Ninety-seven is prime and reduces to sixteen and then seven. It is the largest prime below a hundred, and it is among the primes the older symbolic systems did not develop, so candour requires reporting that it carries no significant religious content. What can honestly be said of it is structural, it is prime, the last before the round hundred, and none of this is lore.
Ninety-seven is prime, with no factors beyond one and itself. Because it leaves a remainder of one when divided by four, it is a Pythagorean prime, expressible as a sum of two squares: 4 squared plus 9 squared.
Where the Chaldean chart and the Balliett-descended chart assign different values to the same letters, a name totalling one figure in one system need not total the same figure in the other, since the two rest on unrelated letter-value tables rather than on a shared inheritance from any single ancient source.
The whole apparatus of digit-reduction numerology is a twentieth-century invention rather than an inheritance from antiquity. Mrs. L. Dow Balliett published the first systematic version, The Philosophy of Numbers, in 1908, fixing the letter-to-number chart still used today and ruling that eleven and twenty-two must stand as master numbers rather than reduce further; her colleague, the physician Julia Seton, is credited with coining the word numerology itself around 1912.