Gematria and the Tanakh

730 Pages·2011·3.12 MB·English

by  Brian Pivik

Gematria and the Tanakh

Brian Pivik
ii

Cover Art by Joey Mazzotta .::detunedDESIGNS::. © 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher.

© 2011 Brian Pivik. All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-1-257-09404-2
Table of Contents Gematria and the Tanakh iii

“Numbers constitute the only universal language.”
- Nathanael West

“For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of
mathematics.”
- Roger Bacon

Table of Contents Gematria and the Tanakh

Table of Contents

Table of Contents ................................................................................................................................ i 
Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................... 1 
Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 2 
What is this Book? ................................................................................................................................................................... 2 
So What is Gematria? ............................................................................................................................................................. 3 
Chapter One: Types of Gematria ....................................................................................................... 5 
Mispar Ragil (Standard Gematria) ..................................................................................................................................... 5 
Mispar soduwriy (Ordinal Value) ....................................................................................................................................... 7 
Mispar katan (Small Number) ............................................................................................................................................. 8 
Mispar hakadmi (Preceding Number) ............................................................................................................................. 8 
Mispar musaphi or kolel value (Standard + Letters) .................................................................................................... 8 
Mispar hameruva haklali (Squaring of the Total) ......................................................................................................... 8 
Mispar hameruba haperati (Squaring of the Letters) ................................................................................................... 9 
Mispar shemi or miluy (Filling) .......................................................................................................................................... 9 
Temurah ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 9 
Atbash ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 9 
Aiq Bekar ..................................................................................................................................................................................10 
Achas B'tay-ah ........................................................................................................................................................................10 
Notariqon .................................................................................................................................................................................10 
Notes About the Text ...........................................................................................................................................................11 
Hebrew Language Conventions: ......................................................................................................................................12 
How to Read this Book: ......................................................................................................................................................13 
Chapter 2: Gematria and the Tanakh ............................................................................................... 15 
100 ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 127 
200 ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 191 
300 ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 247 
400 ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 297 
500 ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 335 
600 ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 365 
700 ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 406 
800 ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 451 
900 ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 480 
1000 ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 503 
2000–2001 ............................................................................................................................................................................... 571 
601,730 .................................................................................................................................................................................... 585
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Biblical and Midrashic Bibliography .............................................................................................. 587 
Hebrew Language Bibliography .................................................................................................... 588 
Traditional Jewish Gematria Bibliography ..................................................................................... 588 
Judaic Kabbalah Bibliography ........................................................................................................ 589 
Western Hermetic Gematria Bibliography ..................................................................................... 589 
Guide to the Comprehensive Index ................................................................................................ 591 
COMPREHENSIVE INDEX ........................................................................................................ 593
Acknowledgments Gematria and the Tanakh

Acknowledgments
I should like to thank the following people for their help, advice, information, support, and
encouragement:
Sean Carey, Doug Dirks, Tony Hornsby, Joy Vernon, Benjamin Mikolaj, Pat Zalewski, Olen Rush,
Tim Hogan, Loran Frazier, all the members of T.A.R., and all those whom I’ve forgotten to mention with
the years passing. I would especially like to acknowledge Dr. Paul Flesher, whose guidance in the Religious
Studies program at UW was essential to my later interests in religion & spirituality.
In particular, I’d like to thank and ask for forgiveness to my family for all the time taken to write
this tome. To my mother, Carol, thanks for giving me the love of reading & curiosity about the world
that’s kept with me. To my father, Walter, thanks for the hard work ethic & desire to see things through to
the end. To my brother, Chris, for making me laugh in hard times and always sticking with me through
thick and thin. And finally and most especially, many thanks to my lovely wife Virginia. Your love and
your deep respect for the Most High is inspiring. hkwrb
2

