Gematria Sources & Bibliography — Primary Texts, References

How sources are chosen

Wherever possible, a claim is tied to the oldest document that actually makes it, in an edition anyone can open.

Three kinds of source appear below. Primary texts are the historical documents themselves — a Talmudic passage, Agrippa’s 1533 treatise, Suetonius — linked to a reputable public edition. Reference works are encyclopaedias and surveys used to check dates, attributions and the names of methods. Modern calculators are listed for one reason: their labels shaped what people now expect a cipher name to mean, so we document them precisely. Listing a site here is not an endorsement of its content.

Wikipedia articles are cited where they are the most accessible summary of well-established material (the Greek numeral system, the manuscript history of 666). They are not used as the sole authority for any cipher table; those rest on the primary texts named in the methodology.

Two books in the list — Marty Leeds’ Pi & The English Alphabet and Zachary Hubbard’s Letters & Numbers — are cited as the origin of modern cipher conventions, not as scholarship. They are in print and not freely available online, so no link is given.

Primary texts

The historical documents themselves — scripture, Talmud, Agrippa, Suetonius — in the most accessible reliable edition.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa — Three Books of Occult Philosophy (De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres), Book II, chapter XX: “What numbers are attributed to letters; and of divining by the same”: 1533; English translation by “J.F.”, London 1651; digital edition by Joseph H. Peterson, Esoteric Archives; The primary source for the Latin-alphabet values behind the “Jewish” and “Latin” ciphers. Agrippa lists A 1 … I 9, K 10 … S 90, T 100, V 200, X 300, Y 400, Z 500, then adds consonantal I (J) 600, consonantal V 700, HI 800 and HV 900 to fill out twenty-seven places.
Irenaeus of Lyon — Against Heresies, Book V, chapter 30: c. 180 CE; translation in Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1, at New Advent; The earliest surviving discussion of 666 in Revelation 13:18: Irenaeus proposes the Greek names Euanthas, Lateinos and Teitan, and already knows of manuscripts reading 616, which he regards as a copyist’s error.
Suetonius — The Lives of the Caesars: Nero, §39: c. 121 CE; Loeb translation at LacusCurtius; Preserves a Greek lampoon — “a new calculation: Nero slew his own mother” — that works because both halves total 1005 in isopsephy. One of the best-attested ancient uses of letter-numbers.
Revelation 13:18: New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, Bible Gateway; “Let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred sixty-six.” The verse that invites the calculation.
Pirkei Avot 3:18: Mishnah, c. 200 CE; Sefaria; R. Eliezer Chisma: astronomy and gematriot are “the side-dishes of wisdom” (פרפראות לחכמה) — the classic statement of gematria’s rank as an aid, not a foundation.
Nedarim 32a: Babylonian Talmud; Sefaria; The 318 men of Genesis 14:14 read as the value of the name Eliezer (אליעזר = 318) — the most-quoted Talmudic gematria.
Nazir 5a: Babylonian Talmud; Sefaria; The default thirty-day term of a Nazirite vow derived from יהיה = 30 in Numbers 6:5 — the one halakhic ruling traditionally grounded on gematria.
Cheiro (William John Warner) — Cheiro’s Book of Numbers: London: Herbert Jenkins, 1926; The book that fixed the Chaldean letter table in its modern form (A I J Q Y = 1; B K R = 2; C G L S = 3; D M T = 4; E H N X = 5; U V W = 6; O Z = 7; F P = 8; no letter = 9). Link is to the author’s biography; the text is in print and in libraries.
Marty Leeds — Pi & The English Alphabet, vol. 1: Self-published; Source of the seven-based “Septenary” cipher (A–G = 1–7, H–M = 6–1, N–T = 1–7, U–Z = 6–1) used on this site and on Gematrinator.
Zachary K. Hubbard — Letters & Numbers: Self-published, 2018; The book that popularised the “four base ciphers” — English Ordinal, Full Reduction, Reverse Ordinal and Reverse Full Reduction — in the online decoding community.
Genesis 14:14: New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, Bible Gateway; Abram leads out “three hundred eighteen” trained men — the verse the Talmud reads as the name Eliezer (אליעזר = 318).
Genesis 17:5: New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, Bible Gateway; “No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham” — the added letter ה raises the name’s value from 243 to 248.
Makkot 23b–24a: Babylonian Talmud; Sefaria; R. Simlai’s count of 613 commandments — 365 prohibitions for the days of the year and 248 positive commandments for the limbs of the body — and the gematria of תורה = 611.
Genesis 5:31: New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, Bible Gateway; “Thus all the days of Lamech were seven hundred seventy-seven years” — the only 777 in the Bible.
Deuteronomy 18:10–12: New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, Bible Gateway; The prohibition of divination, soothsaying, augury and sorcery — the passage most often cited by Christian critics of gematria, and the one that frames the real question: is a given use interpretation or divination?
1 Timothy 1:4: New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, Bible Gateway; The warning against “myths and endless genealogies that promote speculations”, applied by some Protestant writers to number-speculation of every kind.
Numbers 6:5: New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, Bible Gateway; The Nazirite “shall be holy” (יהיה קדוש); the Talmud derives the default thirty-day vow from יהיה = 30.
John 21:11: New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, Bible Gateway; The net holding “a hundred fifty-three” large fish — the number most discussed by the Church Fathers.
Exodus 34:6–7: New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, Bible Gateway; The passage from which rabbinic tradition counts the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy.
The Epistle of Barnabas, chapter 9: c. 70–130 CE; translation in Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1, at New Advent; Reads Abraham’s 318 servants in Greek numerals as ΤΙΗ — the cross (Τ = 300) and the first two letters of Jesus (ΙΗ = 18). The same number the Talmud reads as Eliezer; the earliest Christian gematria on record.
Augustine of Hippo — Tractates on the Gospel of John, Tractate 122: c. 416 CE; translation in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 1, vol. 7, at New Advent; Augustine’s reading of the 153 fish as the triangular number of 17 (the Ten Commandments plus the seven gifts of the Spirit) — a number argument that is not gematria, and a useful contrast to it.
1 Kings 10:14: New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, Bible Gateway; Solomon’s annual income of “six hundred sixty-six talents of gold” — the only other 666 in the Bible, repeated at 2 Chronicles 9:13.

