Resources

Biblical names

The animals of the Tanakh — 162 words, every animal the twenty-four books name, from the donkey of Bereshit 12 to the legendary creatures of Iyov and the Psalms. Each was enumerated from our own lexicon layer and read against the corpus: the count on a row is the count its door opens, the first appearance is the word's own, and where the tradition discusses what a word names, the row says so instead of inventing certainty.

A spelling is not a word: rachel the ewe and Rachel the matriarch share their letters, and only the ewe is counted here — the rows count the word's own lexicon entry, and where one entry bundles a creature with something else, the row counts the creature's verses alone and its note tells you.

2 of 162 words — of the offering species, among the birds & winged creatures

Where the Torah names a kind, it rules the name: the kinds Devarim permits and the birds Vayikra prohibits are ruled by name, certain even where what the name names is discussed. The rest are ruled the way the Torah rules them — beasts by the signs of Vayikra 11, birds by that enumeration and by the tradition a bird has to carry, since the Torah gave signs for beasts and none for birds. Where the tradition itself discusses a status the row says so, and the legendary and collective rows carry no ruling at all. The offering mark stands on the korban species — the herd, the flock, the turtledove and the dove.

Birds & winged creatures

2 words — the birds of the sky, the twenty of the kosher lists among them, and the winged things the Torah counts with them

BirdיוֹנָהDove
Gematria71

×33 in Tanakh Kosher Offering species First appearance:

The yonah — Noach's messenger with the olive leaf, the offering of the poor, the beloved's eyes in Shir HaShirim. Yonah the prophet bears the word as his name; he is his own entry, on the names lists.

See all 33 places it stands →
BirdתורTurtledove
Gematria606

×14 in Tanakh Kosher Offering species First appearance:

The tor — paired with the young dove in the offerings from Avraham's covenant onward; its voice is heard in the land in Shir HaShirim. The same letters in the Aramaic chapters are the bullock, counted on its own row.

See all 14 places it stands →

Where these come from. The candidates were enumerated from the Hebrew lexicon our index carries — every entry whose definition names an animal sense — then each was verified against the corpus itself: its spelling, its count, its first stand. The gematria is computed by the same engine that runs every search, and the count on each row is the number of verses its door opens — the same walk, counted once. Deliberately absent: words that are only ever epithets (the אבירים of the Psalms), the scapegoat's destination עזאזל (the goat itself is the שעיר), and Yeshayahu 2:20's moles, which the ketiv writes across two words and are left to their verse.