The Roots of Ash Wednesday

Since the seventh century, the Western church has observed the start of Lent on Ash Wednesday—the fortieth day before Easter, not counting Sundays. In addition to providing ample time for self-examination and spiritual reorientation, the duration of forty days symbolically aligns Lent with biblical examples of preparation, fasting, and journeying toward liberation—recalling, for instance, Jesus’s forty days of fasting in the wilderness before beginning his ministry, as well as the Israelites’ forty years of desert-wandering before their deliverance into the Promised Land.

Among most…