Numbers
46
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Origin 1908 to 1965
Forty-six is 2 x 23. Its best-known appearance is at John 2:20, where opponents object that the temple has been forty-six years in building, a remark historians use to date the scene. Its modern significance is biological: human somatic cells carry forty-six chromosomes in twenty-three pairs, a count established only in 1956, when Joe Hin Tjio and Albert Levan corrected the figure of forty-eight that had stood for decades. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 1.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period Origin Period Origin PeriodThe 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 PeriodThe 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 OriginThe 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 OriginThe 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 / CompilerAttributed 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 / CompilerMrs. 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 NamePythagorean 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) Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryLargely abandoned as a comparative category 1 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseNumerology 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 Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern SystemThe modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 4 + 6 = 10, then 1 + 0 = 1. Whatever the system says of 46 it therefore says of 1, 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) Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceJohn 2:20 has the Jewish leaders answer Jesus that it has taken forty six years to build the Temple, a figure the Gospel uses to date Herod the Greats reconstruction of the Jerusalem sanctuary. 3 Learn More
Forty-Six Years in the Building
Forty-six is twice twenty-three and reduces to ten and then one. Its scriptural anchor is in the Gospel of John, where, when Jesus speaks of raising the Temple in three days, his hearers object that the Temple has been forty-six years in the building, a detail used by chronologers to date the scene. The same number acquired a modern biological meaning entirely unknown to the ancients: the human cell carries forty-six chromosomes, twenty-three pairs, a fact of twentieth-century genetics that has no bearing on any traditional symbolism but is sometimes drawn into number lore after the fact.
Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers assigns forty-six the reading already given to thirty-seven, good and fortunate friendships and favourable partnerships of every kind, the two numbers sharing a digital root of one; Florence Campbell's 1931 book and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation both preserved the pairing, so the number whose firmest traditional anchor is the Temple's forty-six years of building in the Gospel of John carries, in the wholly separate American tradition, a reading of alliance rather than of construction. In chemistry, forty-six is the atomic number of palladium, a precious metal discovered in 1803 and named after the asteroid Pallas, itself named for the Greek epithet of Athena, Pallas Athena, an entirely secular chain of naming unrelated to either John's Gospel or human genetics.
The Psalm 46 Curiosity
A frequently repeated curiosity concerns the forty-sixth Psalm in the King James Version: the forty-sixth word from the beginning is shake and the forty-sixth word from the end, discounting the closing Selah, is spear, and since the translation was completed when William Shakespeare was in his forties, some have supposed a hidden signature. The pattern is real but almost certainly a coincidence, since the relevant words stand where the older Geneva Bible already put them, before any plausible tampering, and the counting has to be arranged just so. It is a good example of the kind of numerical Easter egg that turns up whenever a text is long enough to be searched, and it tells us nothing about the number forty-six beyond the human appetite for finding patterns.
The shake-and-spear curiosity in the King James Psalm 46 is sometimes presented as a numerological finding, but it depends on counting words in a specific English translation rather than on any value assigned to letters or names, so it belongs to a different category of number-play than Cheiro's compound-number scheme or the Balliett chart described throughout this family of articles, a coincidence of translation and word-count rather than a claim any numerological tradition, ancient or modern, would recognise as its own method.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Disciplines That Use This
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.
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.