SOME BACKGROUND

I’ve encountered Gematria before. The Babylonians and the Greeks had a form of it. There is Hebrew Gematria and English Gematria. Basically, Gematria is assigning the letters in a given alphabet a numerical value. (In Babylonian gematria, however, a numerical value was assigned to whole words, not individual letters). The letters of a word, name, or phrase, when added up according to their assigned number value, will form a specific number value of two, three or even four-digits-long. This number is considered to show this word, name or phrase to be in harmony with any other words, names or phrases which reduce to the same number. The website Gematrinator.com can give you a quite a sampling of Gematria in action (though I have qualms about the seeming political-bent and perceptible anti-semitism of the website’s author).

The Gematria most known today is the Hebrew Gematria. Some scholars believe the ancient Hebrews derived the word Gematria from the Greek words for geometry (geometria) and/or ‘knowledge of writing’ (grammateia). It was most-commonly used on the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh and indeed, finding hidden codes in sacred scripture may still be its most-common use.

The belief behind the employment of Gematria is that the words in sacred scripture had a ‘code’ of sorts, and a pattern to the way the words appeared in print in the holy text. It’s believed by its practitioners that Gematria is the way to break this code could so the underlying meaning can be discovered. In Jewish tradition, only people who met certain qualifications were allowed to study scripture using Gematria, but as has been demonstrated by websites like Gematrinator.com, this numerological technique has greatly-expanded in use, beyond just sacred scripture–and the results can be uncanny.

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