Speculation: The first sentence of Ulysses contains 22 words; could this be a reference to the number 22 in patristic and English religious literature? Kate Gartner Frost has argued that 22 was often a structural element in prefaces of some seventeenth-century English religious writers (John Donne, Giles Fletcher), since it was the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and the number of books of the Old Testament in Jerome’s Latin Vulgate edition.