What Does the Number 3 Mean in the Bible? The Third Day, the Thrice-Holy and the Trinity

Biblical NumerologySee all 53 articles in this series

In the Bible, three is above all the number of the third day, the day God acts after a wait and the day Christ rose from the dead. It also marks fullness, as when the angels cry “Holy, holy, holy”. Christians also hear in it the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Many other threes in Scripture are simply counts.

Abraham walked toward Moriah for two days with the knife and the wood, and “on the third day” he saw the place. Israel waited two days at the foot of Sinai, and on the third the Lord came down. Again and again in Scripture, the waiting ends on the third day. Jesus pointed to that pattern himself, and the morning he rose gave it its fullest meaning. With this number the Bible builds the meaning itself, in plain sight, where any of us can follow it.

Here are the best-known threes in Scripture, grouped by kind, with the passage to read for each:

The three	Where to read it	Kind
Christ rises “the third day”	1 Corinthians 15:4; Luke 24:46	The third day
Jonah three days and three nights in the fish	Jonah 1:17; Matthew 12:40	The third day
Abraham sees the mountain on the third day	Genesis 22:4	The third day
The Lord comes down on Sinai on the third day	Exodus 19:11, 16	The third day
Esther goes in to the king on the third day	Esther 5:1	The third day
“Holy, holy, holy”	Isaiah 6:3; Revelation 4:8	Threefold words
The priests’ blessing in three lines	Numbers 6:24–26	Threefold words
“A threefold cord”	Ecclesiastes 4:12	Threefold words
Faith, hope and charity	1 Corinthians 13:13	Threefold words
Three feasts a year	Exodus 23:14–17	Worship
Daniel prays three times a day	Daniel 6:10	Worship
Three temptations	Matthew 4:1–11	The Gospels
Three prayers in Gethsemane	Matthew 26:44	The Gospels
Three denials, three questions	Matthew 26:69–75; John 21:15–17	The Gospels
Darkness from the sixth to the ninth hour	Mark 15:33	The Gospels
The title in Hebrew, Greek and Latin	John 19:20	The Gospels
Peter’s vision shown “thrice”	Acts 10:16	The apostles
Paul asks three times	2 Corinthians 12:8	The apostles
Father, Son and Holy Ghost	Matthew 28:19; 2 Corinthians 13:14	God

It matters because Christ rose on it, and the oldest summary of the faith puts it at the centre. Paul tells the Corinthians that he is handing on “that which I also received”: that Christ died for our sins, “And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). Those words were given to him; they were not his own. Jesus had told his disciples the same beforehand, that he must “be killed, and be raised again the third day” (Matthew 16:21), and after he rose he told them, “Thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day” (Luke 24:46). And the Nicene Creed still says it; in the Orthodox Church in America’s English it reads, “And the third day He arose again, according to the Scriptures.”

Paul names no passage, but Christians have long heard “according to the scriptures” in the Old Testament stories where the third day ends a wait. Hosea has Israel say, “After two days will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight” (Hosea 6:2). On the way to the mountain where he was to offer Isaac, “on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off” (Genesis 22:4). At Sinai, God told Moses to have the people “ready against the third day: for the third day the Lord will come down in the sight of all the people” (Exodus 19:11), and that morning there were “thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount” (Exodus 19:16).

Jesus made the comparison himself: “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40). The verse in Jonah is 1:17 in English Bibles and 2:1 in Hebrew ones, which begin chapter two with the fish. He spoke of the temple the same way: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up”, and John adds, “But he spake of the temple of his body” (John 2:19, 21).

How can a burial on Friday and a rising on Sunday be “three days and three nights”? Esther shows us how the days were counted. She asked the Jews of Shushan to fast “three days, night or day”, and “it came to pass on the third day” that she went in to the king (Esther 4:16; 5:1). So part of a day counted as a day. The whole question, with the days and hours of Holy Week, is answered in when Jesus rose from the dead.

Isaiah saw the Lord in the temple, and the seraphim “cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory” (Isaiah 6:3). Centuries later John heard the same cry in heaven, from creatures who “rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come” (Revelation 4:8).

