Number games

In an essay on the chronologer Joseph Scaliger in Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800 , Anthony Grafton remarks on the work of Gottfried Buchholzer, whom he calls “one of the most serious Protestant chronologers”:

He “tabulated intervals that cropped up repeatedly, like the 532 years that separated the Flood from the death of Eber, the birth of Eber from the death of Jacob, and the death of Jacob from the fall of Troy. He circulated, first in manuscript and then in print, a ‘chronological game’ which showed that years whose numbers included repeating combinations of numerals often housed dramatic events. Thus the Ten Tribes went into captivity in A.M. 3232, Babylon fell in 3434, and the Sicilian Vespers rang out in 5252” (140-1).

Goropius, a Catholic chronologer, went further suggesting that the “different between the Hebrew and Septuagint computations of the period between the Creation and the Flood” (1236) years represented a “mystic number” that provided a “deep chasm of contemplation” (141). The digits of 1236 represent trinitarian and redemptive mysteries, inasmuch as 1 x 2 x 3 = 1 + 2 +3 = 6 (the day of the creation of Adam and of the crucifixion).

(Grafton has also produced a book-length study in the second volume of his study of Scaliger, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship. Volume II: Historical Chronology ).