Parashat Bereshit, and the numbers in it

The first word and the only four other places it stands, a word written full exactly twice, ten sayings counted as nine and one, and the first commandment of the count.

Parashat Bereshit is where the reading starts again. On Simchat Torah the scroll is rolled back and its opening read at once, and on the Shabbat that follows the congregation hears the whole portion from its first word: Bereshit 1:1 through 6:8, the six days and the seventh, the garden, Kayin and Hevel, ten generations to Noach, and a closing verse of grace. Anyone searching for Bereshit gematria usually wants one number, the value of the first word, and it is the first thing below. The better material in the portion, as so often, is a spelling.

The index weighs the portion first, as usual: 146 verses, 1,931 words, 7,234 letters, and a standard value across every letter of 469,539. A measurement, not a teaching, and nothing below stands on it.

Bereshit gematria: the first word, and where else it stands

בראשית=913 That is the number, and the page for 913 lists every word, phrase and verse of the Tanakh that shares it. The word itself is rarer than a reader might guess. Our index finds the spelling five times in the twenty-four books: here, and four times in Yirmiyahu, where every one of the four dates a prophecy to the beginning of a king’s reign, twice Yehoyakim’s and twice Tzidkiyahu’s.

Rashi, on the Torah’s first verse, reaches for exactly this verse. If you want the verse in its plain sense, he says, read it this way: in the beginning of God’s creating heaven and earth, when the earth was formless, God said, let there be light. The verse is not there to teach the order of creation, because the word never stands alone in Scripture; it is always bound to the word after it, as in the beginning of the reign of Yehoyakim. The index adds one small fact to his example. The spelling with the bet stands outside this verse only in those four verses of Yirmiyahu, and in all four it is bound to the word after it, exactly as Rashi says.

Before any of that, Rashi opens his commentary with a question about the book rather than the word. Rabbi Yitzchak said that the Torah need only have begun with this month shall be for you, the first commandment Israel was given, in Shemot. Why begin with creation? So that when the nations say to Israel, you are robbers who took the land of seven nations, Israel can answer that the whole earth belongs to the Holy One, who created it and gives it to whom He sees fit.

The whole verse, and what not to make of it

The first verse is 7 words and 28 letters, and its standard value is 2,701. The article on calculating gematria adds it up word by word. A great deal is written about that total: it is 37 times 73, both of them prime, and it is the sum of every number from 1 to 73. All of that is true, and all of it is arithmetic. No source this site holds says a word about it, and a reader should price it accordingly: a number that large has properties whether or not anyone intended them.

Ten sayings, counted as nine and one

The Mishnah in Avot opens its fifth chapter with a count: the world was created with ten sayings. Could it not have been created with one? It could, says the Mishnah; the ten are so that the wicked, who destroy a world created with ten sayings, are punished for it, and the righteous, who sustain such a world, are given a good reward.

The Gemara in Rosh Hashanah, and again in Megillah, asks which the ten are. If they are the and-He-saids of the account of creation, those are nine. Its answer is that the first word is a saying too, and it proves it from Tehillim.

By the word the heavens were made: the heavens of the first verse were made by a word, even though that verse never says one was spoken. So the Gemara’s ten are nine sayings and the first word, and the count is settled on the daf itself. A reader who counts the verb will find more than nine. Our index has the spelling ויאמר ten times in the first chapter, but the Gemara is counting the sayings by which the world was made, not every time the verb appears, and not every and-He-said makes anything. The last two in the chapter are spoken to the man and woman already made: a blessing, be fruitful and multiply, and then the gift of every seed-bearing herb and tree for food. Which nine the Gemara has in mind it does not list, and its commentators, whom this site does not hold on that daf, work that out; that its count is of acts of creation, and not of a word, is plain from the daf.

One day, not the first

Every later day of the week is counted with an ordinal: a second day, a third, a sixth. The first is not called first. Rashi asks why it says one, אחד, and answers that on that day the Holy One was alone in His world, since the angels were not created until the second. אחד=13 The article on thirteen follows the word to the Shema.

Toledot, written full exactly twice

תולדות, generations, or the things that came out of something, can be written with two vavs or with fewer. Bereshit Rabbah records Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachman’s observation that every toledot said in the Torah is written short except two: this verse, the generations of heaven and earth, and the generations of Peretz at the end of Ruth. The midrash says in the Torah, and its second example is in Ketuvim, so it is using the word in its wide sense.

This is the kind of claim an index can check in a moment, and it holds exactly. Spelled with both of its vavs, the word stands in the twenty-four books exactly twice, in these two verses and nowhere else; there is no other form of it, with a letter in front or a suffix behind, that keeps both vavs.

תולדות=846תולדת=840

The midrash then asks why the others are short. Rabbi Yudan, in the name of Rabbi Avin: they stand for six things taken from Adam after he sinned, his radiance, his life, his stature, the fruit of the earth, the fruit of the tree, and the lights. And Rabbi Berachyah, in the name of Rabbi Shmuel, adds the other half: the things were created whole and spoiled when Adam sinned, and they will not return to what they were until the son of Peretz comes, which is why the generations of Peretz are written full, for the six things that will come back. The midrash never says the arithmetic aloud. The letter the short spellings lack is a vav, and a vav is six.

ו=6

The book of Adam, and six hundred and thirteen

The next toledot in the portion is one of the short ones, and Bereshit Rabbah reads the verse it opens as a verdict on Adam. Rabbi Yehudah son of Rabbi Simon says Adam was fit to have the Torah given through him. The Holy One said: he is the work of My hands, shall I not give it to him? Then He reconsidered. Six commandments I gave him and he could not stand by them; how shall I give him six hundred and thirteen, two hundred and forty-eight to do and three hundred and sixty-five not to do? Not to Adam will I give it, but to his children: this is the book of the generations of Adam.

The same passage then makes a gematria of the verse’s first word. Rabbi Yaakov of Kfar Chanin says Adam was fit to have the twelve tribes descend from him, and the proof is זה, this: zayin seven and heh five, twelve. But the Holy One said, two sons I gave him and one rose up and killed the other; how shall I give him twelve? זה=12 The count of the commandments this passage leans on has an article of its own.

The first commandment of the count

The Sefer HaChinuch, which walks the Torah portion by portion and numbers the commandments as it goes, opens its count here: Bereshit has one positive commandment, to be fruitful and multiply. This site’s list of the 613 follows the Chinuch, and it counts one commandment in this portion and three in the whole of the book of Bereshit. Which gives Rashi’s opening question its edge. A book that holds so few of the commandments is, by his account, in the Torah for another reason altogether, and the reason he gives is the land.

The last verse

The portion ends on grace. Its last verse turns on two words that are the same two letters in opposite order, נח and חן, and so of course they weigh the same. נח=58חן=58 That is a fact about the letters, and nothing more is claimed for it here; no source this site holds makes anything of it. The reading goes on from this verse in the next portion, which takes its name from the man who found the grace.

The portion’s full text, its aliyot and its haftarah are at Bereshit in the reader, and every value of every word in it is at the portion’s gematria desk.