Twenty-six

The value of the four-letter Name, what our index can say about it, and what it cannot.

Yod is ten. Heh is five. Vav is six. Heh is five again. The four letters of the Name come to twenty-six, and of all the numbers this site can compute, that is the one people arrive looking for.

This article will not set those four letters in Hebrew. Not because the value is a secret, and not out of squeamishness. A web page is printed, saved and discarded. When the Mishneh Torah has to fix the list of the Names, it gives the first of them by its letters rather than setting it, and that is what is done here.

What may not be erased

The Mishneh Torah opens its discussion by fixing the list. There are seven Names, the Rambam writes, and he heads it with the one written yod, heh, vav, heh, which is the explicit Name, or written alef, dalet, nun, yod; then El, Eloah, Elohim, Elohai, Shaddai and Tzevaot. Anyone who erases even one letter of these is liable to lashes.

A good deal of practical law follows from that sentence, and part of it matters here. A particle attached in FRONT of the Name is not part of it and may be erased: the lamed of “to”, the bet of “in”. A letter attached BEHIND a Name is not erasable, because the Name has sanctified it. And the first two letters of the explicit Name, standing alone, are a Name in their own right, the Rambam adds, being a part of the explicit Name.

That is a legal distinction, not a numerical one, but it decides how a count is taken. When the Talmud says a passage has so many mentions of the Name, it is counting the Name whether or not a lamed is standing in front of it. So do we.

The count in the twenty-four books

The bare four-letter spelling stands 6,007 times in the corpus this site indexes, which is the Westminster Leningrad Codex, the whole Tanakh and nothing outside it. That is the count of the SPELLING. Counted by lemma it is higher, because the lexicon carries the forms with a particle fused to the front as the same word, and the two figures answer two different questions. Any number quoted without saying which is being quoted should be treated with suspicion, including on this site.

The value twenty-six is carried by 6,565 word tokens altogether, spread over 39 distinct spellings. Subtract the Name and several hundred remain. Twenty-six is a common enough number that finding it somewhere is not, on its own, a finding.

Where the Name is given

At the bush, after the Name is told to Moshe, the verse closes the matter in a way no later reader has been able to close it.

The line most Jews know it from is the one they say twice a day, where the Name stands twice in six words and the last word is אחד, one.

אחד=13 Thirteen, which is half of twenty-six, and that observation has a long history and an article of its own on this site. It is also the point at which honest description has to stop and say what it is doing.

What the number is, and what it is not

Twenty-six is a fact about an alphabet in which letters double as numerals. It is as much a fact as the observation that the Name has four letters, and about as surprising. What is done with it afterwards is another matter entirely, and it belongs to remez, the level of allusion, which the tradition has always kept carefully distinct from the plain sense of a verse and from the derivation of a law.

The classical writers who count twenty-six do so as allusion, and they say so. The trouble starts when a modern retelling drops that word. A gematria offered as a proof is offering something no gematria has ever been able to supply.

The last verse of Zechariah’s vision uses the same word the Shema ends on, twice, and it is the better place to leave this.