1717 Is Not in the Bible — but Three Verses Sit at 17:17

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1717 is not a number in the Bible. But 17:17 is a reference, and there are three verses at it worth more than any meaning assigned to the digits.

A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity.

Proverbs is usually brisk and often stern, and then occasionally produces a line like this one.

The two halves are doing different work. The friend is constant — at all times, in every weather. The brother is for the bad day specifically; the Hebrew has the sense of someone born for exactly that purpose.

Read together it is not a ranking. It is two kinds of faithfulness, and most of us need both and have been both.

Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.

This is from the long prayer Jesus prays the night before he dies, with the disciples listening. He is not praying that they will be removed from the world — he says so explicitly two verses earlier — but that they will be kept in it and made fit for it.

“Sanctify” means to set apart for a purpose. What does the setting apart is truth. Not intensity, not effort, not an experience. Truth, which can be told to someone.

Abraham fell face down; he laughed and said to himself, “Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?”

He is face down in worship and laughing at the same time, which is a more honest posture than most of us manage.

Sarah laughs too, a chapter later, and denies it, and is gently caught out. And the child is named Isaac — “he laughs” — so the laughter is built permanently into the family. God did not take offence. He put the joke in the name.

Worth stating, because it settles the whole class of question.

The biblical writers used no chapter or verse numbers, and the church used none for its first twelve centuries. Chapter divisions are generally credited to Stephen Langton, around 1227. Verse numbers came from a printing house: Robert Estienne added them to his Greek New Testament in 1551 and to a complete Bible in 1555.

A reference is the Bible’s index — roughly four hundred years old — not its content. Reading meaning into the coordinates is reading meaning into the filing system.

Do not practise divination or seek omens. (Leviticus 19:26)

The objection is not that God is silent. It is that reading messages off the world’s noise makes us the interpreter of our own signs, and then obliges us to obey our own reading.

If the number has been appearing, the cause is usually attention rather than providence: once a figure is noticed it gets noticed again, while every other glance at the clock went unrecorded.

Underneath it there is generally something real. That can be said directly: Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. (Philippians 4:6)

Does 1717 appear in the Bible?

No. Four-digit numbers of that kind have nothing in Scripture to refer to, because chapter and verse numbering was added long after the text was written.

What is Proverbs 17:17?

“A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity” — two kinds of faithfulness rather than a ranking.

What is John 17:17?

“Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth,” from the prayer Jesus prays the night before his death, asking that his followers be kept in the world rather than taken out of it.

When were chapters and verses added?

Chapters around 1227, credited to Stephen Langton. Verse numbers by the printer Robert Estienne, in 1551 and 1555.

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