#42 - the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything
[Disclaimer; This was written at the time of my 42nd wedding anniversary, something I realised only after this snippet was completed!]
"42 is the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything." This is a quote from Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – a light, wry-hearted series of jokey novels held together by science fiction. In the novels, this answer, “42” was first calculated by the supercomputer Deep Thought after seven and a half million years of thought. This shocking answer resulted in the construction of an even larger supercomputer, named Earth, which was tasked with determining what the question was in the first place – they had forgotten!
[There is a suggestion from the novels that the “42” is in fact the wrong answer to the question “what is six by nine”!]
Amusingly, and similarly wryly, each of the characters in your computer keyboard has an associated number, known as the ASCII number. The character “*” is rather cosmic; it covers all possibilities, stands for everything. Its standard number? – well, obviously 42!
Douglas Adams said he had merely picked the number 42 randomly for his story. He was not familiar with the Judaic use of numbers. Judaism had centuries earlier claimed that the number 42 was indeed important for the foundation of the universe and the character of God.
The Babylonian Talmud, compiled 375 AD to 499 AD mentions a "Forty-Two Lettered Name" ascribed to God. Rav (Abba Arika) in the Talmud stated "The Forty-Two Lettered Name is entrusted only to him who is pious, meek, middle-aged, free from bad temper, sober, and not insistent on his rights". So what is the name? They don’t say! How frustrating! We are obviously not meek enough to know it!
42 is the number with which God creates the Universe in the Kabbalah, (anonymous Judaistic mystical book in the Middle Ages). The most significant name is that of the
“En Sof (also known as "Ein Sof", "Infinite" or "Endless"). The Forty-Two-Lettered Name contains four combined names which are spelled in Hebrew letters”.
Again, they state only the most devoted follower learns the significance of this so probably we don’t qualify!
Yet another aspect is in the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew. He gives a genealogy of Jesus from Abraham on. He says there are 14 generations from Abraham to King David, 14 from David to the Exile, 14 from the Exile to Jesus. So 42 generations. What is this all about? – particularly since he is making some numerological point – the 14 generations are not rigidly accurate. Following the traditional Hebrew assignation of numbers to Hebrew letters, many commentators have realised that “David” sums up to 14. So Matthew seems to be mentioning “David” three times. (In the mouth of two or three witnesses………..?) Probably Matthew is trying to establish that Jesus is the “Son of David”. He uses the phrase “ Son of David” about Jesus 9 times (compared with 2 occurring in the gospel of Mark, 4 in Luke and none in John).
From this I conclude that the rather wobbly field of numerology also points to the apex of numerology, which I say is Jesus. As he says “I am the root and descendant of David, the bright morning star”. Since Jesus was the one who created the universe it is also true that he is the ultimate 42. Not dreamed of by Adams or the author of the Kabbalah.The answer to life, the Universe and everything is indeed 42; it is Jesus! And it is certainly not a joke! But may be light-hearted!