What is the significance behind “40 days” that often appears in the Bible?What is the proper term for the “year 0”?What is the historical relationship between Yule and Christmas?What is the pre-schism Christian church called today?Did the discovery of zero affect our calendar and how we count days? Are we off by a tenth?What was the image of Jhwh before it was almost erased from history?
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What is the significance behind “40 days” that often appears in the Bible?
What is the proper term for the “year 0”?What is the historical relationship between Yule and Christmas?What is the pre-schism Christian church called today?Did the discovery of zero affect our calendar and how we count days? Are we off by a tenth?What was the image of Jhwh before it was almost erased from history?
Several times within the Old and New Testament of the Bible there are notes pertaining to a long time as "40 days," as in 40 days of fasting, rain, traveling, etc. Why 40? Is there a factual association? The only thing I've noticed are references to 40 days needed for mummification in natron. Any insight? Thanks!
religious-history timeline
New contributor
add a comment |
Several times within the Old and New Testament of the Bible there are notes pertaining to a long time as "40 days," as in 40 days of fasting, rain, traveling, etc. Why 40? Is there a factual association? The only thing I've noticed are references to 40 days needed for mummification in natron. Any insight? Thanks!
religious-history timeline
New contributor
Answers have concentrated on why use a specific number at all, or have simply given further examples of its use but I understood the question to be why use this particular one. Did it have any numerological significance? Did it sound like something else? Was it a round number in any early counting system (as it would be in Europe where it was normal at one stage to count in 20s (e.g. French quatre-vingt=4x20=80) so 40 would actually be a rounder number than 50)? Was it a month in any early calendar? Etc.
– David Robinson
50 mins ago
Egyptians, who greatly influenced biblical Judaism (e.g., Rosh Hashanah vs. Thout 1), had ten day weeks, and their mummification process lasted about forty days (see Egyptian mummies and ancient Egyptian mummification process).
– Lucian
21 mins ago
add a comment |
Several times within the Old and New Testament of the Bible there are notes pertaining to a long time as "40 days," as in 40 days of fasting, rain, traveling, etc. Why 40? Is there a factual association? The only thing I've noticed are references to 40 days needed for mummification in natron. Any insight? Thanks!
religious-history timeline
New contributor
Several times within the Old and New Testament of the Bible there are notes pertaining to a long time as "40 days," as in 40 days of fasting, rain, traveling, etc. Why 40? Is there a factual association? The only thing I've noticed are references to 40 days needed for mummification in natron. Any insight? Thanks!
religious-history timeline
religious-history timeline
New contributor
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Ron PRon P
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Answers have concentrated on why use a specific number at all, or have simply given further examples of its use but I understood the question to be why use this particular one. Did it have any numerological significance? Did it sound like something else? Was it a round number in any early counting system (as it would be in Europe where it was normal at one stage to count in 20s (e.g. French quatre-vingt=4x20=80) so 40 would actually be a rounder number than 50)? Was it a month in any early calendar? Etc.
– David Robinson
50 mins ago
Egyptians, who greatly influenced biblical Judaism (e.g., Rosh Hashanah vs. Thout 1), had ten day weeks, and their mummification process lasted about forty days (see Egyptian mummies and ancient Egyptian mummification process).
– Lucian
21 mins ago
add a comment |
Answers have concentrated on why use a specific number at all, or have simply given further examples of its use but I understood the question to be why use this particular one. Did it have any numerological significance? Did it sound like something else? Was it a round number in any early counting system (as it would be in Europe where it was normal at one stage to count in 20s (e.g. French quatre-vingt=4x20=80) so 40 would actually be a rounder number than 50)? Was it a month in any early calendar? Etc.
– David Robinson
50 mins ago
Egyptians, who greatly influenced biblical Judaism (e.g., Rosh Hashanah vs. Thout 1), had ten day weeks, and their mummification process lasted about forty days (see Egyptian mummies and ancient Egyptian mummification process).
– Lucian
21 mins ago
Answers have concentrated on why use a specific number at all, or have simply given further examples of its use but I understood the question to be why use this particular one. Did it have any numerological significance? Did it sound like something else? Was it a round number in any early counting system (as it would be in Europe where it was normal at one stage to count in 20s (e.g. French quatre-vingt=4x20=80) so 40 would actually be a rounder number than 50)? Was it a month in any early calendar? Etc.
