The Bible Wheel and gematria

What the Bible Wheel is

Take the 66 books of the Protestant Bible in order. Write the first 22 around a circle, one per spoke; write the next 22 outside them on the same spokes; then the last 22. Label the spokes alef to tav. That is the Bible Wheel.

Richard Amiel McGough published the arrangement on biblewheel.com from 2001, with a book to follow, and argued that it was not merely possible but meaningful: that the three books on each spoke share the character of their Hebrew letter, as that character is revealed in the alphabetic acrostics of scripture (Psalm 119 above all)^{[1] Source: The Bible Wheel}. The arithmetic the wheel rests on is exact — 66 = 3 × 22 — and it has a respectable ancestor: Josephus counted the Hebrew scriptures as twenty-two books, one per letter, in the first century^{[2] Source: Against Apion}. The claim that the books’ contents align with the letters is where interpretation begins.

The twenty-two spokes

Built here from the canon and the alphabet, not copied. Each row is one spoke: the letter and its value^{[3] Source: Hebrew alphabet}, then the book from each cycle.

Some spokes are suggestive on their face — Genesis, Isaiah and Romans on alef; Song of Songs, Acts and Revelation on tav — and the wheel’s advocates built its case from such rows. Others require more work, and the amount of work required is, in the end, what its author came to distrust.

The gematria Bible Wheel “reference identities”

Alongside the wheel, the site published tables of letter-values under the heading “gematria reference”, and the best-known of them are still quoted, usually without attribution. Every one is computed here by the site’s engine:

• Ἰησοῦς = 888 · Χριστός = 1480 · Ἰησοῦς Χριστός = 2368 — the Greek values known since antiquity^{[4] Source: Isopsephy}; note that 888 + 1480 = 2368, as it must, since the value of a phrase is the sum of its words.
• ἀμήν = 99 — “amen”, and the “99” of the Bible Wheel searches.
• Genesis 1:1, בראשית ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ = 2701. This is the identity the wheel made famous: 2701 = 37 × 73, and it is the 73rd triangular number (1 + 2 + … + 73). Both facts are true and were noticed before McGough; his contribution was to build a large structure of “37 and 73” patterns on them.

These are exact, and the arithmetic deserves respect. What they mean is a separate question, and the Jewish tradition that invented gematria answered it with a warning: values illustrate, they do not establish, and a striking number proves only that numbers can be striking^{[5] Source: Gematria}.

A disagreement over ten

The site also lists John 1:1 — Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος … — at 3627 = 39 × 93, paired with Genesis 1:1’s 37 × 73 as a “creation” symmetry. This site’s engine gives 3617. The difference is one letter: the word ἀρχῇ ends in an eta with an iota subscript, the small stroke beneath the vowel that marks an ancient diphthong. The Bible Wheel counts it as an iota, 10; this site treats it as a diacritic and strips it, as it strips accents and breathings, because the value of a word should not depend on whether a scribe wrote the iota beside the vowel or beneath it. Count it and you get 3627; don’t and you get 3617. Neither figure is a mistake. They are two normalisation conventions, and the honest thing — the thing our methodology page tries to do for every table — is to say which one you are using. The 39 × 93 pattern exists under one convention and not the other, which is a fair measure of how much weight such patterns can bear.

The retraction

In the early 2010s McGough announced on the same website that he had left Christianity and no longer believed the Bible Wheel demonstrated anything; he published a detailed critique of his own work, arguing that the thematic correspondences he had found were the product of a method flexible enough to find them anywhere, and that the numerical patterns were selected from a far larger field of non-patterns^{[1] Source: The Bible Wheel}. The original material remains online beside the retraction. It is a rare and honest document: the author of an interpretive system applying to it the test its critics would have applied, and reporting the result. Most of the sites that reproduce the reference identities today do not mention it.

What survives