Kabbalistic Numerology and Gematria

What is Kabbalistic numerology?

Kabbalistic numerology is the reading of Hebrew words through the numerical value of their letters, a method called gematria. Each of the 22 Hebrew letters is also a number, from 1 for aleph to 400 for tav; a word is worth the sum of its letters, and two words of equal value are read as related. The method is older than the Kabbalah itself: the rabbis of the Talmud already list it among the thirty-two rules for interpreting Scripture, and the medieval Kabbalists made it a way of contemplating creation, not a way of predicting a life. That distinction matters. The personality readings sold today as Kabbalistic numerology, where a Latin name is converted into Hebrew values, are a Western invention of the last two centuries. This page gives you the complete letter table with its four ways of counting, the famous equivalences you can verify yourself, the other rabbinic methods, the structure of the Tree of Life as the Sefer Yetzirah actually describes it, and the honest story of how the Kabbalah reached Western occultism.

• Every Hebrew letter is a number: aleph 1 to tet 9, yod 10 to tsadi 90, qof 100 to tav 400.
• Gematria is interpretive: it links words of equal value, such as love (ahava) and one (ehad), both 13.
• The Sefer Yetzirah describes creation through 32 paths: 10 sefirot and 22 letters.
• Reading a person from a name is not part of the Jewish tradition; it comes from 19th-century occultism.

The Hebrew letters and their values: the complete table

The standard count, called mispar hechrechi, gives the 22 letters the values below. Five letters take a different shape at the end of a word; in the standard count they keep their value, but a second system, mispar gadol, continues the sequence and gives the final forms the values 500 to 900. A third system, mispar siduri, simply numbers the letters from 1 to 22 by their place in the alphabet. Knowing which system a source uses is the first thing to check before comparing two values, exactly as with the Eastern and Maghribi tables of Arabic abjad.

The famous equivalences, and how to check them

The strength of gematria is that anyone can verify it. The table below gives the best known pairs of the tradition, with their value computed letter by letter from the standard table and the source where the pairing is discussed. Verify one yourself: Elohim, the name of God as creator, is aleph 1 + lamed 30 + he 5 + yod 10 + final mem 40 = 86; ha-teva, nature, is he 5 + tet 9 + bet 2 + ayin 70 = 86. The equation of God with nature, centuries before Spinoza, rests on that sum.

• A gematria is not a proof: with 22 values and thousands of words, equal sums are frequent, and the tradition knew it.
• The rabbis accepted gematria as a support for a teaching already known, never as a way to derive a new law.
• The 248 limbs of Abraham match the 248 positive commandments counted by the Talmud, which is why the pair is remembered.

Beyond gematria: notarikon, temurah and atbash

Gematria is one of three letter techniques the Kabbalists used; the other two work on the letters themselves rather than their values. Notarikon reads a word as an acronym: amen (אמן) is unfolded, in the Talmud, as El Melekh Ne’eman, God, faithful King. Temurah permutes letters according to a fixed key. The best known key is atbash, in which the first letter is exchanged with the last, the second with the second to last, and so on: aleph with tav, bet with shin, gimel with resh. Atbash is attested inside the Bible itself, which makes it the oldest documented letter cipher of the tradition.

The Tree of Life and the 32 paths of wisdom

The Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, is a short treatise written somewhere between the 2nd and the 6th century; it is the oldest text of Jewish letter mysticism. Its opening sentence says that God engraved the world through 32 wondrous paths of wisdom: the 10 sefirot, which the book presents first as the ten primordial numbers, and the 22 letters. It then divides the letters into three groups: three mothers, aleph, mem and shin, which stand for air, water and fire; seven doubles, bet, gimel, dalet, kaf, pe, resh and tav, which have two pronunciations and stand for the seven planets and the seven days; and twelve simples, which stand for the twelve months and the signs of the zodiac. Many websites state that the Tetragrammaton contains the three mother letters; it does not. Yod, he and vav are simples and doubles, not mothers. The ten sefirot received their names and their arrangement as a tree only later, in the medieval Kabbalah of Provence and Spain.

Who shaped the tradition

The Zohar, the central book of the Kabbalah, circulated in Castile at the end of the 13th century under the name of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, a sage of the 2nd century; scholarship since Gershom Scholem attributes most of it to Moses de León, who died in 1305. In the same decades Abraham Abulafia, a contemplative from Zaragoza, built a meditative practice on the permutation of letters and on gematria, and wrote the pairing of Elohim and ha-teva. In the 16th century the town of Safed in Galilee gathered Moses Cordovero, whose Pardes Rimmonim organised the whole doctrine, and Isaac Luria, whose students recorded a cosmology of divine contraction, breaking and repair that gave gematria a new field of application. Each of these authors treated numbers as a key to Scripture and to the structure of the divine, and none of them cast a horoscope from a name.

From the Kabbalah to Western occultism

The Kabbalah left the Jewish world in the Renaissance. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola included Kabbalistic theses among the nine hundred he published in 1486; Johannes Reuchlin wrote the first Latin treatise on the subject, De arte cabalistica, in 1517; Cornelius Agrippa summarised the letter values and the sefirot for a wide readership in De occulta philosophia (1533). Three centuries later Éliphas Lévi, in Paris, matched the 22 letters to the 22 trumps of the Tarot, starting the Magician at aleph; the Golden Dawn in London (1888) shifted the series and placed the Fool at aleph, which is why two incompatible Tarot attributions coexist today. The same circles converted Latin alphabets into Hebrew values to read names and dates, producing the personal Kabbalistic numerology found on the internet. It is a coherent modern system, but it is not what the Kabbalists practised, and no rabbinic source supports it.

• Pico della Mirandola (1486), Reuchlin (1517) and Agrippa (1533) carried the Kabbalah into Latin Europe.
• Two Tarot attributions exist: Lévi puts the Magician at aleph, the Golden Dawn puts the Fool there.
• Converting a Latin name into Hebrew values is a 19th-century practice, not a Kabbalistic one.