Introduction
This book has been one of the most important parts of my life for the last thirteen years. Ever
since I first read Kabbalah by Gershom Scholem, and my subsequent inquiries into this mysterious
tradition, I felt that an incorporative, comprehensive listing of the Hebrew and Aramaic gematria1 from the
Tanakh was missing from the corpus of literature devoted to biblical exegesis. Disappointed every time I
searched for a word that numerically matched a given term in a lexicon, I was frustrated by the lack of
results as well as the time wasted trying to find words. Even worse, there were few books out there to
answer my questions. What word meant what in the Tanakh? Is this word in the present or past tense; is
it singular or plural?2 Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible helped answer some of my questions,
although the words listed were in alphabetical and not numerical terms and only contain the roots of most
words. I decided that with the help of this book along with several other indispensable texts such as
Godwin's Cabalistic Encyclopedia, The Spice of Torah-Gematria, and various lexicons and commentaries, I could
create an exhaustive numerical concordance the Tanakh, as well as other traditions (including those used
by the Golden Dawn and its subsequent organizations and personalities, as well as some important
Talmudic references), thus completing my goal of one book to supplement others. In effect, I could help
create the most comprehensive listing of Hebrew and Aramaic terms in order of gematria equivalency to
date. Above all, I have endeavored to keep this book easy to use and geared toward anyone with any
interest in gematria whatsoever. Over the course of this creating this text, I have taught myself Biblical
Hebrew/Aramaic, graduated from the University of Wyoming with my Master's in Literary Criticism, and
above all, learned valuable lessons about the nature of humanity. All of these and the people met along
this path have contributed to the writing of this text. I could not begin to thank them all by name, and
their mention in this context may embarrass them, but they know who they are, and I thank them all
deeply.
What is this Book?
I have tried to incorporate an extensive reading of the adverbs, nouns, verbs, and adjectives that
make up the entire Biblical Hebraic language. Also, a comprehensive listing of all persons and places in
the Hebrew Bible is given. This book is not a word-by-word literal gematria of the Hebrew Bible (see Spice
of Torah: Gematria for an example of this type of analysis). As this book cannot possibly give all
permutations of every word without going beyond the scope of the limits of page length, etc., there is still

1 Gematria (gemahtria – emphasis on the middle syllable) is the singular, gematriot is the plural.
2 Given the fact that there are only two tenses in Biblical Hebrew, I have decided to call them either past or present and forgo any
discussion of the meanings of perfect and imperfect tenses, which would require more space than necessary. Instead, I refer the reader
to the bibliography.
Introduction Gematria and the Tanakh 3

a great deal of work to be done. Overall I find that one's investigation into the various gematriot of a word
lead one to discover that the entirety of permutations is important to the overall interpretation, and that
while there seems to be an amalgam of associations, all of these can be found to give meaning to the text
or word in question.
While I have borrowed extensively from the texts noted above, most notably Godwin's and
Locks's works, all the information contained within those texts are easily referenced in other places, thus
most of their work (and my own for that matter) is public domain. One more note about the difference
between this work and Locks: while Locks's excellent gematria book covers the entirety of Torah by taking
each word as itself, I have relied upon the concordances and lexicons easily available to the interested
reader. Thus, the words you will find in this text are the roots and basic terms that are used in the Tanakh,
but not necessarily the words themselves. For instance, the word mowrag (grwm - 249), meaning "threshing
instrument" or "thresher," is used in 2 Samuel 24:22, "And Arunah said to David, 'Let my lord the king
take it and offer up whatever he sees fit. Here are oxen for a burnt offering, and the threshing boards
and the gear of the oxen for wood.'" However, the term used here is actually Mygyrwmhw, vehamuriygiym
(320 or 880), which literally means "and the threshing instruments," but the root of the word is mowrag.
With a little ingenuity and basic knowledge of Hebrew/Aramaic, one may find new words from either the
Bible or Modern Hebrew to match almost any number in this text.
So What is Gematria?
Gematria is a time-honored tradition in Judaism that dates back to the Talmudic interpretation of
the Tanakh through the Baraita of 32 Rules.3 It is not, however, a strictly Jewish practice. Rather, the
Babylonians and the Gnostics of the early Christian era used the concept of gematria, and was widespread
in the Magi literature and interpreters of dreams in Hellenistic Greece.4 One example of non-Biblical use
of gematria is Sargon II, the Assyrian King, who built a wall near Khorsabad 16,283 cubits long to match
the numerical value of his name. Gershom Scholem, the seminal Kabbalistic scholar of the 20th century
feels that the rise of Jewish gematria was a new introduction resulting from the use of Greek letters during
the time of the Second Temple (Kabbalah, 337).
Whatever its origins, gematria is currently used by various groups and individuals to "prove" or
"disprove" various points (usually theological). While non-Biblical in practice (as far as we can discern),
the early development of Kabbalah led to the increasingly abstruse interpretation of Biblical passages. The
growth of esotericism in Judaism led to a surprisingly large variety of interpretive methods, one of which

