Forty

The rain, the mountain, the spies, and the walk to Chorev: every count taken from the text itself.

Forty is the number the Tanakh reaches for when a stretch of time has to be long enough to change something. Not long enough to be a lifetime, and never a round figure standing in for “many”. Forty is a period with a beginning and an end, and something is different at the end.

Every count below is quoted from the Westminster Leningrad Codex through this site’s own index, and every one of them can be opened and read in its own chapter.

The rain

The first forty in the Torah is a sentence of destruction announced a week in advance, and then carried out in the same words.

The number is not finished with when the rain stops. It returns at the other end of the flood, when Noach opens the window.

Between the two, the world is emptied and begun again. The forty is the interval in which that happens.

The mountain

The second great forty is Sinai, and it is the same length used for the opposite purpose: not the unmaking of a world but the giving of a text.

After the calf, Moshe goes up a second time, and the verse insists on what the forty days consisted of.

Moshe recounts both ascents in Devarim, in the first person, and the count does not vary by a day.

The spies

The third is the one where the Torah itself does the arithmetic, and it is the only place in this article where a number is turned into another number by the text rather than by a commentator.

Then the sentence.

A day for a year, a day for a year. Forty days of scouting become forty years of walking, and the correspondence is stated in the verse, not inferred from it. This is what a numerical reading looks like when it has the text’s own authority behind it, and it is worth holding up beside the readings that do not.

The echoes

Once the pattern is set in the Torah, the later books use it as a quotation. Goliath comes out and stands, morning and evening, for the same span.

Eliyahu, fleeing to the mountain of God, walks it in Moshe’s measure, and the verse uses Moshe’s exact phrase.

And Yonah is given a forty that is meant to be cancelled, which is the whole argument of the book.

Once, in the law, forty is a ceiling rather than a span: the upper limit of lashes, and the verse gives the reason, which is that a man beaten beyond it is degraded in front of you.

None of this is gematria

It has to be said plainly, because the two are constantly confused. Every forty above is a number the text counts. It is written out in words, in the ordinary way any language writes a number, and reading it requires nothing but reading.

The word itself, ארבעים, does not come to forty. Its letters come to three hundred and twenty-three.

ארבעים=323

The letter that carries the value forty is mem, on its own. מ=40 So a search of this site for the value 40 will return 963 words and 99 phrases, and not one of them will be the flood. A search for the word finds the flood: the spelling ארבעים stands 93 times, and its forms with a prefixed vav or heh account for most of the rest.

Two doors, two different questions, and the difference between them is most of what this site is for. A number in the text and a number in the letters are not the same object, and an argument that slides from one to the other has stopped being an argument.