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Dive into an eye-opening episode of The Jimmy Akin Podcast! Jimmy uncovers why biblical numbers like 40 aren’t always literal—using Elijah’s “40 days and 40 nights” journey to Horeb as an insightful case study. With geography, math, ancient context, and a clever Deuteronomy cross-check, he reveals how “40” functions here as a stock number for “a long journey”—not an exact stopwatch. Mind-blowing insights for Bible lovers and skeptics alike! Don’t miss it.
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
It’s obvious when you read the Bible that certain numbers have special meaning.
These include numbers like 7, 12, 40, and 1,000.
In view of the special meaning that these numbers have, did the biblical authors always intend us to take them literally?
The answer might surprise you.
Let’s get into it!
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Stock Numbers
Numbers like 7, 12, 40, and 1,000 come up over and over again in the Bible, and it’s clear that they had special meaning.
It’s not always clear what that special meaning was, but they come up so often that they clearly suggested something to the ancient Israelites reading the biblical text.
For example, 7 could suggest the idea of completion, like the fact 7 days made a complete Hebrew week.
12 could represent the twelve tribes of Israel, and later the 12 apostles.
40 could signify a time of testing, like the 40 days that it rained during the Flood, the 40 days Moses spent alone on Mt. Sinai, and the 40 days Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness.
And 1,000 can symbolize a vast amount. It can also symbolize the totality of something that is vast. Like in Psalm 50:10 where God says,
Psalm 50:10
Every beast of the forest is mine,
the cattle on a thousand hills.
The number of hills is vast, and here the number 1,000 represents the totality of hills.
It’s not like there’s a thousand-and-first hill somewhere whose animals God doesn’t own.
What God means is that he owns the animals on all the hills—all the hills in the entire world.
And the number 1,000 is not exact. There’s way more than a thousand hills in the world.
There are over a million mountains with names in the world, and hills are much more common than mountains, so there are way more than a thousand hills.
This shows us that in Psalm 50, the number 1,000 isn’t being used as a literal measurement. It’s not a literal count of the number of hills in the world.
Instead, it’s what can be called a stock number—a number that is used regularly but is not meant to be taken literally.
We use stock numbers in English, too, and a thousand is one of them, but not the only one.
English stock numbers occur when we say things like:
- A thousand pardons
- A picture is worth a thousand words
- Thanks a million
If you’re a native English-speaker, you know that in none of these cases is a person literally asking for your pardon a thousand times, saying that each and every picture conveys exactly a thousand words of information, or thanking you exactly one million times.
In each case, the number just means “a lot,” and saying “a thousand” or “a million” is just a common or stock way of expressing this.
Now, if you’re a native English-speaker, you might say, “Hey, I recognize that numbers like a thousand and a million may not be meant literally, but that doesn’t apply to other common numbers in the Bible.
“Like the number 40. That’s such an unusual number, it must be meant literally—or at least approximately literally.
“I could see how a person might round off a number to 40—like if a person had 38 eggs or 42 eggs, you might round it off to the nearest multiple of five and just say that he had 40 eggs—meaning approximately 40. But when this number is used it’s got to be something close to 40.”
That would be a reasonable thing for a modern English-speaker to propose, because the number 40 does not have any special significance to us.
But it did in ancient Hebrew literature like the Bible.
Elijah’s Journey: 40 days and 40 nights?
In 1 Kings 19, the prophet Elijah is on the run from the evil northern queen Jezebel, and he goes out into the wilderness and asks God to let him die.
Instead, God sends and angel who makes Elijah eat and drink two times in order to strengthen him for a journey.
Then we read:
1 Kings 19:8
[Elijah] got up, ate, and drank;
then strengthened by that food, he walked forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God, Horeb.
So what value does the number 40 have in this passage?
Did Elijah’s journey literally take 40 days and 40 nights exactly—or at least approximately?
Let’s find out.
A Question of Scale
One of the first things that you learn about the geography of the Holy Land is that it’s tiny by American standards.
From north to south, the modern state of Israel is only 290 miles long, and its width varies between 9 miles and 85 miles.
With distances like that, a journey of 40 days and 40 nights would be remarkable, but let’s do some math and see what we can figure out.
Some Basic Math
The fact that the text says Elijah travelled day and night would presumably indicate at least 12 hours a day, leaving time for breaks and sleep.
A normal person can walk around 3 miles per hour, so that would be 36 miles a day.
After 40 days of that travel, he would have gone 1,440 miles, which would be enough to take him far outside the Holy Land.
I mean, if the Mediterranean Sea hadn’t been in the way, Elijah could have walked all the way to Rome!
But the number 40 is a stock number in the Bible, and it not only indicates periods of testing. It’s also used to indicate long periods of time.
For example, the length of a generation is sometimes given as the stock number of 40 years.
This raises the question of whether the number is being used here simply to indicate a long journey rather than being meant literally.
Fortunately, we can shed some light on the question
Elijah’s Journey Begins
We know where Elijah began his journey. According to 1 Kings 19:3-4:
Then [Elijah] was afraid, and he arose and ran for his life and came to Be’er Sheva, which belongs to Judah, and left his servant there.