– David Robinson
50 mins ago
Answers have concentrated on why use a specific number at all, or have simply given further examples of its use but I understood the question to be why use this particular one. Did it have any numerological significance? Did it sound like something else? Was it a round number in any early counting system (as it would be in Europe where it was normal at one stage to count in 20s (e.g. French quatre-vingt=4x20=80) so 40 would actually be a rounder number than 50)? Was it a month in any early calendar? Etc.
– David Robinson
50 mins ago
Egyptians, who greatly influenced biblical Judaism (e.g., Rosh Hashanah vs. Thout 1), had ten day weeks, and their mummification process lasted about forty days (see Egyptian mummies and ancient Egyptian mummification process).
– Lucian
21 mins ago
Egyptians, who greatly influenced biblical Judaism (e.g., Rosh Hashanah vs. Thout 1), had ten day weeks, and their mummification process lasted about forty days (see Egyptian mummies and ancient Egyptian mummification process).
– Lucian
21 mins ago
add a comment |
3 Answers
3
active
oldest
votes
I believe it to be an euphemism similar to how today one might say something like gazillions for a large number.
In a society that is mostly innumerate as well as illiterate, where neither pencils nor paper exist and both slateboards and chalk are fragile and rare, the scale of numbers readily accessible to the common population are much smaller than today. The meaning of 40 to me comes across as: "longer than a month, and more days than one would care to count"; or as Wikepedia puts it in that link:
similar to "umpteen".
2
@Mohair: I chose these words quite carefully: "more days than one would care to count". They mean exactly and precisely what I intended to say; not less; and not more. Please do not read into my post meanings that I specifically excluded, with intent, through my choice of words.
– Pieter Geerkens
9 hours ago
3
@Mohair The extreme ages are almost certainly also poetically motivated exaggerations for "really old". You might also notice that Moses' age is exactly 3 * 40, where each 40-year period corresponds roughly to a different phase of his life: early adult life in Egypt; mid-life exile from, return to, and final departure from Egypt; and wandering in the desert.
– chepner
6 hours ago
7
Hebrew uses 40 like six year olds use 100.
– Joshua
6 hours ago
8
@Joshua Or adults use "million" ("If I had a million dollars."/"One in a million"/"There's a million reasons why that won't work."/etc.)
– R.M.
6 hours ago
2
In Asia, "ten thousand" can sometimes mean "all" . As an example, the Japanese word "万民" means "everyone", and is formed from the characters for "ten thousand" and "people". Note that Japanese has a character ("京") that has "10 quadrillion" as one of its meanings. So just because a number is poetically used as "all" doesn't mean that people aren't entirely conversant with larger numbers, or are otherwise innumerate.
– Steven Burnap
6 hours ago
|
show 9 more comments
There seems to be a bit of pushback on Pieter's (correct) answer, so perhaps a bit more detail is in order.
It is not at all uncommon in languages to have words that, while technically a specific number, are usually used just to indicate an unspecified large amount. One of the technical terms for this is non-numerical vague quantifiers.
The most well-known of these is of course the Hebrew Bible's "40", but they also had a word for an even larger indeterminate number: רבבה. This word came into English (via Greek) as "myriad", but the technical literal value for it is 10,000.
Probably the next most famous for us English speakers is 1,001, which came into English from the Arabic work 1,001 Nights (which usually doesn't contain exactly 1,001 stories, unless you get an edition that purposely tried to edit to that amount for some weird reason). You can find all kinds of English-language books with titles on the theme "1,001 Uses For...", and nobody really expects those to contain exactly 1,001 of the thing in question.
Now most secular (and mainline Christian) Biblical scholars will tell you that the earliest written source for the Hebrew scriptures (including the story of Noah that prominently featured the indeterminate 40) committed the stories to writing around the 6th Century BC.
This was about 4 centuries before the Hebrews started using their distinctive Greek-borrowed numeric system (which resembles Roman Numerals a bit in implementation). At that time the numeric system in use would have been the old Babylonian Sexagesimal system. This survives today mostly in our units of time and angle "degree" (and thus Earth surface coordinate) measurements. This was technically a hybrid base 60 system, but represented with a weird base 10 tally system within the 60.
If that sounds complicated to you, you're probably still better off than the common Semite, who as Pieter pointed out, probably didn't really know how to read or use this system themselves beyond the bare basics required for everyday life. Doing reckoning under this system was much harder than what we have today, and there was no equivalent to the modern western education system, where every child gets basic mathematics instruction. Working with numbers that high was difficult, and very few in the audience of these stories would have been trained to do so.
You may notice that the superglyph for 40 specifically is the first one where there isn't enough space for all the 10's tallies on one line, so you have to start compressing them together into 2 lines in the same amount of space. Perhaps its a coincidence, but this is certainly the point where the writing/carving for numbers starts to look like a bit of a mess. Its a lot.
That's really interesting. Any thoughts on how this relates to New Testament (Greek) use of 40?
– vbnet3d
4 hours ago
2
@vbnet3d - Given that the other known users of this "indeterminate 40" (early Christians, Muslims, and Yazidis) all came later and were influenced heavily by the Hebrew scriptures, the logical conclusion is that they borrowed it. Its also possible this was just a widespread aspect of the regional culture that they all inherited.
– T.E.D.♦
4 hours ago
1
Have you back-checked how often other numbers appear in the text? 3, 4, 7, 12, 13, 50, 70? OT and NT concordances are different for "40". But especially in OT this interpretation is not incorrect, imo in more than two ways, but this A looks only at just one aspect. My 2 cents.
– LangLangC
3 hours ago
unspecified large amount
– Mazura
3 hours ago
add a comment |
Biblically, Forty is a number associated with testing and trials
https://www.thoughtco.com/biblical-numerology-700168
Jesus wandered in the wilderness 40 days, Israel wandered in the desert for 40 years etc.
It's a number that indicates enough time passed for God to achieve a goal. Fullness of time.
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3 Answers
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3 Answers
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I believe it to be an euphemism similar to how today one might say something like gazillions for a large number.
In a society that is mostly innumerate as well as illiterate, where neither pencils nor paper exist and both slateboards and chalk are fragile and rare, the scale of numbers readily accessible to the common population are much smaller than today. The meaning of 40 to me comes across as: "longer than a month, and more days than one would care to count"; or as Wikepedia puts it in that link:
similar to "umpteen".
2
@Mohair: I chose these words quite carefully: "more days than one would care to count". They mean exactly and precisely what I intended to say; not less; and not more. Please do not read into my post meanings that I specifically excluded, with intent, through my choice of words.
– Pieter Geerkens
9 hours ago
3
@Mohair The extreme ages are almost certainly also poetically motivated exaggerations for "really old". You might also notice that Moses' age is exactly 3 * 40, where each 40-year period corresponds roughly to a different phase of his life: early adult life in Egypt; mid-life exile from, return to, and final departure from Egypt; and wandering in the desert.
– chepner
6 hours ago
7
Hebrew uses 40 like six year olds use 100.
– Joshua
6 hours ago
8
@Joshua Or adults use "million" ("If I had a million dollars."/"One in a million"/"There's a million reasons why that won't work."/etc.)
– R.M.
6 hours ago
2
In Asia, "ten thousand" can sometimes mean "all" . As an example, the Japanese word "万民" means "everyone", and is formed from the characters for "ten thousand" and "people". Note that Japanese has a character ("京") that has "10 quadrillion" as one of its meanings. So just because a number is poetically used as "all" doesn't mean that people aren't entirely conversant with larger numbers, or are otherwise innumerate.
– Steven Burnap
6 hours ago
|
show 9 more comments
I believe it to be an euphemism similar to how today one might say something like gazillions for a large number.
In a society that is mostly innumerate as well as illiterate, where neither pencils nor paper exist and both slateboards and chalk are fragile and rare, the scale of numbers readily accessible to the common population are much smaller than today. The meaning of 40 to me comes across as: "longer than a month, and more days than one would care to count"; or as Wikepedia puts it in that link:
similar to "umpteen".
2
@Mohair: I chose these words quite carefully: "more days than one would care to count". They mean exactly and precisely what I intended to say; not less; and not more. Please do not read into my post meanings that I specifically excluded, with intent, through my choice of words.
– Pieter Geerkens
9 hours ago
3
@Mohair The extreme ages are almost certainly also poetically motivated exaggerations for "really old". You might also notice that Moses' age is exactly 3 * 40, where each 40-year period corresponds roughly to a different phase of his life: early adult life in Egypt; mid-life exile from, return to, and final departure from Egypt; and wandering in the desert.
– chepner
6 hours ago
7
Hebrew uses 40 like six year olds use 100.
– Joshua
6 hours ago
8
@Joshua Or adults use "million" ("If I had a million dollars."/"One in a million"/"There's a million reasons why that won't work."/etc.)
– R.M.
