The word οκτω (okto) means eight, which is how English got words like octopus (eight-foot), octave (eight-tone) and October, our tenth month which was named after the eighth month of the ancient Roman calendar of Romulus.

The octopus — from οκτω (okto), eight, and πους (pous), foot — really has eight legs, but our English word octave includes the first and last tone (double the frequency of the first), which is really the same note — do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do. This same so-called "inclusive" counting also, confusingly, associated the term octava dies with what we English-speakers call one week (of seven unique days). But the Romans didn't acknowledge the Jewish seven-day week. They had an eight day week, which they called nundinus, after the word for nine.

One of the reasons why the Jews were hated in the Roman world was that they insisted on a seven-day week, and simply closed shop on what to the Romans must have seemed wholly arbitrary workdays and so messed up the city's commercial proceedings (as early as 139 BC, the Jews suffered periodic expulsions from Rome). That means that the name Octavian (of the first Roman Emperor) would have sounded like, say, a name like George King would have in the 18th century US.

Still, humanity was once little more than a collective of clever beasts (Psalm 73:22, Ecclesiastes 3:18, 2 Peter 2:12, Jude 1:10), while forces much greater than anybody's best intentions are driving us toward a world that's wholly Jewish: a world not merely blessed with the crucially important weekly day off, but also with the alphabet (see our article on YHWH), a postal service (invented in Persia; see our article on Damascus), a population with properly curbed enthusiasms (see our article on περιτομη, peritome, circumcision), a decentralized government based on the maturity of each individual (see our article on Christ), and a "belief" system based on science and the scientific method, rather than ancient superstitions of the decrees of some bully tyrant (see our article on πιστις, pistis, faith or scientific knowledge).

The New Testament is a polemic against imperialism in favor of personal sovereignty, and occurrences of sevens, eights and nines should be viewed against the backdrop of this great cosmic battle. When Jesus asked "where are the nine?" (Luke 17:17) he also asked why Rome would accept the Hebrew alphabet but not the Hebrew Sabbath. And when Peter healed Aeneas (which was also the name of the legendary founder of Roman civilization), in the ostensibly specific eighth year of his paralysis (Acts 9:33-35), he also had begun to heal the Roman people of their disastrous Augustan empire.

Our word οκτω (okto), eight, stems from a broadly attested Proto-Indo-European root "oktow", eight. It occurs 9 times in the New Testament, see full concordance, and from it derive: