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The kabbalists employ gematria to decipher the Torah and everyday events. The absolute or normative value of a word is calculated by treating each letter as a word and then adding up all of the numerical equivalencies of these letter words. Since some letters can be spelled differently as words, different numerical equivalencies can be achieved for a single word. Thus, the Tetragrammaton, yod, hei, vav, and hei, have the values of 72, 63, 45, or 52, each of which has vital significance in Kabbalah. A cryptograph which gives, instead of the intended word, its numerical value, or a cipher produced by the permutation of letters. The term first occurs in literature in the twenty-ninth of the thirty-two hermeneutic rules of R. In some texts the rule for permutative gemaṭria is counted as a separate regulation—the thirtieth (comp. Königsberger’s edition of the rules in his “Monatsblätter für Vergangenheit und Gegenwart des Judenthums”). Waldberg (“Darke ha-Shinnuyim”), who gives a list of 147 cases of gemaṭria occurring in traditional literature, includes in this number cases of symbolical numbers, which properly belong to the twenty-seventh rule (“ke-neged”). This 1 – 900 series, plus the subdivision of the 27-letter series into three enneads of nine sequential letters, is the same as the Greek alphabet. Even the position of a Hebrew letter in the alphabet can be significant. The gematric nomination for 18 is chet plus yud, which spells chai, or ‘life’. Going one step further, some kabbalists find meaning in the name of the letters themselves. It echoes the similar word, tzadik, righteous person; and the name of the tzadik Isaac appears 104 times in the Tanach. It is not a numbers game; it designates properties, forces and degrees that the soul goes through. Variant spellings of some letters can be used to produce sets of different numbers, which can be added up or analyzed separately. If you cherished this short article and you would like to acquire more facts with regards to web site kindly visit the page. The absolute or normative value of a word is calculated by treating each letter as a word and then adding up all of the numerical equivalencies of these letter-words. Thus, the Tetragrammaton, yod, hei, vav, and hei, has the values of 72, 63, 45, or 52, each of which has vital significance in Kabbalah. Along with the absolute value of the letters, the order of the letter in the progressive unfolding of the twenty-two letters also has great significance in Kabbalah. This is termed the ordinal value system where each letter is assigned a number from one to twenty-two (and in some cases to twenty-seven, when the final letters are considered on their own).
