The Bible uses 40 to denote completion or fulfillment. It is used 146 times throughout both Testaments. It is the traditional Hebrew number for the duration of a trial of any kind, when times are hard and a person’s faith is tested. The Israelites slaved in hard bondage under the Egyptian pharaohs for 400 years, 10 times 40. God forced them to wander in the Wilderness of Sin, throughout the Sinai Peninsula, for 40 years as punishment for their “stiff-necked unbelief.†“Sin,†here, does not denote sinfulness, but the Hebrew word for the Sumerian moon god, from which “Sinai†is derived. Moses was 40 years times 3 when he died, at 120.
Moses was 40 days on Mount Sinai receiving God’s Law, another 40 days on the mountain after the golden calf sin. Elijah, some 300 years later, spent 40 days on the same mountain worshiping God.
There are tons of references to “40 days and 40 nights†throughout the Bible. The most notable are the 40 days and nights of rainfall that caused the Flood of Noah. During this time, the whole world flooded to a depth of some 15 feet above the tallest mountains. It took 375 days for the water to recede.
Jesus fasted for 40 days in the wilderness before being tempted by Satan. Jesus remained on Earth for 40 days after his Resurrection, appearing to the Apostles and teaching them, before ascending to Heaven. At the time of his Ascension, there were about 120 Christians on Earth, or 40 times 3.
It was about 40 years from Jesus’ Ascension to the destruction of Jerusalem, in 70 AD, by the Romans.
In the original Koine Greek, as recorded in the Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, the oldest complete manuscripts of the New Testament (c. 200-250 AD), Jesus utters the word “fulfill†in some variation or other, precisely 40 times throughout the Gospels. --Listverse
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