6 hours ago
2
In Asia, "ten thousand" can sometimes mean "all" . As an example, the Japanese word "万民" means "everyone", and is formed from the characters for "ten thousand" and "people". Note that Japanese has a character ("京") that has "10 quadrillion" as one of its meanings. So just because a number is poetically used as "all" doesn't mean that people aren't entirely conversant with larger numbers, or are otherwise innumerate.
– Steven Burnap
6 hours ago
|
show 9 more comments
I believe it to be an euphemism similar to how today one might say something like gazillions for a large number.
In a society that is mostly innumerate as well as illiterate, where neither pencils nor paper exist and both slateboards and chalk are fragile and rare, the scale of numbers readily accessible to the common population are much smaller than today. The meaning of 40 to me comes across as: "longer than a month, and more days than one would care to count"; or as Wikepedia puts it in that link:
similar to "umpteen".
I believe it to be an euphemism similar to how today one might say something like gazillions for a large number.
In a society that is mostly innumerate as well as illiterate, where neither pencils nor paper exist and both slateboards and chalk are fragile and rare, the scale of numbers readily accessible to the common population are much smaller than today. The meaning of 40 to me comes across as: "longer than a month, and more days than one would care to count"; or as Wikepedia puts it in that link:
similar to "umpteen".
edited 10 hours ago
answered 11 hours ago
Pieter GeerkensPieter Geerkens
40.6k6117192
40.6k6117192
2
@Mohair: I chose these words quite carefully: "more days than one would care to count". They mean exactly and precisely what I intended to say; not less; and not more. Please do not read into my post meanings that I specifically excluded, with intent, through my choice of words.
– Pieter Geerkens
9 hours ago
3
@Mohair The extreme ages are almost certainly also poetically motivated exaggerations for "really old". You might also notice that Moses' age is exactly 3 * 40, where each 40-year period corresponds roughly to a different phase of his life: early adult life in Egypt; mid-life exile from, return to, and final departure from Egypt; and wandering in the desert.
– chepner
6 hours ago
7
Hebrew uses 40 like six year olds use 100.
– Joshua
6 hours ago
8
@Joshua Or adults use "million" ("If I had a million dollars."/"One in a million"/"There's a million reasons why that won't work."/etc.)
– R.M.
6 hours ago
2
In Asia, "ten thousand" can sometimes mean "all" . As an example, the Japanese word "万民" means "everyone", and is formed from the characters for "ten thousand" and "people". Note that Japanese has a character ("京") that has "10 quadrillion" as one of its meanings. So just because a number is poetically used as "all" doesn't mean that people aren't entirely conversant with larger numbers, or are otherwise innumerate.
– Steven Burnap
6 hours ago
|
show 9 more comments
2
@Mohair: I chose these words quite carefully: "more days than one would care to count". They mean exactly and precisely what I intended to say; not less; and not more. Please do not read into my post meanings that I specifically excluded, with intent, through my choice of words.
– Pieter Geerkens
9 hours ago
3
@Mohair The extreme ages are almost certainly also poetically motivated exaggerations for "really old". You might also notice that Moses' age is exactly 3 * 40, where each 40-year period corresponds roughly to a different phase of his life: early adult life in Egypt; mid-life exile from, return to, and final departure from Egypt; and wandering in the desert.
– chepner
6 hours ago
7
Hebrew uses 40 like six year olds use 100.
– Joshua
6 hours ago
8
@Joshua Or adults use "million" ("If I had a million dollars."/"One in a million"/"There's a million reasons why that won't work."/etc.)
– R.M.
6 hours ago
2
In Asia, "ten thousand" can sometimes mean "all" . As an example, the Japanese word "万民" means "everyone", and is formed from the characters for "ten thousand" and "people". Note that Japanese has a character ("京") that has "10 quadrillion" as one of its meanings. So just because a number is poetically used as "all" doesn't mean that people aren't entirely conversant with larger numbers, or are otherwise innumerate.
– Steven Burnap
6 hours ago
2
2
@Mohair: I chose these words quite carefully: "more days than one would care to count". They mean exactly and precisely what I intended to say; not less; and not more. Please do not read into my post meanings that I specifically excluded, with intent, through my choice of words.
– Pieter Geerkens
9 hours ago
@Mohair: I chose these words quite carefully: "more days than one would care to count". They mean exactly and precisely what I intended to say; not less; and not more. Please do not read into my post meanings that I specifically excluded, with intent, through my choice of words.
