We are in the midst of the season of Lent in the Christian calendar. Lent is forty days long, excluding Sundays which are of Lent but not in Lent. Last Sunday was the second Sunday of Lent. I have been thinking of the fact that the number forty (40) occurs frequently in the bible. If you are familiar with the bible, I’m sure you can think of some of the times when this happens. Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness after his baptism in the Jordan River by John the Baptist. It rained for 40 days and nights during the flood which God sent to cover the earth. The Israelites were in the wilderness for 40 years after escaping from slavery in Egypt. Moses was on Mount Sinai for 40 days and night in his encounter with YHWH (God). That is just a few of the better-known examples of the number 40 occurring in the bible. However, if we take a bit of a dive into this, we will find there are many more – including some that are rather obscure e.g. the Egyptians spent 40 days embalming the body of Jacob – how’s that for obscure.
So, is this
just a coincidence – or is there a deeper meaning in the number 40 than just a
measurement of mathematics or a length of time? Well, to explore this I
did what most people would do these days, I started with a question to
AI. I found out that the number 40 occurs 146 times in the Old Testament
and New Testament. This is the type of question that AI is good at
answering. As noted above, there are occurrences where the number seems to be
significant and others where it is not so much.
Here’s a few
more examples:
· Jesus appeared to his
disciples for 40 days between his resurrection and ascension
· Elijah traveled 40 days
and 40 nights without food to Mount Horeb
· The first three kings of
Israel—Saul, David, and Solomon—each reigned for 40 years
· Several judges,
including Othniel, Deborah, Barak, and Eli, served for 40 years.
· The holy of holies in
the Temple was 40 cubits long
· Mosaic Law allowed a
maximum of 40 lashes (stripes) for a guilty person
· Goliath taunted the army
of Israel for 40 days before David defeated him
· The prophet Jonah warned
that Nineveh would be destroyed in 40 days
I will leave
it to you to decide if the examples are significant or not – for me some are
and some don’t seem to be. However, taking the big picture view, it seems
to me that 40 has a significance beyond just its use as a measurement or in
counting. Looking at the symbolic meaning of the number, we find that 40
can symbolize completion. Forty can be used to represent a complete
generation. Turning to another source for symbols, the Penguin Dictionary
of Symbols states, “the number forty marks the completion of a cycle, ending in
a radical change or a passage to a fresh level of activity or of living.”
Symbols can be difficult to tie down their meaning. However, it does give
us a different way of looking at the biblical stories. For me, the 40 in
those stories don’t as much mean a measurement but, rather, can represent the
story of completion. Whether the Israelites were actually in the
wilderness for 40 years, rather it was a completion of their time of
preparation for entering into the Promised Land to fulfill the promise that God
had made to Moses. In the bigger picture, we are not ready to move to the next
phase of something until we have completed the current stage we are living
in. That’s why we are not born fully formed – like Athena who came fully
formed out of Zeus’ forehead. We need to grow through the stages of life
from infancy to childhood to adult and on. Hopefully we will continue
growing throughout our lives.
Something to
consider and pray about in Lent. May your Lent be a blessed
one.
