What is gematria?

Letters that are also numbers

Hebrew, like ancient Greek, had no separate digits. Numbers were written with letters: the first nine letters are 1 to 9, the next nine are 10 to 90, and the last four are 100 to 400. The number 15 is written ט״ו (9 + 6) and the year 5786 as ה׳תשפ״ו. Our page on Hebrew numerals explains this system in full.

Since every word is also a string of numbers, every word has a total. Gematria is the practice of noticing those totals and relating words that share one, or linking a word to a number that appears in a verse. The word itself is usually traced to the Greek geometria.

Gematria in the Mishnah and Talmud

The earliest rabbinic mention is in Pirkei Avot, where Rabbi Eliezer ben Chisma says that “the calculation of the equinoxes and gematria are the desserts of wisdom” (Avot 3:18). In other words, they add to learning but are not its main course. The Talmud and Mishnah then give examples. All of them use the standard values, Mispar Hechrachi:

• השטן = 364. Rami bar Chama notes that ha-Satan, the accuser, totals 364, one less than the days of the solar year: on one day, Yom Kippur, the accuser has no permission to accuse (Yoma 20a; also Nedarim 32b).
• אליעזר = 318. Genesis 14:14 says Abram went to war with 318 men. One opinion in the Talmud says this means Eliezer alone, “as the numerical value of his name is this amount” (Nedarim 32a).
• עקב = 172. On the same page, the word ekev (“because”) in Genesis 26:5 is read as 172, the years Abraham observed God’s law, so he recognised his Creator at age three (Nedarim 32a).
• אברם = 243 and אברהם = 248. When Abram became Abraham, the added ה (5) brought his name to 248, the number of a person’s limbs in rabbinic counting (Nedarim 32b).
• יהיה = 30. A nazirite vow with no stated length lasts thirty days, because the verse says the nazirite “shall be (yihyeh) holy” and yihyeh is 30 (Nazir 5a).
• לו = 36. Abaye teaches that each generation has at least thirty-six righteous people who greet the Divine Presence, from “Happy are all who wait for Him (lo)”, Isaiah 30:18 (Sanhedrin 97b).
• יין = סוד = 70. “Wine entered, a secret came out”: wine and secret have the same value (Sanhedrin 38a; Eruvin 65a).
• יש = 310. The Mishnah’s final teaching reads Proverbs 8:21, “to cause those who love Me to inherit yesh”, as 310 worlds for each righteous person (Mishnah Oktzin 3:12).

In each of these passages the number is attached to a specific verse to illustrate or support a teaching. None of them treats a shared value as meaningful on its own, without a verse.

In the commentaries

Rashi (1040–1105) uses gematria in his commentary on the Torah. On the commandment of tzitzit he explains that ציצית = 600, and with the eight strings and five knots of the fringes this gives 613, the number of the commandments (Rashi on Numbers 15:39).

Letter substitution is also old. The Talmud lists the Atbash pairs (א with ת, ב with ש, and so on) in a lesson on the alphabet (Shabbat 104a), and Rashi explains Jeremiah’s “Sheshach” (ששך) as Babylon (בבל) in Atbash (Rashi on Jeremiah 25:26), and “Lev-kamai” (לב קמי) as the Chaldeans (כשדים) (Rashi on Jeremiah 51:1). Our calculator reproduces both.

Later Kabbalistic writing uses gematria much more heavily and introduces additional methods, several of which the calculator also shows. Those later systems are what most online “gematria” refers to, but they are a development of the classical practice, not the same thing.

The same idea in Greek and Arabic

Greek also used letters as numbers, and adding them up is called isopsephy. The Roman historian Suetonius records a Greek lampoon that equated the name Nero (Νέρων, 1005) with “killed his own mother”, which has the same total (Nero 39.2). Irenaeus reports that the Basilidians called their chief power Abraxas because its letters make 365 (Against Heresies 1.24.7). Arabic has the abjad system, used among other things for chronograms. The English ciphers are modern inventions.

Reading gematria responsibly

• Equal totals are common. There are far more words than numbers. In Strong’s dictionary, 16 entries share the value of שלום (376), and a value that has any entries has 10 of them on average. A shared total shows arithmetic, not a hidden link.
• Method matters. A match in one method is rarely a match in the others. Choosing the method after the fact to get a match proves nothing.
• Spelling matters. Hebrew words can be spelled with or without the vowel letters ו and י (male and chaser spelling), and that changes the total.
• It is not prediction. Classical sources use gematria to connect a verse with a teaching. It is not a way to forecast events, read the news, or say what a name means for someone’s future.

Check השטן in the calculator