– Pieter Geerkens
9 hours ago
3
3
@Mohair The extreme ages are almost certainly also poetically motivated exaggerations for "really old". You might also notice that Moses' age is exactly 3 * 40, where each 40-year period corresponds roughly to a different phase of his life: early adult life in Egypt; mid-life exile from, return to, and final departure from Egypt; and wandering in the desert.
– chepner
6 hours ago
@Mohair The extreme ages are almost certainly also poetically motivated exaggerations for "really old". You might also notice that Moses' age is exactly 3 * 40, where each 40-year period corresponds roughly to a different phase of his life: early adult life in Egypt; mid-life exile from, return to, and final departure from Egypt; and wandering in the desert.
– chepner
6 hours ago
7
7
Hebrew uses 40 like six year olds use 100.
– Joshua
6 hours ago
Hebrew uses 40 like six year olds use 100.
– Joshua
6 hours ago
8
8
@Joshua Or adults use "million" ("If I had a million dollars."/"One in a million"/"There's a million reasons why that won't work."/etc.)
– R.M.
6 hours ago
@Joshua Or adults use "million" ("If I had a million dollars."/"One in a million"/"There's a million reasons why that won't work."/etc.)
– R.M.
6 hours ago
2
2
In Asia, "ten thousand" can sometimes mean "all" . As an example, the Japanese word "万民" means "everyone", and is formed from the characters for "ten thousand" and "people". Note that Japanese has a character ("京") that has "10 quadrillion" as one of its meanings. So just because a number is poetically used as "all" doesn't mean that people aren't entirely conversant with larger numbers, or are otherwise innumerate.
– Steven Burnap
6 hours ago
In Asia, "ten thousand" can sometimes mean "all" . As an example, the Japanese word "万民" means "everyone", and is formed from the characters for "ten thousand" and "people". Note that Japanese has a character ("京") that has "10 quadrillion" as one of its meanings. So just because a number is poetically used as "all" doesn't mean that people aren't entirely conversant with larger numbers, or are otherwise innumerate.
– Steven Burnap
6 hours ago
|
show 9 more comments
There seems to be a bit of pushback on Pieter's (correct) answer, so perhaps a bit more detail is in order.
It is not at all uncommon in languages to have words that, while technically a specific number, are usually used just to indicate an unspecified large amount. One of the technical terms for this is non-numerical vague quantifiers.
The most well-known of these is of course the Hebrew Bible's "40", but they also had a word for an even larger indeterminate number: רבבה. This word came into English (via Greek) as "myriad", but the technical literal value for it is 10,000.
Probably the next most famous for us English speakers is 1,001, which came into English from the Arabic work 1,001 Nights (which usually doesn't contain exactly 1,001 stories, unless you get an edition that purposely tried to edit to that amount for some weird reason). You can find all kinds of English-language books with titles on the theme "1,001 Uses For...", and nobody really expects those to contain exactly 1,001 of the thing in question.
Now most secular (and mainline Christian) Biblical scholars will tell you that the earliest written source for the Hebrew scriptures (including the story of Noah that prominently featured the indeterminate 40) committed the stories to writing around the 6th Century BC.
This was about 4 centuries before the Hebrews started using their distinctive Greek-borrowed numeric system (which resembles Roman Numerals a bit in implementation). At that time the numeric system in use would have been the old Babylonian Sexagesimal system. This survives today mostly in our units of time and angle "degree" (and thus Earth surface coordinate) measurements. This was technically a hybrid base 60 system, but represented with a weird base 10 tally system within the 60.
If that sounds complicated to you, you're probably still better off than the common Semite, who as Pieter pointed out, probably didn't really know how to read or use this system themselves beyond the bare basics required for everyday life. Doing reckoning under this system was much harder than what we have today, and there was no equivalent to the modern western education system, where every child gets basic mathematics instruction. Working with numbers that high was difficult, and very few in the audience of these stories would have been trained to do so.
You may notice that the superglyph for 40 specifically is the first one where there isn't enough space for all the 10's tallies on one line, so you have to start compressing them together into 2 lines in the same amount of space. Perhaps its a coincidence, but this is certainly the point where the writing/carving for numbers starts to look like a bit of a mess. Its a lot.
That's really interesting. Any thoughts on how this relates to New Testament (Greek) use of 40?
– vbnet3d
4 hours ago
2
@vbnet3d - Given that the other known users of this "indeterminate 40" (early Christians, Muslims, and Yazidis) all came later and were influenced heavily by the Hebrew scriptures, the logical conclusion is that they borrowed it. Its also possible this was just a widespread aspect of the regional culture that they all inherited.
