A Span of Waiting

Thirty-eight is twice nineteen and reduces to eleven and then two. It appears twice in scripture as a period of waiting or infirmity. In the Gospel of John a man lies beside the pool of Bethesda, unable to reach the healing water, having been ill for thirty-eight years, until Jesus heals him. In Deuteronomy the wandering in the wilderness between the spies' report at Kadesh and the crossing of the brook Zered is reckoned at thirty-eight years, the bulk of the forty spent in the desert. In both cases the number marks a long, near-complete but unfulfilled span, just short of the round forty of testing, which gives it a quiet thematic role as the length of a waiting that is almost, but not yet, over.

Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers assigns thirty-eight the reading already given to twenty-nine, uncertainty, treachery and deception from others; the pairing holds by digital root, thirty-eight reducing through eleven to two and twenty-nine reducing the same way, and Florence Campbell's 1931 book and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation both preserved it, so the biblical thirty-eights of waiting already described above sit beside a distinctly unflattering modern reading with no bearing on either scriptural passage.