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50

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Origin 1908 to 1965

Fifty is 2 x 5 x 5. Leviticus 25:8-13 sets the Jubilee in the fiftieth year, after seven sabbaths of years, as a general release of debts, slaves and alienated land; whether it was ever practised at scale is doubted by historians. Shavuot falls on the fiftieth day of the Omer count, and the Greek name Pentecost means simply fiftieth, which is why the Christian feast falls where it does. The fifty gates of understanding, of which Moses was granted all but one, is a saying already in the Babylonian Talmud at Rosh Hashanah 21b; the elaborate reading of them as gates of Binah is medieval and Lurianic. In digit-reduction numerology it reduces to 5.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
1908 to 1965 1
Origin Period
500 BCE to 300 CE 2
Origin Period
The arithmological reading of the first numbers, one as source, two as division, four as justice, seven as virgin, ten as completion, reaches us through Platonic and Neopythagorean writers of the centuries after Plato. Burkert's finding is that it cannot be traced to Pythagoras himself, whose activity was religious rather than mathematical: the doctrines were credited backwards to him. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore
Origin Period
The system that gives a number a personality, and a person a number, was assembled in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century out of New Thought material. Balliett's The Philosophy of Numbers appeared in 1908; the chart positions, pinnacles and cycles were added by her successors over the next fifty years. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Place of Origin
The Greek world, and above all the Greek cities of southern Italy where the Pythagorean societies were established; the arithmological literature itself is later and largely eastern Mediterranean. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore
Place of Origin
The United States, and specifically the New Thought circuit of the north-eastern seaboard; Balliett worked from Atlantic City. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Attributed Author / Compiler
Attributed by the tradition to Pythagoras. Burkert's study is the standard demonstration that the number-doctrines carrying his name are the work of later hands, and that almost nothing in them can be shown to go back to the sixth century BCE. The attribution is recorded because it is what the tradition says, not because it holds. 2Tradition: Pythagorean and Neopythagorean number lore
Attributed Author / Compiler
Mrs. L. Dow Balliett, who published the first version of the modern system in 1908 and to whom Dudley devotes a chapter. What later authors added, the pinnacles, the challenges, the cycles, the personal year, is theirs, and this atlas's own numerology-position entries cite four different authors between 1908 and 1965 for what is presented as one system. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Origin of the Name
Pythagorean numerology is a twentieth-century label. The system it names has no demonstrable descent from Pythagoras, from the Pythagorean societies, or from the ancient arithmological literature; the letter-value chart it rests on was drawn up in the United States after 1900. The name borrows a pedigree, the oldest move in the subject. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
Largely abandoned as a comparative category 1
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
Numerology has been sold since Balliett as a basis for decisions: which name to take, which date to marry on, which house number to buy. Dudley's survey of what numerologists sell is the standard critical account and its finding is blunt, numbers have power over minds, not over events. These entries record what the tradition says, not advice. 1
Modern Numerology
Reduction in the Modern System
The modern system reduces every number above nine by adding its digits: 5 + 0 = 5. Whatever the system says of 50 it therefore says of 5, because it holds no separate doctrine for the higher numbers. The stated exceptions are 11, 22 and 33, which it leaves unreduced and calls master numbers. 1Tradition: Modern name numerology (Mrs. L. Dow Balliett and her successors)
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Leviticus 25 counts seven sabbaths of years, forty-nine years, and hallows the fiftieth as the jubilee, in which debts are released and land returns to the families that held it. Fifty is therefore the year after a completed cycle rather than a number valued in itself. 3Tradition: Hebrew Bible
Learn More
The Jubilee

Leviticus 25:8-13 sets out the most ambitious economic provision in the Hebrew Bible. After seven sabbaths of years, forty-nine, the fiftieth year is hallowed, the ram's horn is sounded on the Day of Atonement, liberty is proclaimed throughout the land, and every person returns to their holding and to their family. Land sold reverts to the household that held it. Israelites who have sold themselves into service go free.

The logic is stated in the text: the land is not to be sold in perpetuity, for the land is God's and the people are tenants on it. What is bought and sold is therefore not the land but the number of harvests remaining until the Jubilee, and the price is to be adjusted accordingly. This is a legal system designed to prevent the permanent accumulation of land in few hands, and it is unusual enough among ancient legal codes to be worth stating plainly.

Whether it was ever kept is another matter and is genuinely contested. There is no unambiguous record of a Jubilee year being observed. Rabbinic tradition holds that the Jubilee applied only when all the tribes were settled in the land and lapsed with the Assyrian deportations. Some historians treat the legislation as a utopian or priestly programme rather than a practised institution; others argue for a limited historical application. The text itself anticipates objections about the seventh and fiftieth years falling consecutively and answers them.

The word Jubilee comes from the Hebrew yovel, the ram's horn sounded to announce it, and passed through the Latin iubilaeus into the Christian jubilee years, the first proclaimed by Boniface VIII in 1300.

Pentecost and the Fifty Gates

Because the Omer count runs forty-nine days, the festival falls on the fiftieth. Shavuot in Judaism marks the wheat harvest and, in rabbinic tradition, the giving of the Torah at Sinai. The Greek-speaking Jewish world called it pentekoste, simply the fiftieth, and that name carried into Christianity as Pentecost, where Acts 2 places the descent of the Spirit on the apostles on the same day. The Christian feast therefore falls where it does because of an agricultural counting rule in Leviticus, which is a clearer line of descent than most liturgical dates enjoy.

Fifty appears elsewhere in scripture as a round administrative number, captains of fifty, fifty-cubit measurements in the tabernacle and temple accounts, and as the number of days the flood waters prevail in one reckoning.

The fifty gates of understanding are more interesting and are frequently mis-sourced. The saying appears in the Babylonian Talmud at Rosh Hashanah 21b: fifty gates of understanding were created in the world, and all were given to Moses except one. The proof text is Psalm 8:6, that he was made a little less than God. This is Talmudic, redacted around the fifth or sixth century, and not, as often claimed, a Kabbalistic invention.

What is later is the elaboration. The phrase Nun Sha'arei Binah and the reading of the fifty gates as levels within the sefirah of Binah belong to medieval Kabbalah and to the Lurianic system of the sixteenth century, where they are connected to the forty-nine days of the Omer as an ascent, one gate per day, with the fiftieth reached only at Sinai. The Talmudic line is old; the architecture built on it is not.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Disciplines That Use This

Numerology, Disciplines

The modern numerological system assigns this number a meaning, which is why the atlas records it as a subject in its own right, though this does not endorse what the discipline says about it. This link shows only that the discipline works with this particular number; the readings of the number itself belong to whichever tradition holds them.

Source Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras WroughtUnderwood Dudley
Sources
1. Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought
Underwood Dudley, Mathematical Association of America (Spectrum series), 1997View the Source
2. Weisheit und Wissenschaft: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos und Platon (Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism)
Walter Burkert, Harvard University Press, 1962View the Source
3. The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)
Anonymous (multiple authors)Leviticus 25:10-11 (the Jubilee)View the Source
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