There are thirty women that arrive to remove Beloved. Thirty is a symbol of justice and order, according to Marianne Schimmel. When schoolteacher arrives with his party, they are described as "the four horsemen" (148). In fact, the only time a number occurs by itself as a sentence is to describe them: "All the while it was coming down the road. Four. Riding close together, bunched-up like, and righteous" (157). Each of these is a powerful symbol, though none of these numbers recur in the text, at least not with these meanings. .
Two is duality, a pair, a division. It is also a unity, two halves of the same whole. Sex is expressed in many cultures as a duality, the yin and yang, father sky and mother earth. In Beloved, twos, fours, and even twenties occur in situations related to sex and children. Baby Suggs has eight children (209), four girls, four boys. Sethe has four. Two boys, two girls. 124 has two stories, and Sethe and Paul D have sex on the second floor. At Mrs. Garner's wedding, they ate four sheep (59). From the two buckets of blackberries he picked, Stamp Paid put two into the mouth of four week old Denver (170). At Baby Suggs' revival, after talking about "your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts," the crowd sings in "four-part harmony" (89). Such a performance requires the presence of two men and two women, and is doubly evocative of the sexual nature of two. Paul D spends two years with his weaver woman. Each two is an expression of love, either parental or conjugal. .
While Paul D and Sethe are a pair in the kitchen, "Upstairs Beloved [is] dancing. A little two-step, two-step" (75). In this scene Beloved and Denver are a pair, with images of two floating in and out of perception. "She swallowed twice", "the monologue became, in fact, a duet. Denver spoke, Beloved listened, and the two did the best they could to create what had really happened" (76, 78). This relationship is erotic, an ironic counterpoint to the stories being told downstairs in the kitchen.