English 
Chinese 
Dutch 
Arabic 
Spanish 
Portuguese 
Russian 
French 
Italian 
German 
Japanese 
Continue reading with a subscription
Get unlimited access to all our premium content and exclusive features.
Enjoy unlimited access, cancel anytime.
Summary
- The Bible never says what the number 40 itself means, though it comes back again and again to forty days or forty years as a time of testing, waiting or getting ready.
- We counted the word “forty” through the 66 books of the King James Bible and found it 158 times in 145 verses, and 66 of those verses say “forty days” or “forty years”.
- Moses tells Israel that God let them go hungry and fed them with manna through their forty years, so that they would know a person does not live by bread only.
- Jesus gives the tempter that same sentence as his whole answer when his own forty days in the wilderness are over.
- Not every forty is a trial, because the land had rest forty years, David and Solomon each reigned forty years, and many verses are simply counting people or sockets of silver.
- E. W. Bullinger read forty as probation, Augustine as a symbol of this life of toil, the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia as a round number that may come from a generation, and Rabbi Yehuda Hausman as a symbol that is rarely a measure of precise time.
- The same hungry years are remembered in Nehemiah as the years God sustained his people so that they lacked nothing.
Bibliography (Click to show)
- Scripture quotations are from the King James Version (public domain), as published on BibleGateway: Genesis 7:12, 25:20, 26:34, 32:15; Exodus 16:35, 24:18, 26:19, 34:28; Numbers 1:21, 13:25, 14:34, 32:13; Deuteronomy 8:2-3, 25:3, 34:7; Joshua 5:6; Judges 3:11, 13:1; 1 Samuel 17:16; 2 Samuel 5:4; 1 Kings 11:42, 19:8; Ezra 2:8; Nehemiah 9:21; Jonah 3:4-5; Ezekiel 4:6; Matthew 4:2-4; Mark 1:13; Luke 4:2; Acts 1:3, 7:23, 7:30, 7:36; 2 Corinthians 11:24. Counts of the word “forty” are from the King James Version text of Project Gutenberg, ebook 10.
- E. W. Bullinger, Number in Scripture: Its Supernatural Design and Spiritual Significance (1894), the section on forty: archive.org/details/number-in-scripture
- Augustine, Letter 55, translated by J. G. Cunningham, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 1, ed. Philip Schaff (1887): newadvent.org/fathers/1102055.htm
- William Taylor Smith, “Number”, International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, ed. James Orr: internationalstandardbible.com/N/number.html
- Rabbi Yehuda Hausman, “Forty: A Biblical Symbol of Completeness”, TheTorah.com: thetorah.com/article/forty-a-biblical-symbol-for-completeness
Leave a Reply