Ninety-six is a highly composite-adjacent number, thirty-two times three, and reduces to fifteen and then six. It carries no traditional religious symbolism; the older systems, which developed the small numbers and the round figures, left it undeveloped. What can be said of it is arithmetical only, it has many divisors, which made it convenient for measure, and convenience is not lore.
Ninety-six factors as 2^5 x 3 and carries 12 divisors in all. Summing its proper divisors gives 156, more than the number itself, which makes it an abundant number in the classical sense the Pythagoreans used to sort integers into deficient, perfect and abundant classes.
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.
A separate and older-claimed system, generally called Chaldean numerology, assigns letters to digits irregularly rather than in Balliett's repeating one-to-nine sequence, and deliberately omits nine from the chart as too sacred to attach to an ordinary letter; its popular billing as a genuinely ancient Babylonian system rests on assertion rather than on any textual evidence that has been traced back that far.