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The Hebrew alphabet is comprised of twenty-two letters arranged in a fixed order. Diringer1 used both primary and secondary evidence to argue that this order has not been changed. Primary evidence is the acrostic passages in the Hebrew Bible in which subsequent verses begin with subsequent letters of the alphabet (e.g., Lam. 1-4, Prov. 31: 10-31, Ps. 34, 119). Secondary evidence includes an Ugaritic tablet of the fourteenth century B.C. containing the 30 letters of the Ugaritic alphabet -- which is the oldest known ABC -- including the symbols of the twenty-two North Semitic letters in the same order as they appear in the modern Hebrew alphabet.
In addition to ordinal values, the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are also assigned numerical values2. Numerical values for the first nine letters are the units (1-9), the next nine, the tens (10-90); and the last four, the numbers 100, 200, 300, and 400. Use of numerical values is not found in the Hebrew Bible, but is thought to have originated under Greek influence, first appearing on Maccabean coins3. Letters assigned numeral values are used in combination to assign the full range of integers as with Roman Numerals, and are currently used, among other places, on Israeli coins.
Gematria is a mystical association between words and their numerical values. Blech4 writes that "every letter that appears in a Hebrew text is also a number. That number is a message." These mystics add up the values of words to assign messages to the text. Although both Hebrew and Greek alphabets lend themselves to gematria, Davis5 suggested that the Biblical use of this concept is rare.
In contrast to gematria, a modern revival of 'Biblical Numerics' inspired by the writings of Maham and Panin6 uses mathematical principles to examine the Scriptures. Panin analyzed underlying numerical patterns in words, verses and other Bible passages in an attempt to prove their divine origin. He used, in addition to the numerical ("numeric") values, the ordinal ("place") values and the totals of the ordinal and numerical values ("value")7. As an example of the type of his work, Panin assigned the numerical values to the letters in the first verse of Genesis. He found the total for all the letters in the verse summed to 2,701 which factored to 37 * 73. He then added up the values of the even and odd letters and found that these subsets both also factored evenly by 37. He found other subsets that factored evenly by 37 including the the largest and smallest words and the remaining words, the three leading nouns and the remaining words, and so forth. (see http://www.accessv.com/~rjchin/numeric/bnumeric.htm#mechanics for this and another example). In my examination of Panin's work, he appeared to search for factors, use the three value systems independently, and did not justify use of a particular system in his looking for patterns.
Segal warned, "Statistics of the Bible, like the calculations of the Great Pyramid of Egypt, have a fatal attraction for cranks and crackpots - even for wise men in their less guarded moments."8 In examining some of Panin's claims, I flirted with this "fatal attraction." I found that many of his patterns indeed "seemed impossible" to attribute to chance, but also found patterns seemly very significant, only later to discover that they were based on my calculations with arithmetic errors. Looking for these patterns became a time consuming, distracting, and not an easily resolved processes.
However, I eventually identified what appeared to be an unusual common denominator relationships in the letters of the word Israel based on 11 for the ordinal and numerical values as well as the totals. This led to the approach of examining the Hebrew alphabet itself to determine what sets of letters could be shown to have a unique place in the alphabet following the pattern found with "Israel" and the possible significance of the patterns. With this project I was able to focus on a manageable approach to numerical studies.
© 2000 C. M. Felland