– T.E.D.♦
4 hours ago
1
Have you back-checked how often other numbers appear in the text? 3, 4, 7, 12, 13, 50, 70? OT and NT concordances are different for "40". But especially in OT this interpretation is not incorrect, imo in more than two ways, but this A looks only at just one aspect. My 2 cents.
– LangLangC
3 hours ago
unspecified large amount
– Mazura
3 hours ago
add a comment |
There seems to be a bit of pushback on Pieter's (correct) answer, so perhaps a bit more detail is in order.
It is not at all uncommon in languages to have words that, while technically a specific number, are usually used just to indicate an unspecified large amount. One of the technical terms for this is non-numerical vague quantifiers.
The most well-known of these is of course the Hebrew Bible's "40", but they also had a word for an even larger indeterminate number: רבבה. This word came into English (via Greek) as "myriad", but the technical literal value for it is 10,000.
Probably the next most famous for us English speakers is 1,001, which came into English from the Arabic work 1,001 Nights (which usually doesn't contain exactly 1,001 stories, unless you get an edition that purposely tried to edit to that amount for some weird reason). You can find all kinds of English-language books with titles on the theme "1,001 Uses For...", and nobody really expects those to contain exactly 1,001 of the thing in question.
Now most secular (and mainline Christian) Biblical scholars will tell you that the earliest written source for the Hebrew scriptures (including the story of Noah that prominently featured the indeterminate 40) committed the stories to writing around the 6th Century BC.
This was about 4 centuries before the Hebrews started using their distinctive Greek-borrowed numeric system (which resembles Roman Numerals a bit in implementation). At that time the numeric system in use would have been the old Babylonian Sexagesimal system. This survives today mostly in our units of time and angle "degree" (and thus Earth surface coordinate) measurements. This was technically a hybrid base 60 system, but represented with a weird base 10 tally system within the 60.
If that sounds complicated to you, you're probably still better off than the common Semite, who as Pieter pointed out, probably didn't really know how to read or use this system themselves beyond the bare basics required for everyday life. Doing reckoning under this system was much harder than what we have today, and there was no equivalent to the modern western education system, where every child gets basic mathematics instruction. Working with numbers that high was difficult, and very few in the audience of these stories would have been trained to do so.
You may notice that the superglyph for 40 specifically is the first one where there isn't enough space for all the 10's tallies on one line, so you have to start compressing them together into 2 lines in the same amount of space. Perhaps its a coincidence, but this is certainly the point where the writing/carving for numbers starts to look like a bit of a mess. Its a lot.
That's really interesting. Any thoughts on how this relates to New Testament (Greek) use of 40?
– vbnet3d
4 hours ago
2
@vbnet3d - Given that the other known users of this "indeterminate 40" (early Christians, Muslims, and Yazidis) all came later and were influenced heavily by the Hebrew scriptures, the logical conclusion is that they borrowed it. Its also possible this was just a widespread aspect of the regional culture that they all inherited.
– T.E.D.♦
4 hours ago
1
Have you back-checked how often other numbers appear in the text? 3, 4, 7, 12, 13, 50, 70? OT and NT concordances are different for "40". But especially in OT this interpretation is not incorrect, imo in more than two ways, but this A looks only at just one aspect. My 2 cents.
– LangLangC
3 hours ago
unspecified large amount
– Mazura
3 hours ago
add a comment |
There seems to be a bit of pushback on Pieter's (correct) answer, so perhaps a bit more detail is in order.
It is not at all uncommon in languages to have words that, while technically a specific number, are usually used just to indicate an unspecified large amount. One of the technical terms for this is non-numerical vague quantifiers.
The most well-known of these is of course the Hebrew Bible's "40", but they also had a word for an even larger indeterminate number: רבבה. This word came into English (via Greek) as "myriad", but the technical literal value for it is 10,000.
Probably the next most famous for us English speakers is 1,001, which came into English from the Arabic work 1,001 Nights (which usually doesn't contain exactly 1,001 stories, unless you get an edition that purposely tried to edit to that amount for some weird reason). You can find all kinds of English-language books with titles on the theme "1,001 Uses For...", and nobody really expects those to contain exactly 1,001 of the thing in question.
Now most secular (and mainline Christian) Biblical scholars will tell you that the earliest written source for the Hebrew scriptures (including the story of Noah that prominently featured the indeterminate 40) committed the stories to writing around the 6th Century BC.
