118

A hundred and eighteen is twice fifty-nine and reduces to ten and then one. Its fame rests on a much-forwarded modern claim: that Psalm 118 is the middle chapter of the Bible, that Psalm 117 is the shortest chapter and Psalm 119 the longest, and that the exact centre falls at Psalm 118:8, It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man, offered as a hidden design. The claim can be checked. The counts depend entirely on chapter divisions, which are a medieval addition made by Stephen Langton around 1200 and not part of the original text, so any centre they produce is an artefact of that later scheme.

In chemistry, a hundred and eighteen is the atomic number of oganesson, named in 2016 after the physicist Yuri Oganessian, one of only two elements, with seaborgium, named for a scientist still living at the time it was named; it was first synthesised in 2002 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia.

The whole apparatus of digit-reduction numerology is a twentieth-century invention rather than an inheritance from antiquity. Mrs. L. Dow Balliett published the first systematic version, The Philosophy of Numbers, in 1908, fixing the letter-to-number chart still used today and ruling that eleven and twenty-two must stand as master numbers rather than reduce further; her colleague, the physician Julia Seton, is credited with coining the word numerology itself around 1912.

The tidy story also does not survive the arithmetic. The Protestant Bible has 1,189 chapters, whose true midpoint is the 595th, and depending on how one counts, that is Psalm 117 rather than 118; the popular version quietly adjusts the tally to land on the verse it wants. Psalm 117 being the shortest chapter and Psalm 119 the longest is true, but their flanking a supposed exact centre is a coincidence dressed up as design. The example is a useful one: it shows how a chain of individually near-true statements can be assembled into a false conclusion, and why claims of hidden numerical structure in scripture repay checking rather than repetition.

A hundred and eighteen factors as 2 x 59 and carries 4 divisors in all. Summing its proper divisors gives only 62, short of the number itself, which places it among the deficient numbers in the same classical scheme.

The genuine Pythagorean number philosophy that this modern chart borrows its name from left no writings of its own: Pythagoras and his early followers taught only by mouth, and what survives of their number theory comes instead through Nicomachus of Gerasa, whose Introduction to Arithmetic of the first century CE became the standard authority for a thousand years, and through Iamblichus, who drew on Nicomachus two centuries later; neither wrote anything resembling a name-and-birthdate numerology.