A hundred and eighteen is twice fifty-nine and reduces to ten and then one. Its fame rests on a much-forwarded modern claim: that Psalm 118 is the middle chapter of the Bible, that Psalm 117 is the shortest chapter and Psalm 119 the longest, and that the exact centre falls at Psalm 118:8, It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man, offered as a hidden design. The claim can be checked. The counts depend entirely on chapter divisions, which are a medieval addition made by Stephen Langton around 1200 and not part of the original text, so any centre they produce is an artefact of that later scheme.
In chemistry, a hundred and eighteen is the atomic number of oganesson, named in 2016 after the physicist Yuri Oganessian, one of only two elements, with seaborgium, named for a scientist still living at the time it was named; it was first synthesised in 2002 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia.
The whole apparatus of digit-reduction numerology is a twentieth-century invention rather than an inheritance from antiquity. Mrs. L. Dow Balliett published the first systematic version, The Philosophy of Numbers, in 1908, fixing the letter-to-number chart still used today and ruling that eleven and twenty-two must stand as master numbers rather than reduce further; her colleague, the physician Julia Seton, is credited with coining the word numerology itself around 1912.