Why 40 Days After Death? The Story of the Number 40

In Athens, a dish of boiled wheat is shared among family and friends. In Istanbul, sweet helva is handed round to guests and neighbours. In Cairo and in Moscow, too, relatives come back to the house of someone who died forty days ago. They pray, they cook, and they open the door to visitors one more time.

Four cities, four languages, two religions, and the same number. Nobody agreed on it at a meeting. So where did forty come from?

Here is a first clue. In the world of the Bible, forty was less a count than a way of saying "a long time".¹ This story follows that habit from ancient Egypt to an Adriatic harbour, and into a word everyone knows: quarantine.

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The fortieth day

Start with the Orthodox Church. When an Orthodox Christian dies, memorial services are held on the third day, the ninth and the fortieth.² Afterwards a dish of boiled wheat, kollyva, is shared among family and friends.³⁴

The days are counted from the death itself.⁵ In Greek, people simply call the memorial ta saránta, "the forty".⁶ In Russian it is named after the number too: sorokoviny, from sorok, forty.⁵

Orthodox teachers explain these days. Many believe the soul is prepared over forty days before it stands before God.⁷ The fortieth day also recalls the Ascension, which the Book of Acts places forty days after Easter.⁵⁸

The custom is old. A collection of church rules from late fourth-century Syria, the Apostolic Constitutions, already lists the third, ninth and fortieth days. For the fortieth, it points to "the ancient pattern" of the mourning for Moses.⁹

Deuteronomy actually gives thirty days for Moses,⁸ and some old copies of the Constitutions read "thirtieth".¹⁰ The forty may echo another mourning, in Genesis, which we'll come to shortly. Either way, thirty and forty were already trading places, and forty was the number that felt right.

His forty, her forty

Now cross to Turkey. When someone dies there, families mark their kırkı, "his forty" or "her forty". The Qur'an is read through in full, prayers are recited, and sweet helva is handed round to guests and neighbours.¹¹ In Egypt and across the Arab world, the gathering is called al-arba'in, "the forty".¹²

The date itself isn't set by the Qur'an or the hadith.¹² A hadith limits a woman's formal mourning to three days, except for her husband.¹³ So the fortieth day grew as a custom. Families fill it with Qur'an, prayer and charity for the one they've lost, and scholars view fixing the date in different ways.¹¹¹²

For many families, the fortieth day also gives grief a shape: a time to gather, to pray for the dead, and to begin again.

Not every tradition chose forty. In Jewish mourning, the first seven days are shiva, and a wider period of mourning, shloshim, lasts thirty days,¹⁴ the same thirty that Deuteronomy gives for Moses.⁸

Older than all of them: Egypt

The earliest forty days tied to a death in the Bible are in Genesis, and the Bible presents them as an Egyptian custom. When Jacob dies in Egypt, Genesis says his embalming took forty days, the usual time, it explains, for embalming. And the Egyptians mourned him for seventy days.⁸

Forty days and forty nights

That's far from the only forty in the Bible. It turns up so often that it has its own phrase: "forty days and forty nights".⁸

It rains for forty days and forty nights in the story of the Flood. When the mountaintops finally appear, Noah waits another forty days before he opens the window of the ark and sends out birds to look for dry land: first a raven, then a dove.⁸

Moses spends forty days and forty nights on Mount Sinai. In the Gospels, Jesus fasts in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights.⁸

Then forty becomes years. The Israelites wander in the wilderness for forty years, and forty years comes to stand for a generation.⁸¹

The Qur'an also tells of these forties. It gives Moses thirty nights on the mountain, then ten more, to make forty.¹⁵

Christians later built a season on these forties. A fast before Easter is first mentioned around 325, at the Council of Nicaea, though it isn't clear that it yet meant forty days. By the early 330s, a forty-day fast is clearly described. That season became Lent, modelled on Jesus's forty days in the wilderness.¹⁶

Why forty?

