"Seventy times seven" is deliberately not a number: Peter offered seven, generous by the standard of his day, and the answer inflates it past accounting. The parable attached — a servant forgiven an unpayable debt who then jails a colleague over a trivial one — supplies the logic: forgiveness is not a virtue you generate but a debt you pass on. Whether it can be extended to an unrepentant offender, and whether forgiveness requires reconciliation, remain genuinely open questions in Christian ethics.