Numbers with symboylic significance - which comes first, religious usage, or...?

Factual Questions
1

Different cultures have different symbolic meanings for numbers. For example, 7 is the number considered to be perfection in some religion (Judaism, I believe) while for Chinese, it is 8, the number of prosperity. 3 is considered “whole” because there are three members in trinity.

Now the question is which comes first? Let’s take the number 7 for example. Some books I have read say 7 is considered the number of perfection because God takes 7 days to build the world, and 6 is imperfect and hence the origin of “666”. Did significance of 7 comes first, or did it become significant because of the creation story?

(Or in short, are there usage of 3 or 7 as numbers with significance before religions/occultism used them?)

2

A lunar month is 29.5 days; divided into four moon phases (new moon, first quarter, full moon, last quarter). So there’s 7 days (roughly) between phases. This is probably the origin of the week, and all the religious stuff came later.

3

I’m not sure about the origin of 7 being perfection, but it only took God 6 days to create the universe, which would negate 6 as being imperfect.

4

The Sabbath is itself regarded as being a creation of God, so the week of Creation is considered to be seven days, not six.

5

No, it doesn’t come from that. There’s another verse in the Bible (Revelation 13:18) that gives ‘the number of the beast’ as 666. (Except recent scholarship indicates that the number was actually 616. Ancient Greek, which is the language used in the oldest copies of this Bible verse, did not have numeric digits, they used an overloading scheme for letters of the alphabet.)

6

First, on 666, please note: Straight Dope Staff Report: What’s up with 666?.

I think most likely that what came first was the idea of “important” or “magic” numbers which then became incorporated into literature. Most of these ideas (for Westerners, I can’t speak for China) came from ancient Babylon, from their studies of astronomy. As Alive at Both Ends comments, seven was related to the moon’s phases and so would have been viewed as an “important” number, several centuries before the bible was written (regardless of when one argues that the bible was written.)

Twelve was also a “magic number.” The earliest ancient Babylonians thought there were 360 days in the year (12 months of 30 days) – they did figure out their error later, but the importance of 12s comes down to us an important number. And 12 was important from a pure number-theory point of view, because it has so many factors. Today, we have 12 inches to the foot, 12 months in the year, 12 signs of the zodiac, etc. It’s not surprising then that there would be 12 tribes of Israel, 12 disciples, etc.

Ten is also a number of completeness, presumably from ten fingers and ten toes. Thus, in the bible, ten commandments, ten plagues, etc. And then one gets combinations: Moses lives to 120 years (12 x 10), there are 70 (7 x 10) nations descended from Noah, etc.

On 'tother hand, the number 40 is used in the bible as a reference to generational change (or to the emergence of a new world): 40 days of the flood, 40 years in the wilderness, etc etc. This is, I think, a case where there number 40 had literary significance, rather than arising from any astronomy or other influence.

Footnote: Mahaloth, your interpretation of six days of creation are interesting, but the general folklore in both Jewish and Christian tradition has been that seven represents completeness (on the seventh day, God created the sabbath to complete creation) and that six represents incompleteness.

7

I suspect the seven “planets” of antiquity (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) also played a role in the importance of the number 7. When did the naming of the days of the week for the seven planets start? Is it that way in ancient Babylonian where (I believe) the seven day week originated.