What is gematria

A way of reading Hebrew words as numbers: each of the 22 letters has a value (א = 1 … ת = 400) and the letters add up to the word's number. The method is attested at least since the Mishnah.

א 1, ב 2, ג 3, ד 4, ה 5, ו 6, ז 7, ח 8, ט 9, י 10, כ 20, ל 30, מ 40, נ 50, ס 60, ע 70, פ 80, צ 90, ק 100, ר 200, ש 300, ת 400. Final forms ך ם ן ף ץ equal the regular letters in standard counting.

The Five Books per the Leningrad Codex contain 304,805 letters. On sapir861.com the text is divided into pages of 861 letters (±1); the last page has 872.

Only that the sums are equal. We compute how often random words match like that and show the share — for example, "1 pair in 1,000".

No. We show the arithmetic and Torah words with the same number, and draw no conclusions about the person.

All calculations are reproducible; the dataset is published on Zenodo: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22848827. Method after Binyamin Pichkhadze, "Chumash 354" (חומש 354), Bnei Brak, 2002.