Gematria is Hebrew before it is anything else. The English ciphers came later, and one of them carries a name that confuses nearly everyone who meets it. This post separates the two.
The original: Hebrew letter values
The Hebrew alphabet has twenty-two letters, and each carries a number. The values are laid out in three tiers:
| Tier | Letters | Values |
|---|---|---|
| Units | Aleph through Tet | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 |
| Tens | Yod through Tsadi | 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 |
| Hundreds | Qof through Tav | 100, 200, 300, 400 |
So Aleph is 1, Yod is 10, Qof is 100. The system runs out at 400 because the alphabet runs out at twenty-two letters; larger numbers are written by combining letters.
This is why chai — Chet (8) plus Yod (10) — equals 18, and why gifts in multiples of eighteen are a living custom rather than a piece of trivia. The number is read as the word life.
The method has a name in the tradition: mispar hechrachi, absolute value. It is the plainest of a family of counting methods, several of which square the values, add the letter names, or count position rather than value.
What gematria was for
In rabbinic literature gematria is an interpretive device, not a predictive one. Two verses sharing a number are read as commenting on each other; a number in a text is read as pointing at a word. It sits alongside other reading techniques rather than replacing them, and the classical sources use it sparingly.
The Greeks had the same idea independently, under the name isopsephy — the Greek alphabet also doubles as a numeral system, and Greek writers played the same games with it. Any alphabet that is also a number system invites the practice.
The English "Jewish" cipher
Here is where the confusion begins. Open an English gematria calculator, this one included, and you will find a cipher called Jewish. It does not use Hebrew letters. It applies the Hebrew structure to the Latin alphabet:
| Letters | Values |
|---|---|
| A–I | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 |
| K–T | 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 |
| U, X, Y, Z, J, V, &, W | 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900 |
The units-tens-hundreds shape is borrowed from Hebrew. The letters are English. The ordering is idiosyncratic — J, V and W are shunted to the end because they were latecomers to the Latin alphabet, and an ampersand sits among them.
The scheme descends from Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533), which tabulated exactly this kind of Latin-alphabet cipher on the Hebrew model. It is a Renaissance European construction, not a Jewish one, and calling it Jewish is a naming accident that stuck.
Why the distinction matters
Values differ enormously between the two systems. In the English Jewish cipher, Jesus is 985 and Cross is 313. Those numbers say nothing whatever about Hebrew, because no Hebrew letter was involved in producing them.
So:
- If you are working with a Hebrew or Aramaic text, use Hebrew letter values. Nothing on an English keyboard substitutes for them.
- If you are working with English words, the Jewish cipher is a legitimate English cipher with a long pedigree — just not a Hebrew one. Quote it as what it is.
The calculator carries three ciphers in this family: Jewish, Jewish Ordinal — the same letters simply numbered 1 to 27 — and Jewish Reduction, which folds them to single digits. Their letter tables are printed in full on each page, so you can see exactly what you are quoting.
The practical upshot
The English Jewish cipher produces very large values, which makes it the most selective cipher in the set. Two long phrases matching there is far more striking than two matching in Full Reduction, where collisions are routine.
That selectivity is the reason to use it. The name is the reason to explain it every time you do.