What is gematria?

In the 12th century a Judeo-Spanish sage named Abraham Abulafia established a combinatorial system with the 22 letters of the alefate or hebrew alphabet. For Abulafia, each letter was a symbolic entity in itself, and the combination between them was intended to achieve wisdom.

This tendency within medieval judaism brought with it a particular conception of the universe and creation, in which one of the central points was to unravel the hidden meaning of the Christian Torah or Pentateuch.

Hebrew letters have a numerical equivalent, this is known as gematria, a word that comes from the same root as the term geometry. Through geometry the Jewish sages transformed words and paragraphs of the sacred texts into the search for hidden relationships, clues to ascend in knowledge.

Gematria uses the numerical value of the hebrew letters to obtain a value that results from the sum of each letter of a word or name, this value is compared with other values obtained from different words or names since the result can correspond to many words whose sum is equal. Gematry says in those cases that, in a sense, those words are the same and have equivalent meanings.

There are tables available today on internet that contain the main meanings of each numerical value, for example the number one symbolizes beginning and unity, number two the home and witness, number three the Trinity and time of rebirth and so on. Since each value can correspond to more than one word or phrase, the meanings and relationships are multiple.