What is the spiritual significance of 40?

Answer 1

* "Forty days and forty nights" describes the period for which rain fell during Noah's flood * "Forty days" was the length of the period that the twelve spies explored the Promised Land (Numbers 13) * "Forty years" was the length of Israel's wandering in the wilderness. This period of years represents a generation, that is, the time it takes for a new generation to arise. * Moses' life is divided into three 40-year segments, separated by his fleeing from Egypt, and his return to lead the people out. * Several Israelite leaders and kings are said to have ruled for "forty years", that is, a generation. (Examples: Eli, Saul, David, Solomon.) * According to the Midrash, Moses spent three consecutive periods of "forty days and forty nights" on Mount Sinai: 1. He went up on the seventh day of Sivan, after God gave the Torah to the Jewish people, in order to learn the Torah from God, and came down on the seventeenth day of Tammuz, when he saw the Jews worshiping the Golden Calf and broke the tablets 2. He went up on the eighteenth day of Tammuz to beg forgiveness for the people's sin and came down without God's atonement on the twenty-ninth day of Av 3. He went up on the first day of Elul and came down on the tenth day of Tishrei, the first Yom Kippur, with God's atonement * Rabbi Akiva, the greatest expositor of the Oral Torah, only began learning how to read Hebrew when he was 40 years old * A mikvah consists of 40 se'ah (approximately 200 gallons) of water * 40 lashes is one of the punishments meted out by the Sanhedrin (in actual practice, only 39 lashes were administered) * Jesus was presented at the Temple forty days after his birth. * "Forty days and forty nights" was the period Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness, after which he was tempted by Satan. * Forty days was the period from Jesus' resurrection till his ascension into heaven. * In modern Christian practice, Lent consists of the 40 days preceding Easter. In much of Western Christianity Sundays are excluded from the count; in Eastern Christianity Sundays are included. * The dead are usually mourned for forty days in Muslim cultures * Ad-Dajjal roams around the Earth in forty days, forty days that can be as many as forty months, forty years, and so on. * Khadijah is said to be forty years old when she married Muhammad * Muhammad is said to be forty years old when he first received the revelation delivered by an angel * In the Yazidi faith, The Chermera temple (meaning “40 Men” in the Yazidi dialect) is so old that no one remembers how it came to have that name but it is believed to derive from the burial of 40 men on the mountaintop site. * Some Russians believe that ghosts of the dead linger at the site of their death for forty days * In Hinduism, some popular religious prayers consist of forty shlokas or dohas (couplets, stanzas). The most common being the Hanuman Chalisa (chaalis is the Hindi term for 40) SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA.COM