In Hebrew you say “most” by saying a word three times, and Barnes’ Notes on Isaiah puts it this way: “The Hebrews usually expressed the superlative degree by the repetition of a word.” Jeremiah does it with the land: “O earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord” (Jeremiah 22:29). In Isaiah the word said three times is holiness, and Revelation, written in Greek, echoes his cry. When the angels call God holy three times over, they are calling him holy beyond all telling. The priests’ blessing has the same shape, three lines that each begin with the Lord’s name: “The Lord bless thee, and keep thee: The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace” (Numbers 6:24–26).

Later Christian readers heard more in the threefold cry. Jerome, as Benson’s commentary quotes him, took the angels’ hymn to show “that there is a Trinity in the one Godhead”. Isaiah does not name the Trinity; that reading belongs to the Church that took up the angels’ song.

The Gospels are full of threes, most of all in Jesus’ last days. Jesus was tempted three times in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1–11). He took three disciples, “Peter, James, and John his brother”, up the mountain of the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1). In Gethsemane he left them and “prayed the third time, saying the same words” (Matthew 26:44). He had told Peter, “this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice” (Matthew 26:34), and when it happened, Peter “called to mind the word that Jesus said unto him” and “wept” (Mark 14:72). On the cross, “from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour” (Matthew 27:45), three hours, and the charge above him “was written in Hebrew, and Greek, and Latin” (John 19:20).

After the resurrection, Jesus answers the three denials with three questions. By the sea he asks Peter, “lovest thou me?”, and again, and “Peter was grieved because he said unto him the third time, Lovest thou me?” (John 21:17). Each time Peter answers, he receives a charge to feed his lambs or his sheep, and so the man who failed three times is restored three times.

Two of the threes we know best are not quite in the text. The wise men brought three gifts, “gold, and frankincense and myrrh” (Matthew 2:11), but Matthew never says how many men there were. The three-year ministry, too, is an inference: John mentions three Passovers during Jesus’ public life (John 2:13; 6:4; 11:55), and three Passovers a year apart span only about two years. The familiar “three years” adds the months before the first of them, and some readers count the unnamed “feast of the Jews” in John 5:1 as a fourth Passover. No Gospel gives the ministry’s length.

The number does not stand for the Trinity by itself. We believe in one God in three persons because of what the New Testament says about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and the number follows from that belief. The clearest text is Jesus’ command to baptize “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 28:19), and it says “the name”, in the singular. “Christians are baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: not in their names, for there is only one God,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church draws the point out. Paul ends a letter the same way: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all” (2 Corinthians 13:14).

The word “Trinity” is not in the Bible. “In Scripture there is as yet no single term by which the Three Divine Persons are denoted together,” the Catholic Encyclopedia notes. The earliest surviving use of the Greek word, trias, is in Theophilus of Antioch about AD 180, though “The term may, of course, have been in use before his time”. Theophilus found it in the creation story, where “the three days which were before the luminaries, are types of the Trinity, of God, and His Word, and His wisdom.” Tertullian then used the Latin trinitas, writing that “the mystery of the dispensation is still guarded, which distributes the Unity into a Trinity, placing in their order the three Persons”.

The churches confess it in their own words. “The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life,” says the Catechism. The Westminster Confession, the Presbyterian standard, says, “In the unity of the Godhead there be three persons, of one substance, power, and eternity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.” The Orthodox simply pray, “O most Holy Trinity, have mercy on us.” There is more on the third person in who the Holy Spirit is.

Were the three visitors to Abraham the Trinity?

Genesis opens the scene with “the Lord appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre”, then shows Abraham looking up: “lo, three men stood by him”. He bows and says “My Lord”, in the singular (Genesis 18:1–3). The Fathers read this in more than one way. Justin Martyr held that the one who appeared “is God, sent with the two angels in His company”, and he meant the Son. Augustine argued against reading one of them as the Lord and the other two as his angels. Since “three men appeared, and no one of them is said to be greater than the rest”, he asked, “why should we not here understand, as visibly intimated by the visible creature, the equality of the Trinity, and one and the same substance in three persons?” (On the Trinity 2.11). Genesis itself does not settle it.

What about 1 John 5:7?