So, why forty? Most scholars describe forty as the Bible's stock number for a long span: a generation, a long trial, a full stretch of time.¹ Why forty in the first place, nobody knows for sure. But we can watch the habit at work.

It wasn't only the Bible. Around 840 BC, King Mesha of Moab carved a victory stone. On it he says Israel held part of his land for forty years,¹⁷ and most scholars read that as a round number too.¹⁸

Think of how English uses "a dozen" or "a hundred times". Nobody's counting. The number just means "plenty". Forty did that job for a long time.

Forty feet, forty columns

You can still hear it in everyday words. In Turkish, a centipede is a kırkayak, a "forty-foot".¹⁹ In Russian it's a sorokonozhka, a "forty-legs", and Russian has a second word for centipedes and their relatives, mnogonozhka, that simply means "many legs".²⁰ Forty and many, side by side.

English went bigger: "centipede" comes from Latin for "a hundred feet". Real centipedes have anywhere from thirty legs to nearly four hundred. And because their leg pairs always come in odd numbers, never exactly a hundred.²¹

In Isfahan, in Iran, a palace pavilion from 1647 is called Chehel Sotoun, "Forty Columns". It has twenty wooden columns. The usual explanation is that the long pool in front reflects them, and twenty becomes forty.²²

In 1709, a storyteller from Aleppo named Hanna Diyab told a tale in Paris to the French scholar Antoine Galland, who wrote it down. You know it as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.²³

A bundle of furs

Remember sorok, the Russian forty? Most Slavic languages say forty as "four tens". Russian doesn't. In medieval Rus', a sorok was a bundle of forty sable or marten furs, a standard unit of the fur trade.²⁴

It seems the trade word took over the number. If so, it's a borrowed number in the most literal sense. Where the word itself came from, linguists still argue.²⁴

Forty days after a birth

Forty doesn't only follow a death. In many traditions, it also follows a birth.

In the Book of Leviticus, a new mother has seven days of impurity, then thirty-three of purifying: forty in all after a son, and eighty after a daughter.⁸

That's why the Gospel of Luke has Jesus presented in the Temple after forty days.⁸ Orthodox churches still bless mother and baby around the fortieth day, and the feast of the Presentation falls on the second of February, forty days after Christmas.²⁵³

In Islamic law, many scholars, including the school followed in Turkey, set forty days as the longest a new mother's postnatal bleeding is counted.²⁶ Others allow up to sixty.²⁷

In Turkish, the same word marks both ends of life. When mother and baby are ready to go out visiting, they have "completed their forty".¹¹²⁸ In Mexico and much of Latin America, the weeks after birth are la cuarentena, "the forty", a time of rest while the family takes over the house.²⁹

Not everyone chose forty here either. In China, the tradition is "sitting the month": usually about thirty days.³⁰

The harbour that invented quarantine

The most famous forty of all comes from the sea.

In 1377, with plague still returning to Europe, the city-republic of Ragusa, today's Dubrovnik on the Adriatic coast, passed a new rule. Ships and travellers arriving from plague areas had to wait a month in isolation before entering the city. Historians call it the trentino, "the thirty".³¹³²

Within decades, ports around the Mediterranean stretched the wait to forty days, quaranta giorni in Italian. That gave us the word "quarantine".³³³² Every time we say it, we're saying "forty days".

Why forty? Historians aren't sure. It may have drawn on Hippocratic medicine, which counted the fortieth day among the turning points of an illness.³²³⁴ It may have drawn on the familiar biblical forties.³¹ Thirty and forty, trading places once again.

Long enough

So what do all these forties share? In mourning, in fasting, after a birth and at the harbour gate, forty marks a full span of time, a conventional length for something that can't be rushed.

Long enough to grieve before life goes on. Long enough to rest after a birth. Long enough to be sure a ship is safe.

So when a family in Cairo, Athens, Istanbul or Moscow sets the table on the fortieth day, it is keeping one of the oldest ways people have of saying: this takes time.

Does your family mark a fortieth day, or a different number? Which one, and where? Tell us in the comments under the video on YouTube.