Home · The Sevens · Witness III
the first and last words of the first and last verses
“I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord,
which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.”
Revelation 1:8
He calls Himself the first and the last. So look at the first and the last of His Book: the opening verse and the closing one, the opening word and the closing word, and what happens when you count them.
Pattern one · the headline
Take the first and last words of the Bible's first verse, and the first and last words of its last verse. Four words. Then count every time each of them appears in the whole Book.
From the four corners of the Book
Four words, chosen not by us but by where they stand: the first and last word of the verse that opens the Bible, and the first and last word of the verse that closes it. Add up every appearance of all four across the whole of Scripture. Nothing rounded. Nothing dropped.
The total does not merely divide by seven. It is made of nothing but sevens, five of them in a row, and there is no arrangement of a large number that looks less like an accident than that one.
12,674 + 985 + 64,041 + 77 = 77,777
| Word | Case | Mentions |
|---|---|---|
| in | Either case | 12,674 |
| earth | Lower case only | 985 |
| the | Any case | 64,041 |
| Amen | Capitalised only | 77 |
| Total | 77,777 | |
Two of the four are counted case sensitively, and that is worth saying out loud rather than hiding. Drop the case rule and the total is 77,780, which is close and not exact. So the honest question is whether the case rule is arbitrary, and the answer is that in both instances the capital letter is the Book making a distinction of its own.
Earth in Genesis 1:1 is the created ground. Nine verses later God names it: And God called the dry land Earth. From that point the capital marks the proper name and the small letter marks the substance, and Genesis 1:1 has the small letter. Amen capitalised is a title of Christ, These things saith the Amen (Revelation 3:14); the single lower case amen in Numbers 5:22 is a woman's assent under the law. The case rule is not imposed on the text. It reads the text as the text prints itself.
Scope is the whole printed Bible: verse text, the Psalm superscriptions, and the colophons at the end of Paul's epistles.
Pattern two
Keep only the first word of the Bible and the last word of the Bible. Then look for them only in the first book and the last book.
in + Amen, in Genesis and Revelation
Mentions of the Bible's first and last words, inside the Bible's first and last books
The first word of Scripture and the last word of Scripture, gathered inside the two books that stand at the two ends of it. Seven hundred and seventy seven.
Pattern three
Amen appears seventy eight times in the King James Bible. Seventy seven of them are capitalised. One is not, and it is the one that makes the pattern.
Compare it with Nehemiah 8:6, where the people answer Amen, Amen, and both are capitalised. The doubling is the same. The casing is not. And that single inconsistency is the difference between seventy seven and seventy eight.
Here is what makes it interesting. In the 1611 edition, both words in Numbers 5:22 were capitalised, and one Amen was missing altogether from the epistles, having been dropped at the press. By the Cambridge edition of 1629 the missing Amen had been restored to the epistles and the second amen in Numbers had been set in lower case. Two separate corrections, made by two different hands for two different reasons, and between them they land the count on seventy seven.
Pattern four
The last word of Genesis
Mentions of Egypt from Genesis 1:1 to that closing word
Revelation closes on Amen, the seventy seventh capitalised Amen in Scripture. Genesis closes on Egypt, the seventy seventh mention of Egypt in Scripture. The first book and the last book each end on a word that is standing at its own seventy seventh occurrence.
And the word itself carries the story. Genesis ends with the covenant seed in a coffin in the house of bondage, and the whole of Exodus is God coming to get them out.
Pattern five
Seven words into the Book: heaven. Seven words back from the end of it: Jesus. The seventh step in from either door names the place and names the Person.
Pattern six
Set the first verse of the Bible beside the last verse of the Bible and count the letters in each.
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Genesis 1:1 · the first verse of the Bible
“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.” Revelation 22:21 · the last verse of the Bible
Both are printed above in full. Count them yourself.
Two verses written down by two different men, in two different languages, on two different continents, more than fifteen hundred years apart, and rendered into English by a committee that was not counting letters. The same length. The same split.
Seventeen and twenty seven are not idle numbers in this Book either. The flood began on the seventeenth day of the month and the ark rested on the seventeenth day of the month, and the earth was dry on the twenty seventh.
Every figure above was counted from the standard Cambridge text before it was published here, and every search rule is printed beside its number, including the case rule people most often object to. Repeat all of it with King James Pure Bible Search, which is free. The fuller documentation is at kjvcode.com.
The patterns on this page were found and documented by Brandon Peterson, whose book Sealed by the King is free to download. Used with permission. The counts here were reproduced independently before publication.
Before you go
“And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.” Acts 16:31
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