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40

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Origin 1908 to 1965

Forty is 2 x 2 x 2 x 5. It is the standard scriptural span of trial and preparation, and the pattern is remarkably consistent. Rain falls forty days in the flood at Genesis 7:12; Moses is on Sinai forty days at Exodus 24:18; the spies scout Canaan forty days and Israel wanders forty years in Numbers 13 and 14; Elijah walks forty days to Horeb at 1 Kings 19:8; Jesus fasts forty days in the wilderness at Matthew 4:2. The Quran gives Moses forty nights at 7:142 and forty years of wandering at 5:26. Muhammad is placed at forty when the first revelation came, a figure from the sira rather than from the Quran. Lent takes its length from the same pattern. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 4.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
1908 to 1965 1
Origin Period
500 BCE to 300 CE 2
Origin Period
The arithmological reading of the first numbers, one as source, two as division, four as justice, seven as virgin, ten as completion, reaches us through Platonic and Neopythagorean writers of the centuries after Plato. Burkert's finding is that it cannot be traced to Pythagoras himself, whose activity was religious rather than mathematical: the doctrines were credited backwards to him. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore
Origin Period
The system that gives a number a personality, and a person a number, was assembled in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century out of New Thought material. Balliett's The Philosophy of Numbers appeared in 1908; the chart positions, pinnacles and cycles were added by her successors over the next fifty years. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Place of Origin
The Greek world, and above all the Greek cities of southern Italy where the Pythagorean societies were established; the arithmological literature itself is later and largely eastern Mediterranean. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore
Place of Origin
The United States, and specifically the New Thought circuit of the north-eastern seaboard; Balliett worked from Atlantic City. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Attributed Author / Compiler
Attributed by the tradition to Pythagoras. Burkert's study is the standard demonstration that the number-doctrines carrying his name are the work of later hands, and that almost nothing in them can be shown to go back to the sixth century BCE. The attribution is recorded because it is what the tradition says, not because it holds. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore
Attributed Author / Compiler
Mrs. L. Dow Balliett, who published the first version of the modern system in 1908 and to whom Dudley devotes a chapter. What later authors added, the pinnacles, the challenges, the cycles, the personal year, is theirs, and this atlas's own numerology-position entries cite four different authors between 1908 and 1965 for what is presented as one system. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Origin of the Name
Pythagorean numerology is a twentieth-century label. The system it names has no demonstrable descent from Pythagoras, from the Pythagorean societies, or from the ancient arithmological literature; the letter-value chart it rests on was drawn up in the United States after 1900. The name borrows a pedigree, the oldest move in the subject. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Forty recurs in the Hebrew Bible as the span of a trial or a preparation rather than as a counted quantity: forty days and forty nights of rain in the flood narrative, forty years in the wilderness, forty days of Moses on the mountain. 3Tradition: Hebrew Bible
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Schimmel's survey treats forty as the most widely shared of the round numbers in the Near East, standing for a period of waiting, mourning or preparation in Jewish, Christian and Islamic usage alike, and notes how often the figure marks a completed interval rather than a total. 4Tradition: Comparative number symbolism
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
Largely abandoned as a comparative category 1
Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern System
The modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 4 + 0 = 4. Whatever the system says of 40 it therefore says of 4, because it holds no separate doctrine for the higher numbers. The stated exceptions are 11, 22 and 33, which it leaves unreduced and calls master numbers. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
Numerology has been sold since Balliett as a basis for decisions: which name to take, which date to marry on, which house number to buy. Dudley's survey of what numerologists sell is the standard critical account and its finding is blunt, numbers have power over minds, not over events. These entries record what the tradition says, not advice. 1
Learn More
The Pattern of Forty

No number in the Hebrew Bible is used more consistently than forty, and the consistency is the interesting part: it almost always marks a period of trial, testing or preparation that ends in a changed situation.

The rain falls forty days and forty nights in the flood at Genesis 7:12. Moses is on Sinai forty days without eating at Exodus 24:18 and again at 34:28. The spies scout Canaan for forty days at Numbers 13:25, and the forty days become forty years of wandering, a year for each day, at Numbers 14:34, the text making the correspondence explicit. Elijah walks forty days to Horeb at 1 Kings 19:8. Goliath challenges Israel for forty days. Nineveh is given forty days at Jonah 3:4. Saul, David and Solomon are each given forty-year reigns, and the judges deliver Israel for forty years at a stretch, which is a strong indication that forty is functioning as a conventional generation rather than as a count.

In the New Testament, Jesus fasts forty days in the wilderness at Matthew 4:2 and the parallel passages, an episode written in deliberate parallel to Moses and Elijah, and Acts 1:3 gives forty days between resurrection and ascension.

The question of whether these are historical durations or a literary convention is not really open. A number that recurs this often, in this many genres, with this much structural neatness, is doing the work of a unit, roughly, a generation, or as long as a serious ordeal lasts. Reading each instance as an exact tally misses what the text is doing with it. That does not make the passages less meaningful; it makes them legible.

Forty Beyond the Bible

The forty of trial is not confined to Israel, and the parallels are worth stating carefully because some are borrowings and some are not.

Islam. The Quran gives Moses forty nights at 7:142 and the forty years of wandering at 5:26, and speaks of the person who reaches forty years as having reached full strength at 46:15. Muhammad is traditionally forty when the first revelation comes at Hira; that figure is from the sira literature, principally Ibn Ishaq, rather than from the Quran, and the distinction is worth keeping. Islamic mourning and commemorative practice in many regions marks the fortieth day after a death.

Christian practice. Lent is forty days, attested from the fourth century and referred to in the canons of Nicaea in 325. The forty days between Christmas and Candlemas follow the forty days of purification in Leviticus 12.

Medicine and law. The word quarantine descends from the Venetian quaranta giorni, the forty days for which ships were held offshore during plague, a practice formalised in the Adriatic in the late fourteenth century, Ragusa imposed a thirty-day isolation in 1377 and the period was later extended to forty. The choice of forty was made in a Christian culture where forty was already the standard span of purification, so the medical number inherits the religious one.

Folk usage. The forty thieves of the Arabian Nights and the forty martyrs of Sebaste belong to the same habit of using forty for a large round set.

What forty does not have is a mathematical basis. It is 2 x 2 x 2 x 5, and nothing about that factorisation explains anything. Its authority is entirely traditional, which is unusual for a number this prominent.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Disciplines That Use This

Numerology, Disciplines

The modern numerological system assigns this number a meaning, which is why the atlas records it as a subject in its own right, though this does not endorse what the discipline says about it. This link shows only that the discipline works with this particular number; the readings of the number itself belong to whichever tradition holds them.

Source Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras WroughtUnderwood Dudley
Sources
1. Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought
Underwood Dudley, Mathematical Association of America (Spectrum series), 1997View the Source
2. Weisheit und Wissenschaft: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos und Platon (Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism)
Walter Burkert, Harvard University Press, 1962View the Source
3. The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)
Anonymous (multiple authors)View the Source
4. The Mystery of Numbers
Annemarie Schimmel, Oxford University Press, 1993View the Source
The Holy Bible
Anonymous (multiple authors), Robert Barker, 1611Genesis 7:12; Exodus 24:18; Matthew 4:2View the Source
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