The number 6
Man, human weakness, labor, incompleteness
Man and rebellion: the numbers Scripture uses as a warning
Six is stamped on man's workweek, "six days shalt thou labour" (Exodus 20:9), and on man's own creation on the sixth day (Genesis 1:26-31). Solomon's throne stood on six steps not long before his kingdom split (1 Kings 10:19-20; 1 Kings 11:11-13). Across the Gospels, six separate voices accuse Jesus of having a devil, among them the Pharisees and, later, the crowd at Jerusalem (Mark 3:22; John 8:48). E. W. Bullinger reads six as man's number, one short of seven's completeness, and gathers those six accusations as evidence of "man's number" branding human hostility to Christ. The workweek and sixth-day creation are the text's own markers; Bullinger's tally of sixfold patterns elsewhere extends the association further, honestly labeled as his own system.
The mathematics
- The first perfect number: its divisors 1, 2 and 3 add up to exactly 6. Only 51 perfect numbers are known in all of mathematics.
- 6 = 1 + 2 + 3 = 1 × 2 × 3 — both the sum and the product of the same three numbers.
- Regular hexagons tile a flat surface with no gaps, and the honeycomb is provably the least-perimeter way to divide a plane into equal cells — conjectured by Pappus around AD 300 and finally proved by Thomas Hales in 2001 (Discrete & Computational Geometry 25).
Every property here was checked before it was printed.
The same number, in what He made
Snowflakes are six-sided because ordinary ice crystallises in a hexagonal lattice, itself a consequence of the tetrahedral way water molecules hydrogen-bond; every flake begins as a hexagonal prism before it branches (Kenneth Libbrecht, Caltech, Snow Crystals).
Carbon — the element every living thing is built on — is atomic number 6: six protons.
The bee's hexagon is not merely efficient but provably the best there is — the least-perimeter way to divide a plane into equal cells, conjectured for seventeen hundred years and finally proved in 2001 (Hales, Discrete & Computational Geometry 25). The bee had the answer first.
Sources are named in the line itself. “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.”
What they have said about this number
The human number — imperfection, labour and the curse; man made on the sixth day.
“It is the number of imperfection; the human number; the number of MAN as destitute of God, without God, without Christ.”
“The flesh of man — man's opposition to God, and man's pitiful stance against God.”
In Hebrew and Greek
Hebrew
Shesh (שֵׁשׁ) - six
Greek
Hex (ἕξ) - six
First occurrence
And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
The pattern in Scripture
- Man created on day 6
- Six days of labor
- Six water pots at Cana
- 666 - number of the beast (Rev 13:18)
- Goliath was 6 cubits tall
Key verses
And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the mor...
And Mahalaleel lived sixty and five years, and begat Jared:
And Jared lived an hundred sixty and two years, and he begat Enoch:
And all the days of Jared were nine hundred sixty and two years: and he died.
And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah:
6:6 verses
And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.
Wherefore say unto the children of Israel, I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the bu...
And he shall bring his trespass offering unto the Lord, a ram without blemish out of the flock, with...
All the days that he separateth himself unto the Lord he shall come at no dead body.
And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart:
Related numbers
The works behind these readings
- E. W. Bullinger, Number in Scripture (1894)The standing catalogue of what each number means and where it returns: the spine of this whole section. Public domain; free to read in full.
- John J. Davis, Biblical Numerology (1968)The counting discipline: which numbers the text itself repeats, and which readings run past what it says.
- Ryken, Wilhoit & Longman (eds.), Dictionary of Biblical Imagery (1998)The entries on Three, Seven, Twelve and Forty: how each image works across both testaments.
- Chuck Missler, Cosmic Codes (1999)The letter-value material and the design case built on it.
- Troy Brewer, Numbers That Preach (2007)What each number preaches: the founder's named guide, quoted here within the cap on living authors, with the book named so you can go and read it whole.