3 Scholem, Gershom. Kabbalah. pp. 337. The Baraita of 32 Rules examines Genesis 14:14 among other passages, wherein Abram
gathers 318 men, which is the numerical equivalent of his servant's name, Eliezer (rz(yl)), meaning that the 318 men were really
only one. Other Talmudic references to gematria: Shabbat 70a, 145b, 149b; Eruvin 65a; Yuma 54a; Succah 28a, 45b; Megillah 15b;
Moed Katan 17a, 19b, 28a; Nedarim 32a (2x), 32b (2x); Makkot 23b-24a
4 Gematria was referred to as "τό ίσψηФου"
4
was gematria. In Judaic hermeneutics (the study and interpretation of sacred texts), there are four methods
of interpretation: Peshat, meaning "plain sense" or "literal" reading. Peshat draws upon context, grammar,
philology, history, etc. to explain the passage(s) given. Derash is the method that translates "to seek" and is
almost exclusively the method employed by the writers of the Midrash. It employs a great deal of homily
and parable to expand upon a given text. Remez literally means "hint" and this system seeks the allegorical
meaning of a text, philosophizing upon the words and their meanings. Finally sod, meaning "secret," is the
method that suggests words cannot express meaning or truth. Truth is beyond ordinary human
conception and cognizance. Therefore, the sod interpreter reads the Tanakh as a sort of codebook, and
various wordplays (such as gematria, notariqon and all the methods given below) help interpret a text.
In the medieval era, Hermetic scientists, magicians and mystics appropriated the language and
methodology of the world of Kabbalah. The influence of the Kabbalah on the development of western
mystery traditions is well documented and highly important to understand when dealing with the mindset
of many references within this text. I refer the interested reader to the bibliography under the section
"Western Hermetic Gematria Bibliography," which lists many works on the subject. On the other hand,
there are also many Judaic references in the bibliography that give a more strict religious interpretation of
the terms and numerical equivalencies in this book. In many cases, the relationships between Hermetic
and Rabbinical interpretations do not overlap, as Christian mystery traditions influence the former far
more than Judaism. These varied meanings often lead the reader to rethink oft-cited numerical proofs,
and as such are valuable for comparison. However, I make no claims that either is more correct than the
other is. Hebrew, as a sacred language, gives meanings through the relationships of words and phrases, no
matter if they are modern Hebrew or medieval "appropriations" of the language. It has been said that
Hermetic philosophers use the square peg of Christianity to fit into the round hole of Jewish Kabbalah,
but as far as gematria is concerned, I leave conclusions up to the reader.
How are we to come up with those conclusions, then? By comparing two or more words or phrases in
Hebrew or Aramaic with the same numerical total, we can draw conclusions about their relationship
through further analysis. As an obvious example, the number 130 contains two phrases which relate on an
esoteric level: sullam and Sinai. Obviously, the latter refers to Mount Sinai, where Moses received the Ten
Commandments. The former word (sullam) is the word for "ladder," used in Jacob's famous vision. From
the two, we infer that the way to heaven and inspiration is the "ladder" of the Law given by Moses. In
many cases, the relationship is not so easily inferred, but must be carefully interpreted in relation to the
words and a variety of methods. The following section explains these, and outlines the most important
forms of gematria interpretation.