The Story of M

[This is an essay about symbols, letters, and symbolic meaning. If you clicked here thinking this was something like The Story of O, you will be disappointed.]

Recently, I noticed this interesting paper regarding how (graphic) symbols acquire agreed meaning and simplify over time. It reminded me to tell the story of 40. In the Old Testament, 40 shows up a lot in a negative way. Here are some familiar passages:

“It rained for 40 days and 40 nights”

“Moses went up to Sinai for 40 days and 40 nights”

“The Israelites walked for 40 years in the desert”

It shows up in the New Testament too, similarly negatively. Jesus spends 40 days in the wilderness, and 40 days between Resurrection and Ascension. Why 40? Why not 30? Or 50? The answer says a great deal about how symbols get meaning.

Let’s start with the symbols. The Hebrew alphabet is a descendent of the first phonetic alphabet, the Proto-Sinaitic script. About 3900 years ago… and maybe even before… scribes began using a simplified script in addition to the dominant writing system of the time: Egyptian hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs are complex and time-consuming to write, and there were a lot of them to learn. These scribes decided to use phonetic symbols instead, at least for some messages. It sounds obvious now, bit it’s one of the most profound innovations in human communications.

Symbols are arbitrary, but turn back to that paper. People can rapidly agree on a symbol’s meaning and simplify it to just enough to convey that meaning. And so it was of Proto-Sinaitic. Rather than give up entirely on pictograms, they leveraged them to make things less arbitrary. For instance, the /b/ sound was symbolized by a glyph representing the floor plan of a small hut… a home or /bay-it/. That’s an amazing mnemonic, enabling people to learn to read by recognizing the symbol, remembering what it represents, and then sounding out the words!

OK - what does this have to do with 40? Letters in Semitic languages are also used to denote numbers. The first 10 letters are 1..10. The 11th letter is 20. 12th 30. And the 13th letter is 40. In Hebrew, that letter is mem, which is formally written like this:

What does that symbolize? Frankly, I don’t know, but the 13th letter of the (related Semitic language) Phoenician alphabet was written like this:

That looks a lot like “M,” which is the 13th letter of our alphabet! What’s more, it is believed the symbol was derived from the Egyptian hieroglyph for water, for (in Hebrew) mayim and hence sounded like /m/. Those squiggles are meant to indicate waves.

So? The Israelites at the time of the writing of the Old Testament lived in the Judean hills. They were not a sea-going people, and most of the bodies of water they knew were dangerous (the Mediterranean) or toxic (the Dead Sea). Open water - waves - were scary and (I believe) since 40 = mem = waves, 40 was a scary number.

So read those quotes again:

“It rained for a scary number of nights and a scary number of days.”

“Moses went up to Sinai for a scary number of days and nights. [It was so scary that we built the golden calf to protect us.]”

“The Israelites walked for a scary number of years in the desert.”

It makes sense now, doesn’t it? It’s possible that the writers of the Old Testament were aware of the connotation of “40” without even knowing why it had that connotation, and that fear (or at least the connotation) was durable enough to last into the writing of the New Testament. It’s like they had a sort of vague feeling of dread about the number in the same way we do about 13.

And that’s a true Easter Egg.