Reference works

Encyclopaedias and surveys used to check dates, attributions and terminology.

Solomon Schechter and Caspar Levias — Gematria: The Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (Funk & Wagnalls, 1901–1906); Public-domain reference article. Names the three classical Hebrew values used here — normal (finals equal their base letter), minor (reduced to units) and major (finals 500–900) — and records that the term first appears in the twenty-ninth of the thirty-two hermeneutic rules attributed to R. Eliezer b. Jose ha-Gelili.
Gershom Scholem, with David Derovan and Moshe Idel — Gematria: Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (2007), reproduced at Encyclopedia.com; The standard modern survey: the Greek origin of the word, the Assyrian and Greek precedents, and the development of the method in Talmudic, medieval and kabbalistic literature.
Wikipedia contributors — Gematria: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; Useful for its list of Hebrew methods (Mispar Hechrachi, Gadol, Siduri, Katan and others) and for the Sargon II inscription, cited there to Luckenbill, as the earliest known letter-number correspondence.
Wikipedia contributors — Isopsephy: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; Greek letter-numbers in practice: the Pompeii graffito “I love her whose number is 545”, the Nero/matricide equation (1005) and the Sibylline and early Christian uses.
Wikipedia contributors — Greek numerals: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The Milesian (alphabetic) numeral system: 24 letters plus the three archaic signs stigma/digamma (6), koppa (90) and sampi (900).
Wikipedia contributors — Hebrew numerals: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The 22-letter numeral system still used for Hebrew dates and chapter numbers, including the convention of writing 15 and 16 as ט״ו and ט״ז to avoid spelling the divine name.
Wikipedia contributors — Number of the beast: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; Survey of the 666 / 616 manuscript evidence (including Papyrus 115) and the Nero Caesar identification via Hebrew נרון קסר.
Wikipedia contributors — Sefer Yetzirah: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The early “Book of Formation”, whose treatment of the 22 letters as building blocks of creation underlies later kabbalistic letter-number speculation.
Wikipedia contributors — Numerology: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; Modern Western “Pythagorean” numerology (A–I = 1–9 repeating) and the Chaldean 1–8 system as popularised by Cheiro. Neither table is attested before the late nineteenth century.
Wikipedia contributors — Bacon’s cipher: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The biliteral cipher Francis Bacon actually published (De Augmentis Scientiarum, 1623). It is a steganographic code, not a letter-value table; the numeric “Francis Bacon cipher” of online calculators is a later convention that borrows his name.
Wikipedia contributors — Cicada 3301: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; Background to the Gematria Primus rune table used in the Liber Primus puzzle.
Wikipedia contributors — Sexagesimal: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The Sumerian–Babylonian base-60 system, which is the only connection between ancient Sumer and the modern “Sumerian” (ordinal × 6) English cipher.
Wikipedia contributors — 153 (number): Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The mathematical properties of 153 (triangular, sum of the first five factorials, narcissistic) and a survey of the patristic interpretations.
Wikipedia contributors — 666 (number): Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The arithmetic of 666: the 36th triangular number, the sum of the squares of the first seven primes, and its Roman-numeral expression DCLXVI.
Wikipedia contributors — Papyrus 115: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The third-century Oxyrhynchus fragment of Revelation that writes the number of the beast as χιϛ, 616.
Wikipedia contributors — Chai (symbol): Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The word חי (“living”) and its value 18, the reason for gifts and donations in multiples of eighteen.
Wikipedia contributors — Lag BaOmer: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The festival whose name is simply the number 33 written in Hebrew letters (ל״ג): the thirty-third day of the Omer count.
Wikipedia contributors — Thirteen Attributes of Mercy: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The rabbinic enumeration of thirteen divine attributes in Exodus 34:6–7 — the main reason thirteen is an auspicious number in Jewish tradition.
