Many “gematria calculators” online quietly use a Latin table printed by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in Cologne in 1533¹². It is an elegant Renaissance construction — but it is not the system used in the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud, and mixing the two produces numbers that belong to neither tradition. Here are both tables and the five differences you can check yourself.
22 letters, values 1–400. The five final letter forms (ך ם ן ף ץ) take the value of the base letter in the standard count; a separate variant, mispar gadol, assigns them 500–900³.
אalef
1
טtet
9
פpe
80
בbet
2
יyod
10
צtsadi
90
גgimel
3
כkaf
20
קqof
100
דdalet
4
לlamed
30
רresh
200
הhe
5
מmem
40
שshin
300
וvav
6
נnun
50
תtav
400
זzayin
7
סsamekh
60
חchet
8
עayin
70
Latin: the Agrippa key (1533)
The 23-letter Latin alphabet gives only 23 values, so Agrippa padded it to 27 — three tiers of nine — with J = 600, V = 700, HI = 800 and HU/W = 900. Published in De occulta philosophia, Book II, chapter xx¹.
A
1
K
10
T
100
B
2
L
20
U
200
C
3
M
30
X
300
D
4
N
40
Y
400
E
5
O
50
Z
500
F
6
P
60
J
600
G
7
Q
70
V
700
H
8
R
80
HI
800
I
9
S
90
HU/W
900
Five verifiable differences
1 · Age
Hebrew letters served as numerals from the late Hellenistic period — the earliest datable evidence is from 78 BCE — and gematria as interpretation appears in the Mishnah and Talmud³⁴⁵. Agrippa’s Latin table was printed in 1533 CE¹². The gap is over one and a half millennia.
2 · The alphabet
Hebrew has exactly 22 letters and the standard count simply stops at tav = 400; nothing is invented to fill a grid. Latin had 23 letters, so to reach three tiers of nine Agrippa added four artificial entries — J, V, HI, HU — that were not independent letters of the classical alphabet¹.
3 · The corpus
Jewish gematria operates on the fixed Hebrew text of the Tanakh: the spelling of every word is set by the manuscript tradition, so its number is set too. A Latin table operates on transliterations — Iosephus, Joseph and Yosef give three different numbers for one name. On this site names are first written in Hebrew letters precisely to remove that arbitrariness.
4 · The purpose
In the Talmud gematria is an exegetical tool applied to a canonical text — e.g. reading the 318 men of Genesis 14:14 as the numerical value of the name Eliezer⁵, or Avot’s remark that gematriot are “side dishes of wisdom”⁴. Agrippa’s chapter belongs to a Renaissance system of celestial magic — tables, seals and planetary correspondences¹².
5 · Continuity
The Hebrew values have been in continuous, unchanged use for two thousand years — the same table in the Talmud, in medieval commentary and today. The Agrippa key survives mainly through 19th–20th century occult revivals and modern web calculators, many of which mix both systems on one page without saying so³.
What this site computes
SAPIR 861 uses only the standard Hebrew count — mispar hechrachi — applied to the open Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible text of the Leningrad Codex (CC BY 4.0)⁶. No Latin values, no mixed tables. The exact procedure, with a measured hit-rate and a downloadable dataset, is on the method page; the counting rules are on the principles page; worked examples for common names are in the names index.
H. C. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia libri tres, Cologne, 1533 — Book II, ch. xx (the letter–number table). Full scan of the 1533 printing: archive.org/details/DeOccultaPhilosophiaLoc1533.