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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 collective terms

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.

Collective terms

2 words — the words that name animals as kinds — beast, flock, herd, fowl, swarm — counted here so no reader finds them missing

Collective termצֹאןFlock (tzon)
Gematria141

×276 in Tanakh Offering species First appearance:

The tzon — sheep and goats together, the flock of the shepherds from Hevel onward, and the standing figure for Israel: 'and you, My flock.' The rarer spelling tzoneh of the Psalms is counted with this row.

See all 276 places it stands →
Collective termבָּקָרHerd (bakar)
Gematria302

×183 in Tanakh Offering species First appearance:

The bakar — the ox-kind as a herd, always beside the tzon in the count of wealth and offerings. The same letters write boker, morning, under a different entry; only the herd is counted here.

See all 183 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.