This was about 4 centuries before the Hebrews started using their distinctive Greek-borrowed numeric system (which resembles Roman Numerals a bit in implementation). At that time the numeric system in use would have been the old Babylonian Sexagesimal system. This survives today mostly in our units of time and angle "degree" (and thus Earth surface coordinate) measurements. This was technically a hybrid base 60 system, but represented with a weird base 10 tally system within the 60.
If that sounds complicated to you, you're probably still better off than the common Semite, who as Pieter pointed out, probably didn't really know how to read or use this system themselves beyond the bare basics required for everyday life. Doing reckoning under this system was much harder than what we have today, and there was no equivalent to the modern western education system, where every child gets basic mathematics instruction. Working with numbers that high was difficult, and very few in the audience of these stories would have been trained to do so.
You may notice that the superglyph for 40 specifically is the first one where there isn't enough space for all the 10's tallies on one line, so you have to start compressing them together into 2 lines in the same amount of space. Perhaps its a coincidence, but this is certainly the point where the writing/carving for numbers starts to look like a bit of a mess. Its a lot.
There seems to be a bit of pushback on Pieter's (correct) answer, so perhaps a bit more detail is in order.
It is not at all uncommon in languages to have words that, while technically a specific number, are usually used just to indicate an unspecified large amount. One of the technical terms for this is non-numerical vague quantifiers.
The most well-known of these is of course the Hebrew Bible's "40", but they also had a word for an even larger indeterminate number: רבבה. This word came into English (via Greek) as "myriad", but the technical literal value for it is 10,000.
Probably the next most famous for us English speakers is 1,001, which came into English from the Arabic work 1,001 Nights (which usually doesn't contain exactly 1,001 stories, unless you get an edition that purposely tried to edit to that amount for some weird reason). You can find all kinds of English-language books with titles on the theme "1,001 Uses For...", and nobody really expects those to contain exactly 1,001 of the thing in question.
Now most secular (and mainline Christian) Biblical scholars will tell you that the earliest written source for the Hebrew scriptures (including the story of Noah that prominently featured the indeterminate 40) committed the stories to writing around the 6th Century BC.
This was about 4 centuries before the Hebrews started using their distinctive Greek-borrowed numeric system (which resembles Roman Numerals a bit in implementation). At that time the numeric system in use would have been the old Babylonian Sexagesimal system. This survives today mostly in our units of time and angle "degree" (and thus Earth surface coordinate) measurements. This was technically a hybrid base 60 system, but represented with a weird base 10 tally system within the 60.
If that sounds complicated to you, you're probably still better off than the common Semite, who as Pieter pointed out, probably didn't really know how to read or use this system themselves beyond the bare basics required for everyday life. Doing reckoning under this system was much harder than what we have today, and there was no equivalent to the modern western education system, where every child gets basic mathematics instruction. Working with numbers that high was difficult, and very few in the audience of these stories would have been trained to do so.
You may notice that the superglyph for 40 specifically is the first one where there isn't enough space for all the 10's tallies on one line, so you have to start compressing them together into 2 lines in the same amount of space. Perhaps its a coincidence, but this is certainly the point where the writing/carving for numbers starts to look like a bit of a mess. Its a lot.
edited 4 hours ago
answered 6 hours ago
T.E.D.♦T.E.D.
76k10171313
76k10171313
That's really interesting. Any thoughts on how this relates to New Testament (Greek) use of 40?
– vbnet3d
4 hours ago
2
@vbnet3d - Given that the other known users of this "indeterminate 40" (early Christians, Muslims, and Yazidis) all came later and were influenced heavily by the Hebrew scriptures, the logical conclusion is that they borrowed it. Its also possible this was just a widespread aspect of the regional culture that they all inherited.
– T.E.D.♦
4 hours ago
1
Have you back-checked how often other numbers appear in the text? 3, 4, 7, 12, 13, 50, 70? OT and NT concordances are different for "40". But especially in OT this interpretation is not incorrect, imo in more than two ways, but this A looks only at just one aspect. My 2 cents.
– LangLangC
3 hours ago
unspecified large amount
– Mazura
3 hours ago
add a comment |
That's really interesting. Any thoughts on how this relates to New Testament (Greek) use of 40?
– vbnet3d
4 hours ago
2
@vbnet3d - Given that the other known users of this "indeterminate 40" (early Christians, Muslims, and Yazidis) all came later and were influenced heavily by the Hebrew scriptures, the logical conclusion is that they borrowed it. Its also possible this was just a widespread aspect of the regional culture that they all inherited.