The King James Version reads, “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one” (1 John 5:7). Only part of that is in question: the words “in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one”, with the opening words of verse 8. Those added words, known as the Johannine Comma, came into the King James from early printed editions of the Greek New Testament. Bruce Metzger records, in the second edition of his Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, that “The passage is absent from every known Greek manuscript except eight”, which seem to translate it from the Latin, and that it is “quoted by none of the Greek Fathers” in all their long arguments over the Trinity. Modern critical editions of the Greek leave it out, and so do the English translations made from them.

The doctrine never rested on those words, for the Greek Fathers argued for the Trinity without them. The faith the creeds confess, the Trinity included, is the subject of the free course Christianity: What Christians Have Believed for 2,000 Years.

They found it in Scripture, in the human person and in baptism. Origen of Alexandria taught that a reader should take in Scripture “in a threefold manner”: the plain sense for beginners, a deeper sense for those further on, and the spiritual sense for the mature, “For as man consists of body, and soul, and spirit, so in the same way does Scripture” (On First Principles, book 4). Paul names the same three when he prays that “your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless” (1 Thessalonians 5:23). Irenaeus held that the whole person is flesh and soul together with the Spirit God gives: “the perfect man consists in the commingling and the union of the soul receiving the spirit of the Father, and the admixture of that fleshly nature” (Against Heresies 5.6.1).

And in Jerusalem, Cyril told the newly baptized that they had “descended three times into the water, and ascended again; here also hinting by a symbol at the three days burial of Christ.” In one act they confessed the three persons and went down with Christ for his three days, and then they came up again.

Christians worship one God in three persons, and so their prayers count to three again and again. The Orthodox say the Trisagion, “Holy God! Holy Mighty! Holy Immortal! Have mercy on us”, three times over, followed by “Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit”. When they cross themselves, as one Orthodox parish’s guide explains, “The three fingers joined together above the palm symbolize the Holy Trinity”. Baptism is still given in the threefold name, as it was when Cyril’s hearers went down into the water three times.

Many threes in the Bible are plain counts. “Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth” (Genesis 6:10). Abraham asked Sarah for “three measures of fine meal” (Genesis 18:6). “There was a famine in the days of David three years” (2 Samuel 21:1). The law asks for “two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses” (Deuteronomy 19:15), which sets a minimum for evidence and carries no sign. When Amos says “For three transgressions of Damascus, and for four” (Amos 1:3), he names only one crime after it, so the numbers are a figure of speech rather than a tally.

Some threes even mark failure, like Peter’s denials, or Balaam’s donkey asking, “What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times?” (Numbers 22:28). Patterns the text never counts, such as reading the six days of creation as two sets of three, are a reader’s arrangement. A fair test is to ask whether Scripture itself returns to the three and makes something of it. The third day passes that test many times over, and three measures of flour do not.

Scripture gives three no hidden meaning. The common claim that it stands for divine perfection comes from later systems of number meanings, of which the best known is E. W. Bullinger’s Number in Scripture. Bullinger (1837–1913) wrote that “Three denotes divine perfection; Seven denotes spiritual perfection; Ten denotes ordinal perfection; and Twelve denotes governmental perfection.” He builds this partly on geometry, since three lines are the fewest that can enclose a shape, and not on anything the Bible says about the number. Such schemes can be devout, but they are laid on the text from outside, and the Bible gives no number a meaning beyond the passages where it is used. Most numbers in Scripture simply count things, and numbers like 344 carry no meaning at all.

The one dream in the Bible full of threes comes in prison, where Joseph heard Pharaoh’s butler dream of a vine with “three branches”, and the baker of “three white baskets”. Joseph answered, “The three branches are three days”, and “The three baskets are three days” (Genesis 40:10, 12, 16, 18). First, though, he told them where the meaning came from: “Do not interpretations belong to God?” (Genesis 40:8). That meaning was given for those two men, and Scripture gives no rule for reading a three in anyone else’s dream.

The three it does ask every one of us to know is the one Paul handed on, the morning the long wait ended: he “rose again the third day according to the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:4).

---

• Why is the number 7 so important in the Bible?
• What the number 8 means in the Bible
• The number 5 in the Bible
• 50 in the Bible: the Jubilee and Pentecost
• What 1,000 means in the Bible
• What is the sign of Jonah?

More from this seriesBiblical NumerologySee all 53 articles