Forty-six is twice twenty-three and reduces to ten and then one. Its scriptural anchor is in the Gospel of John, where, when Jesus speaks of raising the Temple in three days, his hearers object that the Temple has been forty-six years in the building, a detail used by chronologers to date the scene. The same number acquired a modern biological meaning entirely unknown to the ancients: the human cell carries forty-six chromosomes, twenty-three pairs, a fact of twentieth-century genetics that has no bearing on any traditional symbolism but is sometimes drawn into number lore after the fact.
Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers assigns forty-six the reading already given to thirty-seven, good and fortunate friendships and favourable partnerships of every kind, the two numbers sharing a digital root of one; Florence Campbell's 1931 book and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation both preserved the pairing, so the number whose firmest traditional anchor is the Temple's forty-six years of building in the Gospel of John carries, in the wholly separate American tradition, a reading of alliance rather than of construction. In chemistry, forty-six is the atomic number of palladium, a precious metal discovered in 1803 and named after the asteroid Pallas, itself named for the Greek epithet of Athena, Pallas Athena, an entirely secular chain of naming unrelated to either John's Gospel or human genetics.