Hebrew Gematria Calculator

The 22 letters and their values

Hebrew gematria is built on a fact of the language: the letters are numbers. From the late second century BCE, Hebrew writers used א–ט for 1–9, י–צ for 10–90 and ק–ת for 100–400, and the same system still numbers chapters, verses and the days of the Hebrew calendar^{[5] Source: Hebrew numerals}.

The four methods

The Jewish Encyclopedia’s survey of gematria lists more than twenty ways of deriving a number from a Hebrew word — squared values, cubed values, values of the letter names, and so on^{[1] Source: Gematria}. Four are in general use, and those are the four this calculator computes.

Mispar Hechrachi (מספר הכרחי) — standard, or absolute, value

The plain numeral values above; finals count as their base letter. When a source says “the gematria of X is …” with no qualifier, this is the method meant. The Encyclopedia calls it the “normal value”^{[1] Source: Gematria}.

Mispar Gadol (מספר גדול) — large value

Identical except that the five final letters continue the sequence: ך 500, ם 600, ן 700, ף 800, ץ 900. This extends the alphabet to 27 numerals reaching 900, the same range as Greek. The Encyclopedia’s “major value”^{[1] Source: Gematria}.

Mispar Siduri (מספר סידורי) — ordinal value

Each letter’s position in the alphabet, א 1 … ת 22. The Hebrew equivalent of English Ordinal.

Mispar Katan (מספר קטן) — small, or reduced, value

The standard value with its zeros dropped: י 10 → 1, ק 100 → 1, ת 400 → 4. Every letter is 1–9. The Encyclopedia’s “minor” or “cyclical” value^{[1] Source: Gematria}. Do not confuse it with reducing a total to one digit, which the “reduced” column does for every cipher on the site.

Final letters — the one thing to check

Five letters take a different shape at the end of a word: כ→ך, מ→ם, נ→ן, פ→ף, צ→ץ. In the standard method the shape changes nothing. In Mispar Gadol it adds several hundred. Nearly every disagreement between Hebrew calculators comes down to which of the two a site uses by default — some silently apply Gadol.

A quick test for any word you are comparing: if it contains no final letter, Hechrachi and Gadol give the same number and the choice does not matter. If it does, the two values differ by exactly 480, 560, 650, 720 or 810 per final letter. Compare: שלום = 936 · אלהים = 646 · אדם = 605 in Gadol, against 376, 86 and 45 in the standard method.

Famous values

These are the results most often cited in the literature, computed live from the same engine as the calculator: אליעזר = 318 · יהוה = 26 · אלהים = 86 · תורה = 611 · אמת = 441 · משיח = 358 · נחש = 358 · אהבה = 13 · אחד = 13 · חי = 18.

• אליעזר = 318 — the 318 men of Genesis 14:14 read as Abraham’s servant Eliezer alone (Nedarim 32a)^{[2] Source: Nedarim 32a}.
• יהיה = 30 — the basis for the default thirty-day Nazirite vow in Numbers 6:5 (Nazir 5a), the one halakhic ruling traditionally grounded on gematria^{[3] Source: Nazir 5a}.
• משיח (messiah) and נחש (serpent) both 358 — a pairing much discussed in kabbalistic literature.
• אהבה (love) and אחד (one) both 13; together 26 = יהוה. A staple of homiletic teaching.
• חי (life) = 18 — the reason gifts and donations are given in multiples of 18.

Gematria in Jewish tradition

The Mishnah ranks gematria modestly. In Pirkei Avot, R. Eliezer Chisma calls astronomy and gematriot “the side-dishes of wisdom” (פרפראות לחכמה) — appetisers, not the meal^{[4] Source: Pirkei Avot 3:18}. The Talmud uses it occasionally for homiletic support and, in the Nazirite case, as a mnemonic peg for a law that had other foundations^{[1] Source: Gematria}. It was in the medieval period, and above all in kabbalistic writing from the thirteenth century onward, that gematria became a systematic tool for reading scripture, generating the long list of methods the encyclopaedias record^{[6] Source: Gematria}.

That history is why this calculator separates the methods so carefully. A value quoted from a medieval kabbalist may use Gadol or a letter-name method; a value from the Talmud almost always uses the standard count. Knowing which is half of understanding the claim. The history page follows the thread from Assyria to the present.

Typing Hebrew

If your device has no Hebrew layout, open the keyboard panel under the calculator and tap letters; final forms are included. Pasted text works too, including text with vowel points — the points are ignored. You can mix Hebrew and English in one box: the Hebrew methods count only Hebrew letters and the English ciphers only Latin ones, and the group that matches your input floats to the top of the table.