Unrelated... what is with the Bible and the number 40?
40 years of this, 40 days and nights of that. When things happen for a long time it's 40 units of time.
hmmm
@futurebird From a bajillion old testament lessons (so, kinda suspect) I remember ancient Israelite use of numbers was often symbolic, and it's thought that the symbolism was generally shared by people within the time x culture. 40 was sometimes used to indicate "lots" but, as someone else ITT said, probably a specific spin on "lots."
Other stuff I remember (again, no idea if this is legit):
3, 7, and 12 were generally good. They indicated completion and maybe power (?).
6 was (at least sometimes) bad. One explanation was "almost a holy/complete number, but falling short and therefore worse than if it hadn't even tried." I heard it used in parallel with the story of Lucifer challenging God's authority and being cast out of heaven: he was almost-god, which turned out to be far worse than your basic not-god.
The counting system was (at least sometimes?) base 60(ish; hence compasses and clocks), and many of the important or notable numbers were multiples of 20, 12, 3, and/or 60, maybe like we sometimes default to describing things in multiples of 5 or 10.
@guyjantic
Hebrew numbers are basically* base 10. The Assyrians and Babylonians used a system which they inherited from the Sumerians, which is base 60 with a subbase of 10. That is, there are specific words and symbols for 1, 10, and 60, with other numbers represented by combinations of those. There is also a placeholder symbol used to indicate that a space does not gave a value in it, a sort of proto-0.
Relevant Numberphile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR3zzQP3bII
@futurebird
@Infrapink @futurebird Ooh, this is super interesting. Thanks!
@Infrapink @guyjantic @futurebird that's a pretty straightforward system, although thinking in terms of large multiples of 60 would take some getting used to, I could imagine being fast with it, like people who work with computers getting pretty good at common binary numbers.
@Infrapink @guyjantic @futurebird mistaking this base 60 for a 1 may be why they kill 60 Palestinians for every Israeli
I didn't know they did a video on this! May show it to my students who I just forced to learn this system (they loved decoding the tablet... it's such a good feeling to get meaning out of something so old.)