v. 27), there is a kind of communion (v. 35), and being without food is a kind of wilderness experience in which God must provide (v. 21). Furthering the Passover imagery, everyone must remain in the house (v. 31). Then in Acts 28 Paul seems to be saying that the special transition era of ministering the gospel to the Jew first is coming to an end.

With this in mind, we can venture a guess as to what Luke is underscoring by taking the time to tell us that 276 persons were saved (v. 37). If Jordan is correct, we should not be surprised to find some references that are related to God’s house or to exile and exodus patterns. There are no other occurrences of the number 276 so we need to look at a couple of ways of breaking it down.

276 is a triangular number: it is the sum of 23 + 22 + … + 1. It is also 23×12. Twelve is certainly significant for God’s house and kingdom. Twenty-three has a couple points of significance related to God’s house: (1) in 2 Kings 12:6ff, God’s house is repaired beginning in the twenty-third year of King Jehoash; and (2) in 2 Chronicles 7:10, the people return rejoicing from the consecration of God’s house on the twenty-third of the month.

There are also a few references that relate to defeat and exile and captivity, which is suggestive that those who do not escape the Roman-Jewish ship will have no further opportunity of repentance (as Hebrews 10:26 warns, there “no longer remains a sacrifice” in the old temple): (1) in 2 Chronicles 36:2, Jehoahaz begins his brief and plundered reign at the age of twenty-three; (2) in Jeremiah 25:3, Jeremiah prophesies seventy years of captivity after twenty-three years of ignored prophecy; (3) in Jeremiah 52:30, Nebuchadnezzar makes his final plundering of Israel in the twenty-third year of his reign.

There is a final reference to 46 = 23×2 in John 2:20, which is the length of time to build Herod’s temple. All of these references lend credence to Jordan’s interpretation of the underlying message and application that Luke is giving: escape to the church, the new house of God.

You may find this approach unfamiliar or uncomfortable. There are certainly many attempts at Biblical numerology out there that are pure flights of fancy. However, in this case we are not linking numbers to abstract ideas but rather using them to link together texts that have a related theme (in this case the establishment or destruction of God’s house), and to identify possible ways in which this connection reinforces or enriches the theme of those texts.

We can consider other examples of this approach to show that it is reasonable. Obviously the significance of the numbers seven (creation or new creation) and twelve (God’s people) is well known. The number seventy is less well known, but it occurs quite often in a way that symbolizes the nations, since it is the number of names populating the earth after the flood in Genesis 10. You can see some clear examples of this in Exodus 1:5 (the nations were already and will again be saved through Jacob and his family) and Exodus 15:7.

There is a case to be made that 17 is somewhat interchangeable with 70 in that it is 7+10 rather than 7×10. There are many groupings of 17 that occur in the Psalms, and it is at just this time where there is an explosion of Gentile involvement in God’s house. And this likely also explains the significance of John’s taking care to mention 153 fish in John 21:11, since 153 is the triangle of 17 + 16 + … + 1. The Holy Spirit through John is encouraging the church that, by Jesus’s word, we fishers of men will capture the nations!

Another interesting triangular number is the 666 of Revelation 13:18, the number of the beast, the number of a man. This is the triangle of 36 + 35 + … + 1. Thirty-six in turn is 6×6. So many sixes! The sixth day of creation is the day on which man was created, so it is the number of an Adam. The first Adam failed in his ministry precisely by giving the creation over to a beast. This number is also the number of another Adam who turned away from God: Solomon, who disobeyed the laws of kingship (Deuteronomy 17) and gathered 666 talents of gold per year (1 Kings 10:14, 2 Chronicles 9:13). With Jordan, I believe all of this points towards the land beast’s representing unfaithful Jewish leadership rather than Rome or Nero (which I believe corresponds to the sea beast, but we can explore that at another time). We have already considered that Revelation’s Babylon is Jerusalem rather than Rome.

It is possible to have an approach to numerology which is grounded in Scripture itself, and which enriches the message of the priority of God’s kingdom and the certainty of the Holy Spirit’s victorious work in and through the church.