The Number Nineteen

Few faiths are built around a single number as clearly as the Bábí and Bahá’í religions are built around nineteen. Its meaning comes from a system, used in Arabic and Persian, in which each letter has a numerical value. In that system the Arabic word wáhid, meaning “one” or “unity”, adds up to nineteen. For the Báb, the young merchant of Shiraz who declared in 1844 that he was the bearer of a new revelation, this made nineteen the number of divine unity and the natural unit of a new order.

The Báb gave the number shape in his community and in time. His first eighteen disciples, who recognised him independently, he called the Letters of the Living. The first was Mullá Husayn, a religious scholar who met him in Shiraz in May 1844; the only woman among them was the poet Táhirih, known also as Qurrat al-‘Ayn, who never met the Báb in person. With the Báb himself they made up the first wáhid, the first “unity” of nineteen. In his writings the Báb went further, describing the whole of creation as nineteen unities of nineteen, 361, the letter value of the phrase kull shay’, “all things”.

The Báb also created a new calendar on the same plan, and Bahá’u’lláh, the founder of the Bahá’í Faith, later confirmed it with some changes. The Badí‘ calendar has nineteen months of nineteen days, each month named after an attribute of God, such as Splendour, Glory or Beauty. Since nineteen times nineteen gives only 361 days, four or five intercalary days, Ayyám-i-Há, are added before the final month, ‘Alá’, “Loftiness”, which is the month of fasting. The year begins with Naw-Rúz, the Persian New Year, at the spring equinox. Since 2015 the calendar has been used in the same form by Bahá’ís worldwide.

On the first day of each month every local Bahá’í community holds the Nineteen Day Feast. It is not a banquet but a regular gathering with three parts: prayers and readings from scripture, consultation about the community’s affairs, and a social part with food and conversation. For many Bahá’ís it is the heart of community life, a rhythm of nineteen days that repeats through the year.

The Báb drew on a tradition that already gave nineteen a place in Islamic thought. In a short passage of the Qur’an, sura 74, Hell is described and the text says: “Over it are nineteen.” Most classical commentators understood this as the number of angels who guard Hell. The next verse explains that the number was given as a trial for unbelievers and to strengthen believers’ faith, and many commentators were content to leave it at that. Others noted that the opening formula of nearly every sura, Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim, “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate”, has nineteen letters in its usual Arabic spelling, and mystics and letter-number specialists sometimes speculated about the link.

In the 1970s the number became the centre of a modern theory. Rashad Khalifa, an Egyptian-born biochemist working in the United States, began publishing in 1974 the claim that a computer count had revealed a mathematical structure based on nineteen running through the whole Qur’an: in the number of suras, of certain letters and of certain words. He presented this as proof of the book’s divine origin, and the idea attracted wide attention. Critics soon pointed out that the counts worked only by choosing which spellings, letters and words to include and which to leave out, and that similar patterns can be found in any long text if one searches hard enough. Khalifa himself concluded that two verses at the end of sura 9 did not fit his system and must be later additions, and he later claimed to be a messenger of God. Most Muslim scholars rejected both claims. He was murdered in Tucson, Arizona, in 1990. A small community still follows his teaching, while popular versions of the “Code 19” continue to circulate online.

Long before the Báb, nineteen mattered for a practical reason. A lunar month lasts about 29.5 days, so twelve months make only about 354 days, eleven days short of the solar year. Calendars that want to keep their months in step with the seasons must add an extra month from time to time. Astronomers discovered that 19 solar years come within about two hours of exactly 235 lunar months. Adding seven extra months in each 19-year period therefore keeps the calendar aligned for a long time. The Athenian astronomer Meton is credited with proposing the cycle in 432 BCE, and it is still called the Metonic cycle, though Babylonian astronomers were using a similar scheme around the same time.

The Hebrew calendar uses this cycle today. In years 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17 and 19 of each cycle a second month of Adar is added, so that Passover always falls in spring. Christian scholars of the early Church used the same 19-year cycle for the calculation of Easter, the computus, and medieval calendars marked each year’s place in it with its “golden number”. Judaism also contains a nineteen of a different kind: the central prayer of every service is still called the Shemoneh Esreh, the “Eighteen”, though it has had nineteen blessings since one was added, by rabbinic tradition, in the generations after the destruction of the Temple.

Nineteen thus links a modern faith’s calendar, a debated reading of the Qur’an and an ancient piece of astronomy. Its importance comes from letter values in one case and from the movements of the sun and moon in another, not from any power of the number itself.