– T.E.D.♦
4 hours ago
1
Have you back-checked how often other numbers appear in the text? 3, 4, 7, 12, 13, 50, 70? OT and NT concordances are different for "40". But especially in OT this interpretation is not incorrect, imo in more than two ways, but this A looks only at just one aspect. My 2 cents.
– LangLangC
3 hours ago
unspecified large amount
– Mazura
3 hours ago
That's really interesting. Any thoughts on how this relates to New Testament (Greek) use of 40?
– vbnet3d
4 hours ago
That's really interesting. Any thoughts on how this relates to New Testament (Greek) use of 40?
– vbnet3d
4 hours ago
2
2
@vbnet3d - Given that the other known users of this "indeterminate 40" (early Christians, Muslims, and Yazidis) all came later and were influenced heavily by the Hebrew scriptures, the logical conclusion is that they borrowed it. Its also possible this was just a widespread aspect of the regional culture that they all inherited.
– T.E.D.♦
4 hours ago
@vbnet3d - Given that the other known users of this "indeterminate 40" (early Christians, Muslims, and Yazidis) all came later and were influenced heavily by the Hebrew scriptures, the logical conclusion is that they borrowed it. Its also possible this was just a widespread aspect of the regional culture that they all inherited.
– T.E.D.♦
4 hours ago
1
1
Have you back-checked how often other numbers appear in the text? 3, 4, 7, 12, 13, 50, 70? OT and NT concordances are different for "40". But especially in OT this interpretation is not incorrect, imo in more than two ways, but this A looks only at just one aspect. My 2 cents.
– LangLangC
3 hours ago
Have you back-checked how often other numbers appear in the text? 3, 4, 7, 12, 13, 50, 70? OT and NT concordances are different for "40". But especially in OT this interpretation is not incorrect, imo in more than two ways, but this A looks only at just one aspect. My 2 cents.
– LangLangC
3 hours ago
unspecified large amount
– Mazura
3 hours ago
unspecified large amount
– Mazura
3 hours ago
add a comment |
Biblically, Forty is a number associated with testing and trials
https://www.thoughtco.com/biblical-numerology-700168
Jesus wandered in the wilderness 40 days, Israel wandered in the desert for 40 years etc.
It's a number that indicates enough time passed for God to achieve a goal. Fullness of time.
New contributor
add a comment |
Biblically, Forty is a number associated with testing and trials
https://www.thoughtco.com/biblical-numerology-700168
Jesus wandered in the wilderness 40 days, Israel wandered in the desert for 40 years etc.
It's a number that indicates enough time passed for God to achieve a goal. Fullness of time.
New contributor
add a comment |
Biblically, Forty is a number associated with testing and trials
https://www.thoughtco.com/biblical-numerology-700168
Jesus wandered in the wilderness 40 days, Israel wandered in the desert for 40 years etc.
It's a number that indicates enough time passed for God to achieve a goal. Fullness of time.
New contributor
Biblically, Forty is a number associated with testing and trials
https://www.thoughtco.com/biblical-numerology-700168
Jesus wandered in the wilderness 40 days, Israel wandered in the desert for 40 years etc.
It's a number that indicates enough time passed for God to achieve a goal. Fullness of time.
New contributor
New contributor
answered 10 hours ago
DavidDavid
591
591
New contributor
New contributor
add a comment |
add a comment |
Ron P is a new contributor. Be nice, and check out our Code of Conduct.
Ron P is a new contributor. Be nice, and check out our Code of Conduct.
Ron P is a new contributor. Be nice, and check out our Code of Conduct.
Ron P is a new contributor. Be nice, and check out our Code of Conduct.
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Answers have concentrated on why use a specific number at all, or have simply given further examples of its use but I understood the question to be why use this particular one. Did it have any numerological significance? Did it sound like something else? Was it a round number in any early counting system (as it would be in Europe where it was normal at one stage to count in 20s (e.g. French quatre-vingt=4x20=80) so 40 would actually be a rounder number than 50)? Was it a month in any early calendar? Etc.
– David Robinson
50 mins ago
Egyptians, who greatly influenced biblical Judaism (e.g., Rosh Hashanah vs. Thout 1), had ten day weeks, and their mummification process lasted about forty days (see Egyptian mummies and ancient Egyptian mummification process).
– Lucian
21 mins ago