A friend of mine gave me a copy of a PowerPoint presentation that he had prepared for a course that he was on. The color, glitter, imagery, and mathematical subtlety made the presentation so close to compelling that I came close, for fear of committing iniquity, to never writing this critique of it.
So this friend showed me a PowerPoint presentation that he had made for a course that he needed to take. Then he gave me a copy of it to keep. Being a Christian, he wanted to show the teacher and class something from the Bible. So, for whatever reason, he chose to focus on an abstruse kind of ‘biblical’ numerology, which, as it turns out, is more heretical than biblical, though I confess to have been positively impressed when I first saw his presentation of it.
The practice of assigning numerical values to letters may be traced as far back as the time of the Assyrian empire many hundreds of years before the time of Christ. The letter L in the Roman numeral system is equal to the number fifty. This is the idea. Assigning numerical values to letters in the Bible is a branch of Jewish mysticism known as Gematria. Alfred Edersheim informs us a little of what Gematria is. Gematria means ‘geometry’ or ‘calculation’ and is about ‘the numerical value of the letters in a word.’ Gematria is one of the many made-up rules of ‘Jewish traditionalism’—that traditionalism so often and so strongly denounced by the Lord in the Gospels. Gematria is a ‘rule’ that gives ‘free vent to every kind of fancifulness.’ This kind of numerology was used by Rabbis for the purpose of airing speculations and glossing over displeasing facts, like, for instance, the ‘objectionable idea of Moses’ marrying an Ethiopian’ (Alfred Edersheim, Sketches of Jewish Social Life in the Days of Christ, pp. 211, 212.) This information and judgment corroborated my appraisal of my friend’s PowerPoint project: The Mystery and Poetry of Numbers.
Some persons, like my friend, have mixed the arcane field of Gematria up with the fact that the Bible exhibits numerical patterns in what it tells us about. Moses was forty years in Egypt, forty years in Midian, forty days on Mount Sinai, and forty years in the wilderness, for example, which Old Testament pattern of hardship is continued by Jesus being tempted for forty days while fasting. There are numerous other numerical patterns. The tribes of Israel number twelve; Jesus chose twelve apostles; the crown on the head of the woman in Revelation 12 has twelve stars; the tree of life has twelve kinds of fruit; and the New Jerusalem has twelve pearly gates, twelve angels at the gates, twelve jeweled foundations, and stretches out to twelve thousand furlongs. This is an obvious pattern. It has nothing to do with letters of words having numerical values. The Bible exhibits number patterns for many reasons: because God is orderly; because patterns are beautiful; and because patterns make things easy to remember, which is important, for example, if we instance the number forty, for we might one day be desperate to seek out solidarity and solace in hardship, which is made easy by a search for this number in the Bible. So there is a bad kind of numerology; this is Gematria, for which use no basis can be found in the Bible. And there is a good kind of it; this is obvious in the repetitions of numbers, especially the numbers seven, twelve, and forty. When I refer to numerology in a bad light in this article, it is Gematria that I have in mind.
So the premise of my friend’s presentation is that each letter of both the Hebrew and Greek alphabets has a numerical value. Keep that in mind, or this article will make no sense. His sources are Ivan Panin and E. W. Bullinger. I don’t know if this friend of mine knew about the nature and roots of Gematria when he put his project together. The word ‘Gematria’ is used in his PowerPoint, at least. In this critique of his PowerPoint presentation, I will assume that the numerical values that are submitted agree with whatever standard they were borrowed from. I will deconstruct his PowerPoint project sparingly, not exhaustively.
