oa De numerieke structuuranalyse van de bijbelse geschriften

The purpose of this article is to focus attention on what might prove to be the most important discovery of our time in the field of biblical studies: the structural use of numbers as a compositional technique. The insight that biblical texts are numerical compositions, i.e. texts of which the structure is fundamentally governed by certain (symbolic) numbers, has gradually been gaining ground the last couple of years. The phenomenon ‘numerical composition’, not unknown among classical and medieval scholars, has been little known, if not totally unknown, among biblical scholars until quite recently. Reviewing the most recent major publication on the subject, the Amsterdam dissertation of M. J. J. Menken, Numerical Literary Techniques in John. The Fourth Evangelist’s Use of Numbers of Words and Syllables, Supplements to Novum Testamentum, Vol. LV, Leiden 1985, the author sets it in the wider framework of research done in this respect. Trying to distinguish scholarly sound work from pseudo-scientific publications he gives a brief survey of what has been written on the subject so far and illustrates the importance of numerical structural analysis in biblical scholarship.