487. The symbolism of days as those times and states in general was shown in the first chapter [§23], where the days of creation symbolize nothing else.
It is very common for the Word to call all units of time "days." 1 In this verse the practice is quite obvious, as it also is in verses 5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, 23, 27, and 31 below. The general states at those times accordingly are symbolized by days as well. When years are mentioned in conjunction with days, the time spans represented by those years symbolize the nature of the states then; in other words, they symbolize the specific states.
[2] The earliest people had particular numbers they used for symbolizing various aspects of the church: three, seven, ten, twelve, and additional ones that they compounded out of these and others. This allowed them to sum up the states of the church. As a result, these numbers contain hidden wisdom that would require a long explanation. It was a way of evaluating different states in the church.
The same phenomenon occurs at many other places in the Word, especially in the prophets. In the rites of the Jewish religion there are also numbers for both timing and measurement in connection with sacrifices, minhas, 2 oblations, and other acts of worship; and everywhere those numbers occur they symbolize holiness in the thing they are applied to.
What these numbers specifically involve, then — the eight hundred in this verse, the nine hundred thirty in the next, and so on for the numbers of years in the following verses — is more than I can ever convey. They all come down to changes in the state of religion among those people, seen in relation to their general state.
Later on, by the Lord's divine mercy, I will need to tell what the simple numbers up to twelve symbolize. 3 Unless this is known first, the symbolism of their products cannot be grasped.
Footnotes:
1. See, for example, Ezekiel 4:6, which explicitly equates a day with a year. [RS]
2. For the definition of a minha, see note 1 in §440 on Isaiah 43:22-23. [LHC]
3. For the meaning of one, see §§1013, 1285, 1316. For that of two, see §§649, 720, 755:2, 900. For that of three, see §§482, 720, 900, 901. For that of four, see §1686. For that of five, see §§649, 798, 1686. The significance of six has already been explained in §§62, 84-85; that of seven, in §§395, 433, 482:1 (see also notes 1 and 2 in §395:1). For the meaning of eight, see §2044. For that of nine, see §§1988, 2075. The meaning of ten has been touched on in §468:4. For the meaning of eleven, see §9616. For that of twelve, see §§575, 577, 648:2. This is only a very small sampling of passages that deal with the meaning of these numbers. For other perspectives on the meaning of sacred numbers, see Schneider 1995 and Lawlor 1982. [LHC, RS]
