A nonreligious question about the Greek of Matthew 18:22

Factual Questions
1

This is the passage about forgiving ‘not up to seven times, but until [some number] of times’.

I get that the upshot is that it’s meant to mean ‘a big, symbolically meaningful number’ like ‘a lucky jillion’, but what of the actual Greek construction? Some Bible translations seem to have it as ‘seventy times seven’, others as ‘seventy-seven’.

I don’t know any Greek, but online translations of ἑβδομηκοντάκις seem to say ‘seventy times’, which in English could mean ‘seventy occurrences’ or ‘seventy multiplied by’. Is it the same ambiguity in Greek? Is it some idiom that’s lost to us? A poetic turn of phrase like a Shakespeare neologism?

In the alternative, would there have been clearer contemporary ways of saying either ‘seventy-seven occurrences’ or ‘seventy-multiplied-by-seven occurrences’ without the confusion?

2

Aren’t those the same thing?

Seventy occurrences of seven adds up to the same value as multiplying seven by seventy.

3

Right. My source for this is R. Alan Culpepper’s 2022 commentary on Matthew.

Quote:

Hebdomēkontakis hepta, which occurs nowhere else in the NT, has been
understood to mean either seventy-seven, as in Gen 4:24 LXX , or seventy times seven.

and

Regardless of whether the Greek construction means seventy-seven or
seventy times seven, the number is a hyperbole. It is beyond counting. After
that many incidents, one either loses count or learns to forgive without
counting; counting is inimical to true forgiveness.

LXX refers to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament scriptures that were in common use in the 1st Century A.D.

4

Again, I don’t know Greek, but ‘seventy occurrences seven’ could be different from ‘seventy occurrences (of) seven’ - 77 vs 490.

As a lousy analogy, “four score and seven” is (4x20)+7, not 4x(20+7), but will folks grasp that intuitively two thousand years from now?

5

Seventy occurences of what and seven?

6

In this context, seventy occurrences of forgiving someone and seven.

7

“Four score and seven” doesn’t mean anything without the explanation that we are talking about years.

“Four score sevens” with no reference to years could be understood to mean 7*20.

8

Gotcha, so “seventy times and seven (more times beyond that)”?

9

An obvious connection, or perhaps reference to, to Genesis 4:24, no?

10

Ultimately, it may be impossible to know this, but do we call this ‘hyperbole’ because of the particular construction? If I said you had to forgive your neighbor a jillion times, or eleventy gazillion, the fact that those are made up numbers indicates poetic license or hyperbole or idiom or something.

In the same vein, is ‘seventy(times) seven’ a ‘made up’ wacky construction that signaled hyperbole, as opposed to a different expression that would clearly mean 77 or 490 or some other number? Even if that specific number was culturally weighted, like 13 or 666 or ‘four score and twenty’ would be to us today?

11

E.g. “Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty”?

12

Yeah, absolutely, I think so (and this turns up in Jewish texts too).

You don’t hear it yourself?

Imagine a kid asking “what about seven times?” and a frustrated adult responding, “Even seventy times seven”.

13

Yes, the hyperbolic jump is from seven up to seventy-seven (or seventy time seven). Seven was considered a divine number (seven planets, seven days of the week, etc.), so that would have been a likely guess for the upper limit for forgiving, but bumping it up to seventy-seven, at that time and place, would be the giveaway that Jesus is using a rhetorical device.

14

There was a Schlock Mercenary strip I can’t find, that commented that the precise value of a “bazillion” depended on context, and could be as high as 10^30 (for molecules), or as low as 7 (for bullet holes in a person).

490 times, or even 77 times, is not all that inaccessible as a number… but I highly doubt that anyone’s ever kept count that high of the number of times that they’ve forgiven someone, and Jesus of course would have doubted that, too. So the clear meaning is just “if you think you’ve forgiven someone enough because you’ve reached the required number, it’s still not enough”.

It may or may not have been a standard construction at the time for “unspecified large number”, but the context was that someone asked Jesus if forgiving someone seven times was enough. So Jesus answered in a way that played off of seven.

15

Wiktionary notes that this suffix is “added to the stems of cardinal numerals, adjectives, and pronouns to form adverbs of repetition,” i.e. what English does with once, twice, thrice, Greek can do with any number. This is seventice seven.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-άκις

16

In English, the frustrated adult could say “Even a billion times” (hyperbole with a real number)
or “Even a jillion times” or “infinity plus one times” (maybe more clearly hyperbole, given the made-up number)
or “Until the cows come home” (idiom, no numbers)
or “four times two plus ten to the third” (an ambiguous construction: 4(2+10)^3 vs. ((4x2)+(10))^3 vs. (4x2)+(10^3), etc. ) If you’re clever, one of these constructions works out to 13, or 666, or 5318008 or 420 for cultural caché.
or “69(nice) times” (an unambiguous number, but heavy with cultural baggage).
There are probably others that I haven’t thought of…

I’m wondering which of these is the closest to the Matthew expression.

17

It looks like that construction best matches “seventy-occurrences seven” -whatever that means- instead of “seventy multiplied by seven”, then.

18

I don’t know—twice seven is 14, and thrice seven is 21, so 70-ακις 7 would be 490, though I think “eleventy-seven” (really big, euphonic, made-up number) is more the idea.

19

I should have noticed that, since that same suffix is used in the naming of a number of geometric shapes I’ve worked with. For instance, a “tetrakis hexahedron” is a cube (“hexahedron”, “six-faced shape”) with a pyramid on each of its faces, to bring its total number of faces up to four times six.

In this context, the meaning is clearly multiplication, so if the Gospel passage is interpreted the same way, it’d literally mean “490”.

20

It has been a long time since I read the gospels, but I can tell you that first of all, things coming in sevens is very common in Judaism, especially scriptural Judaism, and second, that the Matthew is probably quoting, in Greek, the Septuagint Daniel, 9:24, where 70 weeks are given as the time necessary to finish a transgression, including seeking and receiving forgiveness, in preparation, apparently, for the messiah.

Third, “the somethingiest of something” is a very common form of expression in biblical Hebrew. The major holidays that are in the Torah are all called a “Shabbat Shabbaton,” or “greatest Shabbat of Shabbats.”

So, there may be a Hebrew expression behind the Greek that the author of Matthew did not fully understand, could not translate very well, or both.

There may have been a source, originally in Hebrew, that said, essentially, “the seventy of seventies,” meaning that this one coming in seventy had special significance, while other things just happened to come as seventy, but for no reason.

If “Matthew” was not familiar with the idiom, and unable to make literal or mathematical sense of it, he may have tried to translate it more of less word for word, with some tweaks so it was grammatical. So we get this puzzling phrase.