Forty

Meaning

Forty links the reported duration of a material transformation with a catalogue of scriptural and sacred-historical episodes. The passage varies the unit: years in the wilderness, days of fasting, months of preaching, hours in the grave, and days between resurrection and ascension. Its purpose is concordant pattern, not conversion of all these intervals into a single schedule. The catalogue is the treatise's historical reckoning and is not independently endorsed by the lexicon. Its opening also says that the material event happens “generally,” while the later account of human tribulation refuses to limit suffering to forty days or years.