@futurebird ISTR it's a mistranslation of "many".

@futurebird somewhere (not sure which step of the process) "40" was used to represent "an arbitrary large quantity". if you want more time than 40 days you go to 7 years, then eventually on to 7 generations. Harm against Cain would come back sevenfold against the perpetrator.

@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.

@darac @futurebird
This reminds me of discworld's trolls:

‘Everyone knows trolls can’t even count up to four!’* *In fact, trolls traditionally count like this: one, two, three, many, and people assume this means they can have no grasp of higher numbers. They don’t realise that many can BE a number. As in: one, two, three, many, many-one, many-two, many-three, many many, many-many-one, many-many-two, many-many-three, many many many, many-many-many-one, many-many-many-two, many-many-three, LOTS.

@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 @guyjantic

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.)