Because thirty-eight reduces to eleven, some numerological schemes treat it as carrying the intuitive, illuminating charge of that master number, before its further reduction to two of partnership and balance. Beyond the two biblical spans of thirty-eight years and this reductive reading, the number has little traditional development; it is not a figure the older symbolic systems dwelt on. Its honest description is a scriptural number of prolonged waiting, twice nineteen, standing just below the forty of completed trial.
None of the four foundational twentieth-century texts, Balliett's 1908 chart, Cheiro's 1926 book, Campbell's 1931 book or Jordan's 1965 systematisation, extends unreduced master-number status beyond eleven, twenty-two and thirty-three; treating thirty-eight's intermediate eleven as itself a live master-number charge before its final reduction to two is accordingly a later, minority elaboration rather than a reading any of the system's own founding authors are on record as endorsing. Unconnected to either the scriptural spans or the master-number debate above, thirty-eight is the atomic number of strontium, an element first identified in ore found near the Scottish village of Strontian in the late eighteenth century, which gave the element its name. Strontium's own best-known modern use, the bright red of some fireworks and flares, comes from the same element, an entirely secular application.