Ninety-eight is twice forty-nine and reduces to seventeen and then eight. It is one of the integers just below a hundred without traditional religious symbolism; the older systems passed it over. Its structure as twice a square of seven, two times seven times seven, is the most that can honestly be said, and that is arithmetic rather than lore.
Ninety-eight factors as 2 x 7^2 and carries 6 divisors in all. Summing its proper divisors gives only 73, short of the number itself, which places it among the deficient numbers in the same classical scheme.
None of this genealogy is hidden by the numerologists themselves: Balliett, Campbell and Jordan each wrote openly as originators and systematisers rather than as transmitters of a secret ancient science, and the chain from Balliett's 1908 book through Campbell's 1931 manual to Jordan's 1965 standardisation is well documented in the numerology literature's own bibliographies.
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.