The Prophets and the Levitical Cities

Forty-eight is sixteen times three and reduces to twelve and then three. Jewish tradition fixes two notable counts at forty-eight. The Talmud, in the tractate Megillah, states that forty-eight prophets and seven prophetesses prophesied to Israel, a reckoning that became the standard rabbinic count of the prophetic line. And the law of Numbers assigns the Levites, who received no tribal territory of their own, forty-eight cities scattered among the other tribes, six of them cities of refuge, so that the priestly tribe was distributed across the land rather than settled in one place. The number thus marks two complete institutional sets in the religious ordering of Israel, the prophets and the Levitical towns.

Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers assigns forty-eight the reading already given to thirty, neither fortunate nor unfortunate on its own, its strength depending on the company it keeps in a chart; the two numbers share a digital root of three, and Florence Campbell's 1931 book and Juno Jordan's 1965 systematisation both preserved the pairing, an ambivalent modern reading that has no bearing on the number's firm institutional role in the Talmud's count of the prophets and the Levites' forty-eight cities already described above.