Bible number · 4 lenses
What Does 40 Mean in the Bible The number of testing
When he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was hungry afterward.
What does the number 40 mean in the Bible?
In the Bible, 40 marks a full time of testing that has to be lived all the way through before something new begins: the rain of the flood, Moses on the mountain, Israel's forty years in the desert, Jonah's warning to Nineveh, and Jesus fasting in the wilderness. Below, four traditions read what the number means.
Where the number 40 appears in the Bible
Genesis 7:12
It rained on the earth forty days and forty nights.
Exodus 24:18
Moses entered into the middle of the cloud, and went up on the mountain; and Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights.
Numbers 14:34
After the number of the days in which you spied out the land, even forty days, for every day a year, you will bear your iniquities, even forty years, and you will know my alienation.
Jonah 3:4
Jonah began to enter into the city a day's journey, and he cried out, and said, “In forty days, Nineveh will be overthrown!”
Acts 1:3
To these he also showed himself alive after he suffered, by many proofs, appearing to them over a period of forty days, and speaking about God's Kingdom.
The number 40 through 4 lenses
Same number, 4 ways of seeing it. Tap one to jump to it.
Ego & Being · Matthew 4:1-11
Ego v. Being
Spiritual authority is forged through resisting the fundamental temptations of appetite, spectacle, and power.
- The ego's three core strategies: (1) Reduce Being to survival, 'I am my hunger.' (2) Force God to prove your specialness, demanding validation. (3) Trade presence for worldly power. Jesus refuses all three from stillness, not willpower.
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Psychoanalysis · Genesis 7
Psychoanalysis
The one man carried through is master of the water rather than someone who escaped it, the servant through whom the cleansing is actually carried out. The rain lasts the same stretch that Moses later spends on the mountain receiving the law, and that Jesus spends in the desert being tested: a fixed span of ordeal that has to be lived all the way through before anything new is handed over.
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Clinical Psychology · Matthew 4:1-11
Clinical Psychology
Answering each approach out of scripture fulfills the law and the prophets instead of setting them aside. The older words are taken up and aimed at the highest thing a heart and soul can serve. Refusing to make bread out of stones denies that material provision is sufficient. People live by word, by beauty, by art and literature, and they live by these literally, in the sense that a man deprived of them starves. The wilderness encounter with that adversary opens a voluntary confrontation with mortality and evil, and it runs all the way to the cross.
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Esoteric · Genesis 7:12
Esoteric
The number 40 is the fourfold nature of a person: physical, spiritual, intellectual, and emotional, and the rain falling that long is the dissolving force coming down through every one of them. Water descends on the mind and softens what was hard-set in it, night and day alike, until the whole fourfold self is steeped and nothing dry and rigid is left standing. Completion comes not by climbing or striving but by staying under it, still, letting the downpour do the loosening.
40 days and 40 nights is the full measure of a person met by that steady descent. Rest here is stillness held while the water works, and the self is remade by being soaked rather than by doing anything at all.
- The number 40: the fourfold nature of a person, physical and spiritual and intellectual and emotional
- Rain: the descending, dissolving force that comes down to soften and loosen what has hardened in the mind
- Earth: the mind, the ground on which the whole inner weather falls
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What the number 40 means in each story
One line per lens.
- Psychoanalysis40 days and nights: Forty marks testing in the Bible (Moses, Jesus in the desert). It is a full period of ordeal that must be endured.Genesis 7:1-24
- EsotericForty days and forty nights of rain (verse 12): your four sides: body, spirit, mind and feelings.Genesis 7:1-24
- Clinical PsychologyNineveh's coming overthrow (the forty day warning): what gets destroyed when you stay silent about what needs saying.Jonah 3:1-10
- ManifestationNineveh will be overthrown (the forty day warning): not fixed fate, only what follows if nothing changes.Jonah 3:1-10
- EsotericThe cry that in forty days Nineveh falls (verse 4): religious doomsday preaching, wanting the world wiped out.Jonah 3:1-10
Commentaries on the number 40
Bullinger, Number in Scripture (1921) · Forty
Forty has long been universally recognized as an important number, both on account of the frequency of its occurrence, and the uniformity of its association with a period of probation, trial, and chastisement (not judgment, like the number 9, which stands in connection with the punishment of enemies, but the chastisement of sons, and of a covenant people). It is the product of 5 and 8, and points to the action of grace (5), leading to and ending in revival and renewal (8). This is certainly the case where forty relates to a period of evident probation.
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