Gematria works on the premise that the letters of the alphabet can also be used as numbers, and therefore words and phrases acquire distinctive numerical values. A well known example is that of God, whose name spelt in Hebrew, is IHVH (יהוה). The values of these four letters are 10 - 5 - 6 - 5, thus the 'number of His name' is 26. It follows from this, by means of numerical equivalence, that God is identifiable with AHBH and AChD - Love and Unity - because the letter values of these two words sum as 1 + 5 + 2 + 5 and 1 + 8 + 4 = 26.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines gematria as,
"A cabbalistic method of interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures by interchanging words whose letters have the same numerical value when added." This is actually a rather restrictive definition because gematria was every bit as important to other peoples in antiquity, and examples of its use are more common in the culture of classical Greece than in Judaism.
...read more>>>...