Wikipedia contributors — Tetragrammaton: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The four-letter divine name יהוה, whose standard value is 26.
Wikipedia contributors — Hebrew alphabet: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The twenty-two letters, the five final forms, and the letters’ numeric values.
Wikipedia contributors — Hebrew calendar: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; How Hebrew years and days of the month are written with letter-numerals — the one sense in which a “gematria calendar” is a traditional object.
Wikipedia contributors — Scottish Rite: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The Masonic rite whose highest degree is the thirty-third — the origin of most modern associations between 33 and Freemasonry.
Wikipedia contributors — Triskaidekaphobia: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The Western fear of thirteen and the (mostly modern) explanations offered for it.
Wikipedia contributors — Angel number: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The twenty-first-century belief that repeated digits (111, 333, 777 …) are messages — a numerological idea with no connection to letter-values.
Wikipedia contributors — 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; Crowley’s 1909 tables of correspondences, the book that fixed “777” in the vocabulary of Western occultism. The title refers to the lightning flash descending the Tree of Life — a zig-zag suggesting three sevens, and the sum Crowley reckoned for the paths it crosses.
Wikipedia contributors — Anglo-Saxon runes: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The futhorc rune row from which the Gematria Primus of Cicada 3301 takes its twenty-nine characters and their names.
Wikipedia contributors — Liber Primus: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The rune-written book released during the 2014 Cicada 3301 puzzle, most of which remains undeciphered; the Gematria Primus is the key to its plain-text pages.
Wikipedia contributors — Pythagoreanism: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; Ancient Pythagorean number mysticism — which concerned numbers themselves, not letter-values, and is the namesake rather than the source of “Pythagorean” numerology.
Wikipedia contributors — Against Apion: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; Josephus’ count of twenty-two books of Hebrew scripture (1.38–41), the oldest witness to a canon numbered like the alphabet.
Wikipedia contributors — Freemasonry: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; Background on the fraternal organisation to which “masonic gematria” claims refer; the article records no letter-number cipher among its practices.
Wikipedia contributors — Hanukkah: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The eight-night festival; with the shamash lit each night, the candles used over the festival total 2 + 3 + … + 9 = 44.
Wikipedia contributors — Pigpen cipher: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The geometric substitution cipher used by eighteenth-century Freemasons for secrecy — the only “Masonic cipher” with a documented history, and a cipher in the cryptographic sense, not a letter-value table.
Wikipedia contributors — Illuminati: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; The historical Bavarian Illuminati (1776–1785) and the conspiracy theories that later borrowed the name.

Modern calculators documented

Sites whose cipher labels shaped popular usage. Listed so you can see exactly which convention each name refers to — not as endorsements.

Gematrix.org — Gematria calculator: Online, 2000s–present; Documented here because its labels set popular expectations: “Jewish Gematria” means Agrippa’s Latin values applied to English, “English Gematria” means ordinal × 6, and “Simple Gematria” means English Ordinal.
Gematrinator.com — Gematrinator calculator: Online, 2010s–present; Source of several modern cipher names used across the web — Sumerian, Septenary, Francis Bacon (case-sensitive 1–26 / 27–52), Reverse Full Reduction and others.
Richard Amiel McGough — The Bible Wheel: biblewheel.com, 2001–present; The site behind the “Bible Wheel” arrangement of the 66 books on the 22 Hebrew letters, and its gematria reference tables. Note that the author later published a retraction of his own thesis on the same site.

Something missing?

If you know a better edition, an earlier attestation, or a source that contradicts something here, please send it. Sources are added when a page starts relying on them, and each addition is noted in the methodology changelog.

What this site is built on

How sources are chosen

Primary texts

Reference works

Modern calculators documented

Something missing?

Where the sources are used