We were watching a rerun of the show Numb3rs last night and the theme happened to be biblical numerology. It’s interesting that Hebrew and Greek languages do not have numbers; rather, they give numeric values to letters. A numeric value given to letters or a string of letters is called the gammatria. For example, the name Jesus in Greek is translated to Iasous. Knowing that each letter in Greek has a corresponding numeric value, we deduce that the numeric value for Iasous (Jesus) is 888:
I | A | S | O | U | S |
10 | 8 | 200 | 70 | 400 | 200 |
Here are some other values and the corresponding alpha meanings:
1 = Unity
2 = Male/Female, Yin/Yang
3 = Divine Perfection, Trinity
4 = Creation
5 = Grace and Redemption
6 = Man
7 = Spiritual Perfection
8 = New Beginnings
9 = Judgement, hmm, I don’t like judgement. It’s not my inclination to think that God judges. Therefore, I go with Gifts of the Spirit
10 = Divine Perfection
12 = Governmental Perfection
40 = Probation or Trial
153 = Divine Intervention – disciples catch 153 fish after the Resurrection; “fish” is translated to “ixthus” in Greek which has a numerical value (or gammatria) of 1224, which is 8 x 153.
I love the teaching on the gammatria. I have taught on it often. Nice to know that there are reources for the contuiation of this fascinating study