gwern comments on [FICTION] Hamlet and the Philosopher's Stone - Less Wrong
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Doe the Bible ever use the 40 cliche for something other than days & nights? I don't remember (but it's not something I paid much attention to when I was reading the Bible).
Moses supposedly lived in Egypt for about 40 years and then fled for about 40 years before being in the Desert for about 40 years.
Leviticus 12:
7+33=40 days, 14+66=80 days.
See also the spies (40 days), Noah waiting to open the Ark (40 days), and more here.
The "embalming" is an interesting inclusion because it tells of an Egyptian practice, which might stem from the same cultural idea of 40 days/years being a complete unit or is a projection onto them, or be a transcription of an idea directly into metaphor, (nearly) ignoring the literal truth of how long it took, or be erroneous projection. Genesis 50:
I included the full length of that so no one says "Aha! Apparently the writers were willing to say '70 days' when something took that long, so the 40 is not a metaphor." Consider that the other mourning period is a multiple of 7.
In a word: yes, it uses it all over the place. I believe also in the original Hebrew for the OT; I don't know anything about the NT. I was going to list some examples, but you can grep the Bible just as well as I can.
EDIT: Oh, I misread your question. Gimme forty seconds to go look.
RE-EDIT: 40 years in the wilderness.
Using Gutenberg's KJV, I get 111 hits for ' forty '; filtering 'forty and' (for numbers spelled out like 'forty and two') gets me 72. Filtering out 'days' and 'years', none of them seem to be the trope; so the Bible seems to use it solely for days and years, but not months, minutes, weeks, etc.
Cool.