Hebrew numerology, and whether it is gematria

The word most people search for, the word the tradition uses, and an honest account of where the two overlap and where they come apart.

Somebody wanting to know what the numbers in the Hebrew Bible mean, or what their own name comes to, usually reaches for the word numerology, because in English that is the word for the general idea. It is a reasonable word to reach for. It is also not quite the right one, and the distance between it and the right one is the most useful thing anybody can tell you about the subject.

The Jewish tradition’s name for reckoning the value of Hebrew words is gematria. Hebrew numerology and gematria overlap, and they are not the same practice, and they do not answer the same kind of question.

What numerology usually means

In ordinary English usage numerology means a family of practices that assign numbers to the letters of a name or to the digits of a birth date, add them, reduce the total to a single digit, and read a person’s character or prospects out of the result. Different schools assign different values and disagree about the arithmetic, and the appeal is obvious: it takes something as ordinary as a name and offers to make it say something about a life.

The important structural fact about it, and the one that matters for what follows, is that the numbers are assigned. English writes its words with letters and its numbers with digits, two separate sets of signs. To make A into 1 somebody has to decide that it should be.

What gematria is

Hebrew never had a second set of signs. Alef is the first letter and it is also one; tav is the last and it is also four hundred. Nobody assigned those values in order to read meaning out of them. They are how the writing system counts, in the same way that the letters are how it spells, and a Hebrew word is therefore already a number before anybody takes an interest in it. Gematria is the practice of noticing the number and setting words carrying the same one beside each other.

That is the whole mechanism, and the companion piece on what gematria is and is not works all seven reckonings this site computes, gives the places the Talmud itself counts, and says where the ground stops being firm. This page is about the other question: whether the thing you searched for is that thing.

One honest complication

Biblical numerology is a phrase that suggests the Bible is written in numbers. It is not. The twenty-four books spell their numbers out as words, exactly as English does when it writes nine hundred and thirty rather than 930.

Not a letter-numeral in it. The convention that writes a year or a page number with letters is real, and it is what gives Hebrew its familiar way of writing a date, but it is later than the biblical text and it belongs to the writing system rather than to the Torah’s own spelling. The point is worked at length in the article about forty, where the forty days of the flood turn out to have nothing to do with the letter that carries forty.

Where the two touch

They touch in three places, and it is worth granting all three rather than pretending the resemblance is imaginary. Both give letters numbers. Both notice when two different things come to the same total and treat the coincidence as worth a moment. And both are practised, mostly, by people who suspect there is more in a text or a name than its surface, which is not a foolish thing to suspect.

Where they part

The first difference is the one above: in Hebrew the values are not a scheme laid over the alphabet, they are the alphabet.

The second is direction, and it is the one that decides everything. A classical gematria looks backwards. It is offered to support a teaching the source already holds on other grounds, and it is never the only support. When the Gemara in Shabbat reads the word נא in Lot’s plea as fifty-one against Sodom’s fifty-two, the discussion it belongs to had already reached its conclusion. נא=51 Nothing in the classical use of the method looks forward, and nothing in it claims to describe a person.

The third is scale, and this site is in an unusually good position to state it, because it has counted. The index behind the search box holds 2,581,248 spans: every word of the 23,213 verses of Tanakh, every run of adjacent words inside a verse, and every whole verse, each valued seven ways. Against a haystack of that size a match is not a marvel. It is the expected result, and a reading that rests on nothing but a match rests on nothing.

The fourth is what makes a reading traditional in the first place. It is never the arithmetic. The arithmetic is the cheap part. A gematria belongs to the mesorah because someone taught it, someone recorded it, and people who could also count argued about it for a long time afterwards. The old list of thirty-two rules by which aggadah is derived names gematria among them, and names it in company with other interpretive techniques rather than with anything occult.

Where the line actually runs

The tradition is not shy about the boundary and does not leave it to taste. The Rambam, setting out the Torah’s prohibitions on divination, defines one of the forbidden categories as those who give times: the people who say, by the reckoning of the stars, that such a day is favourable and such a day is not, this month bad for that undertaking. He closes the whole subject with a paragraph calling these things falsehood and lies, quoting a verse in Bemidbar.

His last word on it is a different verse, the one that closes the passage on soothsayers in the portion of Shoftim.

Two things have to be said about that carefully, and this page is not a ruling on anybody’s practice. The Rambam is describing forecasting, which is a category the Torah names, and he is not describing gematria, a word that does not appear anywhere in those chapters. But the reason the tradition’s own use of numbers never drifted into that category is the same reason set out above: it was always used to explain something already known, never to announce something not yet known. Take away the backwards direction and what is left is not gematria with a modern accent. It is a different practice that has borrowed the alphabet.

The numerology of your name

This is what most people are actually looking for, so here is a straight account of what this site will and will not do with a name.

It will tell you exactly what the letters come to, under each of the six reckonings, and it will list every word, every phrase and every verse in the twenty-four books that carries the same number, in canonical order from Bereshit forward, with the occurrence counts. Take a name almost everybody knows. דוד=14 The spelling stands 600 times in Tanakh.

And here is the sort of thing a name search teaches, which no numerology of names can survive intact. The same king is written another way in Divrei HaYamim, with a yod in the middle. That spelling stands 251 times across the twenty-four books, the great majority of them there. דויד=24 One man, one Bible, two spellings, two different numbers. Any system that reads a destiny out of the total has to answer which of the two is his, and there is no answer, because the question was never a real one.

What the site will not do is tell you what any of that means about you. Not because the tool is unfinished, but because the number of a name is a fact about its letters, and a fact about letters is not a fact about a person.

So: the same thing?

No, and the word you searched for is not a wrong word. It is an English word for a wide family of practices, and one member of that family is a real and old part of Jewish learning with a name of its own, a literature of its own, and rules about what it is allowed to prove. That member is gematria, and it is what this site computes.

The useful question to carry into any of it is not whether the numbers work out. They very often will. It is who says so, and what they thought it showed.