The Number 200 Has No Meaning in the Bible — Here Is Where It Appears

Christian Pure Team

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Summary

  • The number 200 has no assigned meaning in the Bible. Where it appears, it is counting.
  • Scripture does use some numbers meaningfully — seven, forty, twelve — but always openly, in patterns the text establishes and repeats.
  • Absalom weighed his own hair each year at “two hundred shekels by the royal standard” (2 Samuel 14:26). The narrator records the vanity of a man about to rebel, whose head later catches in an oak.
  • Philip calculates that two hundred denarii — more than half a year’s wages — would not buy each person a bite (John 6:7). His arithmetic is correct and he is about to be embarrassed by generosity.
  • It also counts two hundred men who followed Absalom to Hebron in complete innocence, and two hundred loaves Abigail loaded onto donkeys to stop David doing something he would regret.

The number 200 has no assigned meaning in the Bible. No verse attaches a significance to it, and Scripture builds no pattern on it. It does appear, though, in a handful of places — and two of them are among the most human moments in the whole book. Does the number 200 have a meaning in the Bible? No. Scripture does use some numbers with meaning, and it does so openly: seven for completeness, forty for a season of testing,…

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Bibliography (Click to show)

Sources: Scripture quotations from the NIV via BibleGateway (2 Samuel 14:26; 2 Samuel 18:9; John 6:7; 2 Samuel 15:11; 1 Samuel 25:18).

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