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OCTOBER, 1917)
SOME INTERESTING PARALLELS
233
SOME INTERESTING PARALLELS.
BY HIRALAL AMRATLAL SHAH, B.A. To begin with the use of the number forty', in the Vedic and non-Vedic literature.
(I) RigoII, 12, 11, informs us that "Indra found out in the forlieth autumn, Sambara abiding in the hills":
"यः शम्बरं पर्वतेषु शिवन्तं
fiat " There is no convincing explanation why it should be the fortieth (autumn) and nothing more or less than that. Mr. Tilak's! bypothesis is well known and is considered to be highly ingenious. But as far as we know, it is not commonly accepted to be the right and final explanation. He construes the hymn differently, taking it to mean the fortieth day of the autumn and not the fortieth Autumn (=year).
We now transcribe passages where this number is used. First of all, we refer to the dramas of Shakespeare edited by Mr. Verity and also to his notes on the passages we select therefrom. In Hamlet, we read :"Hamlet : 'I lov'd Ophelia : forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity
Of love, make up my sum...' (V, 1, 262, ff.) "forly: cf. sonnet' 2 (Shakespeare's).
When forty winters shall beseige thy brow', Corialanus,' III, 1, 243 - I could beat forty of them', and the Merry Wives of Windsor,-1, 1, 205-6,
I had rather than forty shillings
I had my books of songs and sonnets here'; “ Other numbers, e.g., 3 and 13, have become significant through some ancient belief or historical event; and perhaps 40 gained some mysterious import through the scriptures. Thus the wanderings of the Israelites lasted forty years, the fast of our Lord forty days, likewise the fast of Elijah (1, Kings, XIX, 8) and the stay of Moses on the mount. (Exod., XXIV, 18)."
Mr. Verity adds here that the "Elizabethans use forty to imply indefinitely large number." However, he changes his opinion & year later, commenting on a passage we are just giving, that forty is used constantly by Elizabethans apparently as a significant number, where no precise reckoning was needed." . This is a note on the lines in the Midsummer Night's Dream, II, 1, 175-6,
(Puck_ I'll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes.' We now dispense with Shakespeare and turn to the European history. From Macaulay, we learn that in feudal times, forty days made up the period, for which, men were bound to serve in a war.
The most interesting parallels, according to us, lie in the wanderings of the Israelites for forty years and in the line of the Sonnet, "forty winters shall beseige thy brow."
We can do no more than direct the attention of scholars to these instances. We shall now pass on to other cases where resemblance in thoughts and words is interesting.
1 The Arctic Home in the Vedas, pp. 279 ft.
[Forty is a common conventional number in ancient Jewish tradition and has been supposed to have originated in “forty years as the conventional life of a generation.-Ed.]