But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a broom tree.
So Elijah fled from Jezebel (the queen of the northern kingdom of Israel) down to Be’er-sheva, which was on the southern border of Judah.
Indeed, the phrase “From Dan to Be’er Sheva” is used nine times in the Bible as a way of referring to the entire Holy Land, from north to south, from Dan in the north to Be’er Sheva in the south.
In fleeing Queen Jezebel, Elijah first reached Be’er Sheva and then went a day’s journey further into the Negev desert.
That’s where he had his angelic encounter at the broom tree.
Journey’s End
The text also tells us where Elijah ended his journey, at “the mountain of God, Horeb.”
In the Old Testament, Horeb is another name for Mt. Sinai, the mountain of God where Moses received the Ten Commandments.
Unfortunately, the location of Mt. Sinai isn’t entirely clear.
A prominent tradition identifies it with Jabal Mousa, a tall mountain in the south of the Sinai Peninsula, by St. Catherine’s Monastery.
This is not the only proposed location, however. There are others—also in the Sinai Peninsula, as well as outside of it.
The plausible ones are either closer to Be’er-Sheva, though, or not much farther away, so we can use the location of the modern Mt. Sinai to get a reasonable approximation of Elijah’s maximum travel distance.
What Was Elijah’s Travel Speed?
According to Google, the distance from Be’er-Sheva to Mt. Sinai is 266 miles.
Of course, that’s along the modern road system, but we’re dealing with an approximation, so 266 miles will do.
Since Elijah had already gone one day into the Negev when he had the angelic encounter at the broom tree, and since he travelled another 40 days and 40 nights, that would be 41 days total.
Using these numbers, Elijah’s travel speed would have been 6.5 miles per day (266 / 41 = 6.5).
If that represents 12 hours of walking a day, that would be about half a mile per hour (6.5 / 12 = 0.54).
That’s painfully slow.
A normal walking speed is around 3 miles per hour, so Elijah would have needed to walk only around 2 hours a day in order to cover the distance in 40 days.
A mere 2 hours would hardly be day and night travel, and that suggests that the description of it as taking “40 days and 40 nights” is a stock description meant to indicate a long journey and not meant to be taken literally.
Like when we say, “Thanks a million”—using a stock number to indicate great thanks.
Confirmation from Deuteronomy?
If Elijah was able to travel at a normal walking speed for 12 hours per day then he would make 36 miles per day.
He would thus be able to do 266 miles in just over 7 days (266 / 36 = 7.4).
A less determined person only putting in 8 hours of walking a day, rather than travelling day and night, could make 24 miles in a day and cover the 266 miles in 11 days (266 / 24 = 11.1).
And that’s very significant, because in Deuteronomy 1:2 we read:
Deuteronomy 1:2
It is eleven days’ journey from Horeb by the way of Mount Seir to Kadesh-barnea.
The precise location of Kadesh-barnea is also debated, but it is clear that it was on the southern border of Israel, placing it near Be’er Sheva.
Deuteronomy thus gives us a remarkable confirmation of the approximate time it would take to travel from Be’er Sheva to Mt. Horeb: It’s something like 11 days under normal travel conditions, not 40 days and 40 nights.
Ancient Expectations
This is significant because the ancient audience would have known that.
Not only would many in the audience—particularly those from the southern kingdom of Judah—have known the approximate distances and travel times, many would have known it just from reading Deuteronomy!
The same applies to the author of Kings, who was clearly literate and who records the finding of “the book of the Law” in the temple in 2 Kings 22:8-10.
This book of the Law either was Deuteronomy or it included the book of Deuteronomy.
And the author even refers to the mountain as “Horeb” rather than “Sinai”—which is the way that Deuteronomy overwhelmingly refers to it.
Both the author and the audience were thus in a position to recognize the description of Elijah’s journey as taking 40 days and 40 nights as a stock number representing a long journey rather than a literal measurement.
This illustrates how ancient expectations differ from modern ones regarding the use of numbers: The ancients were willing to use numbers in a literary or symbolic way in different circumstances than we do.
Modern Expectations
If we fail to recognize this then, compared to the ancients, we can come off as overly pedantic, like Mr. Spock or Mr. Data—insisting on numerical precision while utterly missing the point.
The point of the text is: God strengthened Elijah for a long journey, which may also have been a time of testing for Elijah. The point is not how long the journey literally took.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that numbers are always literary or symbolic in ancient texts—the 11 days mentioned in Deuteronomy isn’t symbolic.
Neither is the 12 apostles that Jesus had. He really had twelve, not eleven or thirteen.
But this does mean that numbers can be literary or symbolic, and we need to be sensitive to the context to tell us what the ancient author intended.
This applies, particularly, to skeptics wanting to accuse the Bible of being inaccurate.
Sometimes the Bible just uses numbers differently than we do today, and if we fail to recognize this, the fault is ours, not the Bible’s.
Got that?
Thanks a million.
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