What are the "Seven Seas"? - fact check

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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Not sure why this 1999 article showed up as a recent addition on the home page, but since it’s there, and I read it, and the inaccuracy at the bottom of the article apparently has been there for 15 years, I might as well comment on it. I appreciated the article, as it corrected my misunderstanding that it was referring to seven actual known seas, and now the symbology of the number 7 makes sense. However, at the bottom of the article you mention " The world was formed in seven days." This is actually incorrect. The symbolism here is 7 represents the completeness of God’s work.

I’ve spent most of my life trying to understand the first two chapters of Genesis. I figure if you understand those fully, you have a leg up on understanding the rest of the Bible. If you examine them carefully, you will see the world was formed in 6, 4 or 3 days, depending on your frame of reference. If you mean “the world (earth) and all the living creatures in it”, that would be 6 days. If you mean “the world sans living creatures (animal, not plant life) but including the sun, moon and stars”, then it would be 4 days. If you mean just “the world (not counting living creatures and the universe surrounding it)”, it would be 3 days. It is interesting to note, God made the “seven seas” on day 3. God’s work was completed by the end of day 6. Thus, he rested on the 7th day.

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God made the World in six days flat
On the seventh he said, I’ll rest
So he let the thing into orbit swing
To give it a dry run test

A billion years went by
Then he took a look at the whirling blob
His spirits fell as he shrugged
Oh well, it was only a six-day job

The Chad Mitchell Trio
Rhymes for the Irreverent

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In the broader sense, there are certain numbers which show up over and over again in mythology. Seven, twelve, thirteen, forty, a thousand.

There are multiple reasons why seven is significant. One obvious example is that when you look up at the night sky you see stars which pinwheel across in near-perfect lockstep with each other. But there are exactly seven celestial bodies visible to the naked eye which do NOT pinwheel in lockstep but rather “wander” across the sky. They are: The sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The seven days of the week are named after these seven celestial objects. The Judeo-Christian creation myth stole the number seven from the older myths and rewrote the reason for it. “Yeah there’s seven celestial objects, but that’s not really why we have seven days in a week. We have seven days in a week because Jehovah created the world in six days and rested on the seventh day, which is why you should work six days and rest on the seventh too.” But the use of the number seven is much older than this retelling of the story. So don’t get too hung up on the six vs. seven idea.

Seven shows up other places in the bible too. Someone asked Jesus if they should forgive their brother seven times. Jews had a tradition of forgiving debts every seven years. There are seven deadly sins.

Seven shows up in other mythologies too.

But in psychology it’s been shown over and over again that when you ask people to memorize a list of names, they have an very high success rate if the number of names is less than seven and a really low success rate if the number is more than seven. There’s something fundamental about the human brain that makes it easy for us to remember up to seven things but we have trouble remembering more than seven.

But my point is that, if you’re going to write a story, a myth, a legend, any kind of whimsical explanation of anything, at some point you have to sit down and decide how many major characters there will be in your story. There are only finitely many answers to that question, and seven is often a good choice. Doesn’t matter if we’re talking about Happy, Sleepy, Grumpy, Bashful, Dopey, Sneezy, and Doc, or if we’re talking about Picard, Riker, Data, Troi, Crusher, Worf, and LeForge. Seven just feels right. Six is not quite enough and eight is too many.

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Powers &8^]

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I have heard on good authoirty that eight is enough.

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What are the Seven Seas

The notion of their being seven days in a week predates the Bible by a long time. It was certainly in use around 2000BC. Seven is a pretty common number in the Epic of Gilgamesh (2500BC) where the storm lasts for seven days, the ship rests on Mount Nisir for seven days, then Utnapishtim waits for seven days to send the dove out.

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I would have gone with Gilligan et al., myself.

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Seven is both approximately ¼ of a lunar month and the number of classical planets.

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So that’s why they bumped off Tasha Yar. But what about Wesley? It took them a lot longer to get rid of him.

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Or how about Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, Sulu, and Chekov? But Chekov wasn’t in the first year; was he added just to fill out the required number?

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Babylon 5 had 10–11 regulars every year, though it took until the 4th season for there to be a single episode using all of them.

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And then there was Game of Thrones…

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I think Rand was intended to be a semi-regular in the first season.
Powers &8^]

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All these things that don’t change, Come what may.
But our good times are all gone,
And I’m bound for moving on.

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Well, they had to kill off Tasha to get down to seven in TNG.

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Mal, Zoe, Wash, Jayne, Kaylee, Inara, Simon, River, Book.

Nine is not too many. :slight_smile:

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Jayne might disagree with that.
Powers &8^]

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and, according to Word of Joss, Serenity herself counts as a character, as do River’s feet.