Thirty-Nine as a Canon and a Code

The Protestant Old Testament is counted as thirty-nine books, so the number marks the extent of the Hebrew canon as reckoned in the Reformed churches, over against the forty-six of the Catholic Old Testament. The Church of England defined its doctrine in the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571, which remain a historic standard of Anglican belief. In rabbinic law the categories of work forbidden on the sabbath are enumerated as thirty-nine, the melachot listed in the Mishnah tractate Shabbat, derived from the kinds of labour involved in building the Tabernacle. Between the lashes, the canon, the Articles and the thirty-nine forbidden works, the number carries an unusual amount of specific institutional weight for one that the symbolic traditions otherwise ignore.

Walter Burkert's study of the Pythagorean tradition and Underwood Dudley's critical survey of the modern system, Numerology: Or What Pythagoras Wrought, both treat this kind of borrowed, ambivalent compound reading as characteristic of Cheiro's scheme generally, a chart built for readings of names and dates rather than for tracking a number's use in canon law or judicial procedure; the thirty-nine of the Articles, the lashes and the melachot belongs to an entirely separate, older and better-documented body of institutional history.