What is gematria?

Definition

The word itself is Hebrew (גימטריה), borrowed from Greek — most scholars derive it from geometria, “measurement”, though grammateia, “letter-work”, has also been proposed^{[1] Source: Gematria}. It enters the record as a technical term in the twenty-ninth of the thirty-two hermeneutic rules attributed to R. Eliezer ben Jose the Galilean around 200 CE^{[2] Source: Gematria}, but the practice it names is older than the name, and wider than Hebrew.

Three things are bundled in the definition and are worth pulling apart. First, an alphabet in which letters have numbers — a historical fact about Hebrew and Greek, and a convention imposed on English. Second, the arithmetic: look up, add, compare. Third, the interpretive step: deciding that two words with the same total illuminate each other. The first two are exact and checkable. The third is where every tradition, and every disagreement, lives.

How it works

Every system of gematria rests on a table — a cipher — that gives each letter a value. In Hebrew the table is simply the numeral system the language already used: the first nine letters are 1–9, the next nine 10–90, the last four 100–400. Greek works the same way with 27 signs reaching 900. English has no historical numeral alphabet, so English gematria uses one of several invented tables, of which A = 1 … Z = 26 is the most common.

Given a table, the procedure is the same everywhere:

1. Write the word and look up each letter’s value.
2. Add the values. The sum is the word’s gematria.
3. Optionally, reduce the sum by adding its digits (74 → 11 → 2), or look up other words with the same sum.

Because step 1 depends entirely on the table, a gematria value is only meaningful together with the name of its cipher. “Jesus is 74” is true in English Ordinal, “Jesus is 888” is true in Greek isopsephy, and “Jesus is 985” is true in the Agrippa-based table most sites call “Jewish gematria”. None of these contradicts the others; they answer different questions.

A worked example

The most-quoted gematria in Jewish tradition comes from Genesis 14:14, where Abraham takes 318 men to rescue his nephew. The Talmud (Nedarim 32a) observes that Abraham’s servant is named Eliezer, and that אליעזר adds up to exactly 318 — so, it suggests, Abraham went with Eliezer alone^{[4] Source: Nedarim 32a}:

Notice what the example does and does not do. It does not claim that 318 means anything on its own. It notices that a number in the text equals a name in the text and offers the equality as a reading — an asmakta, a peg to hang an interpretation on. That is the characteristic move of classical gematria, and the Mishnah’s own verdict on the method is modest: gematria and astronomy are “the side-dishes of wisdom”, not the meal^{[3] Source: Pirkei Avot 3:18}.

Other Hebrew values you will meet constantly, computed live: אליעזר = 318 · אהבה = 13 · אחד = 13 · יהוה = 26. The pairing of אהבה “love” and אחד “one” at 13, which together make 26, the value of the divine name, is a favourite of homiletic teaching. In English Ordinal the equivalent showpiece is 74: gematria = 74 · Jesus = 74 · cross = 74.

Three alphabets

Hebrew

The tradition the word belongs to. Letters have been numerals since the second century BCE and the practice runs from the Talmud through medieval commentary to Kabbalah, where it became systematic. Four methods are in common use — standard, large (finals 500–900), ordinal and reduced — and the Jewish Encyclopedia lists more than twenty^{[2] Source: Gematria}. Hebrew calculator →

Greek

Called isopsephy, “equal pebbles”. Older than the Hebrew word and abundantly attested: Pompeian graffiti, a lampoon on Nero preserved by Suetonius, and the early Christian numbers 888 (Jesus) and 666^{[5] Source: Isopsephy[8] Source: Against Heresies, Book V, chapter 30}. One standard table of 27 numerals. Greek calculator →

English (Latin alphabet)

No ancient basis — Romans counted with I, V, X, not with the alphabet. The first Latin letter-table is Agrippa’s of 1533^{[7] Source: 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”}; the ordinal table and its variants are modern. Nine tables are in use, several of them derived from one another and several sharing names confusingly. English calculator →

Who uses it, and for what

Students of Jewish texts meet gematria in the Talmud, in Rashi and the medieval commentators, and above all in kabbalistic literature, where correspondences between words of equal value are a major interpretive tool^{[1] Source: Gematria}. Here the practice is textual: it works on the Hebrew of scripture and liturgy.

Readers of the New Testament and early Christian writers encounter isopsephy in Revelation’s 666 and in the patristic discussion of it, and in the symbolic 888 of the name Jesus. Some later Christian writers, notably in the Renaissance “Christian Kabbalah”, extended gematria to Latin.

Numerologists use letter-values — usually the “Pythagorean” 1–9 chart or Cheiro’s Chaldean chart — to reduce a name to a single digit and read character or fortune from it. The arithmetic is gematria; the interpretive framework is quite different, and the two are compared on the numerology page.

An online decoding community, active since the 2000s, applies a stack of English ciphers to names, headlines and dates in search of shared values. This is where most English-language searches for “gematria” now come from, and where the naming confusions between calculators arose^{[6] Source: Gematria}.

This site serves all four, on one condition: every number is labelled with the cipher that produced it, and every cipher is traced to its source.

What gematria is not

• It is not a code with a key. A cipher table is not a secret; it is a public convention, and different conventions give different numbers for the same word. There is no “true” value of a word independent of the table.
• It is not evidence in the ordinary sense. With 26 letters and typical word lengths, most English Ordinal totals are shared by hundreds of common words, and derived ciphers multiply the apparent matches without adding independent ones. A shared value is where a comparison starts, not where an argument ends. The accuracy page shows how often matches arise by chance.
• It is not prediction. No classical tradition uses gematria to forecast events, and the historical record of modern attempts is not encouraging. Its home is the reading of texts.
• It is not numerology, though numerology borrows its arithmetic. Gematria compares words; numerology reduces a name to a digit and interprets the digit.

Where to start

Type a word into the calculator and select a row to watch the letters add up; that ten-second experiment teaches more than a page of prose. Then read how to calculate gematria by hand, so the numbers stop being a black box, and the history, so the practice has a context. If your interest is scripture, go on to gematria in the Bible; if it is the modern English ciphers, to the cipher comparison. Whatever the destination, keep the one rule that makes gematria honest: always say which cipher.