What does 40 mean in scripture

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thursday63

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The only thing I have ever heard about 40 years is that it is the length og a generation. But what about Jesus fasting 40 days on the desert. What does 40 symbolize?
 
I may not know much, but 40 usually symbolizes a metamorphosis or a transformation to the person in question.
 
thursday63 said:
The only thing I have ever heard about 40 years is that it is the length og a generation. But what about Jesus fasting 40 days on the desert. What does 40 symbolize?
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Forty days is the symbolical time of purification, of exclusion from the world. A woman must observe this after birth 40 days (for herself) for birth of a male and twice that for a girl (40 for herself and 40 for the girl). The boy is circumcised which is a difference. Note: 7 days + 33 days = 40 days.
 
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Noah’s flood was also 40 days, Israel wandering in the desert was 40 years, the reign of King David was 40 years, and there were 40 days between the resurrection and the Ascension of Christ. While it is open to debate, there were likely 40 years between the resurrection and the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple.
 
Isn’t the Aramaic (or possibly other ancient language) word for “40” and word for “many” the same? It could also be something someone told me once, and I’ve mangled it over…ahem…40 years. See what I did there?
 
Go to www,agapebiblestudy/numbers 😊

Its a GREAT lesson

Easter Blessings,
Patrick
 
Forty in the Bible is the number for “testing”.
Grace and peace,
Bruce
 
I don’t know if it is the same word, but I have heard a lot (40) of scholars say that 40 often simply means ‘a lot’
 
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I would just like to point something in out in regard to the very nature of these questions and how they relate to Catholic Scripture interpretation.

The desire to pin passages of scripture to a literalist interpretation is not something the ancient authors themselves would have been concerned with.
Did they wander in the desert for 22 years, 37.5 years, 45 years, or was it literally 40?
That’s not the concern for the writer of these passages. The point is the profound truth conveyed by the number 40, as other posters have observed. That is the truth conveyed, not the literal number of years.

Christians run into all sorts of trouble with applying modern journalistic standards to passages that were never intended that way. If you want to glean the full Inspired truth from scripture, you have to know how the original author thought, and how his culture thought, and how they transmitted God’s revelation. What types of literature did they use? Idioms? etc…
And that means knowing the people, not just the information in the English language.

Revelation is not just the words on the page, it is also the people the word lives within, and ultimately a person, Jesus Christ.
 
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