Forty Minus One

Thirty-nine is three times thirteen and reduces to three, but its significance is almost entirely that of forty less one. The law of Deuteronomy caps judicial flogging at forty lashes, and to avoid any risk of exceeding the limit through a miscount, Jewish practice fixed the penalty at thirty-nine; Paul reports in Second Corinthians that he five times received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. The number thus stands for the maximum permitted punishment, the round forty deliberately held one short out of scruple for the law. Christian tradition later took the thirty-nine lashes into the Passion narrative, and various pious schemes matched them to a count of human ailments, though scripture itself does not number the scourging of Jesus.

Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers assigns thirty-nine the reading already given to thirty, itself described in his scheme as neither fortunate nor unfortunate, sometimes weak and sometimes powerful depending on its company in a chart; the pairing holds by digital root, both numbers reducing to three, and Florence Campbell's 1931 book and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation both preserved it, an ambivalent modern reading that has no bearing on the number's much firmer institutional weight in the lashes, the canon and the Articles already described above.