Thirty in Month and Scripture

Thirty is the standard length of the fuller calendar month, thirty days, and in the Muslim devotional world the Quran is divided into thirty juz, roughly equal portions, so that reciting one each night completes the whole book across a thirty-day month of Ramadan. In Hebrew the letter lamed carries the value thirty. Periods of thirty days recur as spans of mourning and consecration, Israel mourned Aaron and Moses thirty days each, and the number's reduction to three ties it to the many threes of completeness. Between the age of ministry, the price of betrayal and the thirtyfold division of the Quran, thirty is a number that scripture and liturgy both put to steady, structural use.

Balliett's 1908 chart reduces thirty to three, self-expression and creativity in the standard modern keyword list, the same root as twelve and twenty-one; Walter Burkert's study of the Pythagorean tradition finds that the ancient arithmological reading of three as the first true number, source of the triangle and of every plane figure, reaches modern readers through Neopythagorean writers rather than from Pythagoras himself, a caution that applies as much to the tripled ten of thirty as to the small numbers it is built from.