Hebrew gematria: when letters become numbers

The Hebrew alphabet never had numerals separate from its letters. For centuries the same series of twenty-two signs was used both to write words and to count: aleph was 1, bet 2, gimel 3, and so on up to yod, 10; then the tens up to tsade, 90; and finally qof, resh, shin and tav for 100, 200, 300 and 400. From this double nature came gematria, the art of calculating the numerical value of a word and pairing it with other words that give the same sum.

A name of Greek origin

The term itself betrays a Hellenistic origin. Scholars usually connect it with the Greek geometria, or with grammateia, but the exact derivation remains debated. The procedure was also known outside the Jewish world: an inscription of the Assyrian king Sargon II, in the eighth century BC, states that the walls of his new capital, Dur-Sharrukin, were measured according to the value of his name, and the Greeks practised a similar game called isopsephy.

In rabbinic literature gematria appears among the rules of biblical interpretation. A baraita attributed to Rabbi Eliezer son of Yose the Galilean, which lists thirty-two principles for interpreting Scripture, expressly includes it. In Pirkei Avot, the collection of sayings in the Mishnah, Rabbi Eliezer ben Hisma calls astronomical calculations and gematriot “the side dishes of wisdom”: useful and pleasant, but not the core of study.

Examples from the Talmud

The most famous example concerns Abraham. In the book of Genesis the patriarch sets out to rescue his nephew Lot with three hundred and eighteen servants. A passage of the Babylonian Talmud, in the tractate Nedarim, observes that 318 is also the value of the name Eliezer, Abraham's servant: according to this reading the patriarch actually set out with Eliezer alone. The calculation does not cancel the literal story, but adds a second layer of meaning to it.

Another pairing, recorded in the tractate Eruvin, joins yayin, “wine”, and sod, “secret”: both words are worth 70. Hence the saying that when wine goes in, the secret comes out. Even more familiar is chai, “alive”, which adds up to 18: this is why, in Jewish custom, gifts of money are often given in multiples of eighteen, as a wish for life.

From Kabbalah to derived methods

In the Middle Ages gematria acquired new variants. One could calculate the “small” value, reducing each letter to a single digit, or the “full” value, adding up the names of the letters spelled out in full. Some systems assigned the values from 500 to 900 to the five final forms of the alphabet. The kabbalists of Provence and Spain, and later those of Safed, used these methods alongside other techniques such as notarikon and temurah.

The result was a vast repertoire of equivalences, gathered in commentaries on the Torah. Jacob ben Asher, born in Germany and active in Toledo in the fourteenth century, made wide use of it in the short notes on the Pentateuch that earned him the nickname Baal ha-Turim, showing how gematria could coexist with literal exegesis without claiming to replace it.

Gematria remains a living chapter of Jewish culture today, from rabbinic commentary to popular tradition. It should be read for what it was in the texts: not a science of numbers, but a way of reading Scripture as a fabric in which every letter, even through its value, can point to another word and open up a new interpretation.