The Number Thirteen

Many people in Europe and the Americas think of thirteen as an unlucky number. Hotels and office towers leave out a thirteenth floor, airlines skip row thirteen, and Friday the 13th is treated with half-serious caution. Yet in the history of religions thirteen is not a number of ill omen at all. In Judaism, in particular, it is a number of faith, mercy and coming of age.

The best-known Jewish thirteen comes from the philosopher and legal scholar Moses Maimonides, who lived in Spain, Morocco and Egypt in the 12th century. In his commentary on the Mishnah he summed up Jewish belief in thirteen principles: among them, that God exists, is one, has no body, is eternal and alone to be worshipped; that prophecy is true and Moses the greatest of prophets; that the Torah is from God and will not change; that God rewards and punishes; that the Messiah will come; and that the dead will rise. The principles were debated by other medieval rabbis, some of whom proposed shorter lists, but they became widely accepted. They survive in two forms in the prayer book, the hymn Yigdal and the creed Ani ma’amin, “I believe”.

Older still are the thirteen attributes of mercy. In Exodus 34 God passes before Moses and proclaims a description of himself as merciful, gracious, slow to anger and abundant in kindness. Rabbinic tradition divided this passage into thirteen qualities, and it is recited during the penitential prayers before the High Holy Days, on festivals and on fast days. A different list of thirteen, attributed to Rabbi Ishmael, gives the rules by which the rabbis interpreted the Torah.

Thirteen also marks adulthood. According to the Mishnah, thirteen is the age for keeping the commandments. A boy at thirteen becomes bar mitzvah, “son of the commandment”, responsible for his own religious life; a girl traditionally becomes bat mitzvah at twelve, though many communities celebrate it at thirteen. The ceremonies that now mark these birthdays developed over many centuries.

The fear of thirteen in Western countries is often explained by the Last Supper. In the Gospels Jesus shares a final meal with his twelve apostles, thirteen people in all, and one of them, Judas, betrays him. It is easy to see how a later age could read the scene as a warning about thirteen at table. But the Gospels themselves never stress the number, and there is no evidence that the early or medieval Church considered thirteen unlucky. The belief that if thirteen people dine together one of them will die within the year appears in European writing only from the 18th century.

Friday was a separate story. Since Christians remember the crucifixion on a Friday, some medieval and early modern writers called it an unlucky day for starting journeys or new ventures. The two fears joined surprisingly late. Historians of superstition find Friday the 13th as a named unlucky day only around the end of the 19th century, and it spread quickly in the 20th. A 1907 American novel, Friday, the Thirteenth, by the financier Thomas W. Lawson, about a plot to crash the stock market on that day, helped make the phrase familiar. Horror films later did the rest.

A popular modern story claims a much older origin. On Friday 13 October 1307, agents of King Philip IV of France arrested the Knights Templar across the kingdom, a dramatic event that led to the order’s dissolution. The date is real, but no medieval or early modern source links it to bad luck. The connection appears in the 20th century and was spread by popular books and by novels such as The Da Vinci Code. Historians treat it as a modern myth attached to an older superstition.

Other stories are also told. One popular explanation points to a Norse myth in which the trickster Loki arrives as the thirteenth guest at a feast of the gods and causes the death of the god Baldr. The medieval Norse sources do describe Loki’s role in Baldr’s death, but the detail of thirteen guests seems to come from modern retellings.

Outside Europe, thirteen often has entirely different associations. In Sikh tradition a much-loved story from the lives of Guru Nanak tells how, as a young man working in a government storehouse at Sultanpur, he was weighing out grain and reached the number thirteen. The Punjabi word tera means both “thirteen” and “yours”. Lost in devotion, the story goes, he kept repeating “tera, tera”, “yours, yours”, and kept giving, as if every measure belonged to God.

In Japan, Buddhist families of several schools hold memorial services for the dead at fixed intervals, culminating many years after a death, and the Shingon tradition links them to thirteen Buddhas and bodhisattvas who guide the deceased. In ancient Mesoamerica the Maya combined thirteen numbers with twenty day names to make a sacred calendar of 260 days, still kept by some Maya communities in Guatemala.

Thirteen, then, is a number with two faces. In Jewish prayer it speaks of a merciful God and a believer’s first steps into adulthood; in modern Western folklore it is a minor fear supported by stories that are mostly younger than they claim. Neither meaning comes from the number itself. Both come from the texts, calendars and tales that people attached to it.