The thirty-first chapter of Proverbs closes the book with the acrostic poem in praise of the woman of valour, the eshet chayil, its twenty-two verses running through the Hebrew alphabet, a passage recited in many households on the eve of the sabbath, and the reason the chapter number is widely recognised. Beyond El and Proverbs 31, the number carries little developed symbolism; it reduces to four, the number of order and the built world, and modern numerology reads it through that root. Its durable significance is the name of God in its shorter form, one of the arithmetical anchors of Kabbalistic reading.
Balliett's 1908 chart reduces thirty-one to four, order and the built world in the standard modern keyword list, a reading in some tension with El's own weight as a divine name, since four in the American system is generally read as the steady, material root rather than the transcendent one; the two traditions, Hebrew gematria and American numerology, converge on thirty-one by entirely unrelated routes, one finding in it the name of God, the other the discipline of ordinary structure. Thirty-one is also prime, and it carries a second scriptural echo distinct from Proverbs: Psalm 31:5, Into thy hand I commit my spirit, is the verse Luke's Gospel (23:46) gives as Jesus's last words from the cross, so the same number anchors both the closing acrostic of Proverbs and one of the seven last words of the crucifixion. In chemistry, unrelated to either, thirty-one is the atomic number of gallium.