Behold!: The Art and Practice of Gematria

Contents

Contents

PREFACE

1.      What is Gematria?

2.      Learning the Hebrew Alephbet

3.      Writing Scripts

a.      The Proto-Consonantal Script

b. Paleo-Hebrew/Phoenician/Ktav Ivri

c. Modern Hebrew/Ktav Ashuri

d. The Greek Writing script

e. The Arabic Writing Script

f. The Galay writing script

4.      Ciphers

a. The Genesis Order

b. Biblical Gematria

c. The Reversal Cipher

d. Greek Gematria

e. English Gematria

f. Standard Gematria

g. Arabic Quran cipher

h. The 1683 Alphabet

I. Pseudo-ciphers and Numerology ciphers

I.1 The Agrippa Cipher

I.2 English Gematria

I.3 Simple gematria

I.4 Other ciphers

5.      Conventions of Gematria

a.      Methodology

b. Conventions of structure

c. Operators

d. Mnemonics

e. Notariqon and Temurah

f. Flag-words

g. Iterations

h. Alphabetic acrostics

6.      Lost in translations

7.      Studying the Bible

8.      The Genesis 1-2 arrangement

9.      The Letters and Gematria of Genesis 1-2

ב Beth (2) B

א Aleph (1) A

ג Gimel (3) G

ש Shin (3) Sh

ד Daleth (4) D

ת Tav (4) Th

ה Heh (5) H, E

ו Waw (6) U,V,W

ז Zayin (7) Z

ח Cheth (8) Ch

ט Teth (9) T

י Yod (10) I, Y

כ Kaph (20) K

ל Lamed (30) L

מ Mem (40) M

נ Nun (50) N

ס Samekh (60) S

ע Ayin (70) O

פ Peh (80) P

צ Tsade (90) Ts

ק Qoph (100) Q

ר Resh (200) R

10.      The History of the Merkabah

11.      The Merkabah and the Exodus

12.      A Serpent in the Garden

a.      Calculations of Bereshit Three

13.      Gematria and the Hebrew Bible

a. Talmud & Hekhalot

b. Kabbalah

c. Gates

d. Sacred & Secret

e. The Temple

f. The Holy Names

g. The Shemhamphorash

h. The Trees of Life

14.      Gematria and the New Testament

15.      Gematria and the Occult

a. Rosicrucians

b. WMT Traditions

c. Elemental Weapons

d. The Tarot

e. Aleister Crowley

16.      Exegesis with Gematria

a. Biblical Exegesis

b.      Christian Exegesis

c.      Occult Exegesis

17.      Gematria, War and Genocide

The genocide of the Amalekites?

The destruction of the seven nations of Canaan?

The destruction of the Gaza Strip?

The legacy of the descendants of Abraham?

18.      Gematria Research

19.      Numerology

20.      APPENDIX 1

Four Entered Paradise (Hekhalot Zutarti)

21.      APPENDIX 2

22.      GLOSSARY

23.      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PREFACE

To learn for learning’s sake, not because it’s going to get you something, necessarily, but because you have faith that the things that interest you will help you become who you need to be.

Austin Kleon

This book was originally self-published in May 2021, followed by a second edition in November last year with a publisher, and I’m swiftly returning to self-publishing after that cautionary lesson.

I’ve returned to color printing, which is a bit more costly but worth it in terms of usefulness to the student. Alongside some of the many diagrams and portraits, I’ve color coded all the calculations to make them easier for the reader to follow. Nouns are yellow. Operators are green. Flag-words are pink, and Mnemonic words are blue.

In the years that followed the first edition I’ve discovered some truly astounding and highly significant information about the practice of gematria. For readers who have already bought the first or second edition of Behold I’ve published a follow up which details many of these findings¹, but for this third edition of Behold I’ve included the material here. I cover the calculations in Genesis 1-3 and the proper arrangement of the verses of 1-2. I’ve also included some new operators and information about the practice of iterating through biblical names of God, city and personal names.

This third edition of Behold was rewritten and expanded to include in-depth studies that I undertook following the start of the Israeli war in Gaza. After thinking about the ways that the ideology of religious Zionism has worked to block a two-state solution and realizing that the scriptural basis of religious Zionism does not in-fact back their claim to a greater Israel, I’ve included a substantial analysis of the matter in this edition. I also present an in-depth analysis of various claims to divinely mandated ancient genocide, because it’s important to recognize when such claims amount to exercises in subtraction rather than historical records of conquest.

Finally, I’ve expanded the section on Christianity, and I’ve added the Islamic ciphers with some notes on the Quran. Enjoy!

What is Gematria?

God doesn’t speak Hebrew—God speaks numbers.

—Lon Milo Duquette

Biblical Gematria was a formal system of rhetoric mathematics. This means it was mathematics that was written without math notation, and according to a system of rules and conventions. It was used by ancient scribes to supply key pieces of information to their writings so they could be understood in a spiritual context. It was a way of reading and writing texts embedded with mathematical calculations.

The key features of Biblical Gematria are:

• Each letter is also a number.

• Each letter has a place in creation.

• Each letter has a placement in a special priestly ordering of the alphabet.

The priestly order of the alphabet was used by the first Temple cult as a type of table of contents for the verses of Genesis 1–2. Every letter corresponds to the thematic qualities of every verse. For instance, the letter aleph corresponds to Genesis 1:3–5, and concerns the creation of day and night, and the letter gimel corresponds to Genesis 1:6-8 and concerns the creation of the sky, and so on. The letters themselves were believed to have been created in spirit or principle by Elohim.

The practice of Gematria in biblical times included a number of conventions, such as:

Reserved prepositions and verbs to indicate types of arithmetic operators.

Nouns reserved to represent numerical values.

Reserved words as mnemonics—usually relating to the pictographic origins of a letter.

Flag-words in the text, for reader instructions, e.g. הנהBehold!

The use of notariqon² and temurah, and ciphers in reverse.

Standard rhetorical features, such as the use of gematria with alphabet acrostics, or iterations through words.

The conventions that govern the art and the practice of Biblical Gematria were so systematic and complete that a scribe knew that whatever sum he embedded in a text would be read and understood in exactly the way he intended it should be understood.

Gematria appears to have flourished during the late Bronze age and Iron ages. The Torah contains a wealth of gematria calculations in it. The first Book of Kings, and the Book of Ezekiel also contain information about the Temple that is supplied by the gematria of the text. This is called architectonic gematria and is of great interest to Masons.

Though gematria, like the alphabet itself, was first invented by the ancestors of the Jewish people, it was carried into Christianity by Jews that wrote the Christian Cannon, and therefore we find calculations in rhetoric math also scattered across the New Testament. When the correct ciphers are used, it resolves questions about the meaning of the 153 fish and the number of the Beast. General knowledge of this type of math was lost during the early Christian period, but knowledge of it may have been fostered outside of the purview of the Catholic or Protestant churches by members of esoteric societies and groups identifying within western esoteric and occult fraternities.

Western hermeticism rather shamelessly appropriated the spiritual architecture of Jewish mysticism, but there was little awareness that this might have been a culturally insensitive move at the time. Hermeticists employed the spiritual architecture of the ancient Temple religion but provided alternative rituals and meditative work so that gentiles might partake of comparable results.

The study of the Torah with gematria in the context of ancient first temple Jewish mysticism can be very interesting. It encourages self-reflection and can deepen a feeling of connection with God. It can lead to a better appreciation of the purpose of our lives. The great takeaway from Torah study is the importance of adhering to the will of God³ (the will of the divine spark in each of us) in our thoughts and actions, because doing that is the foundation of all ethical conduct⁴. But it also does something more liberating for the individual. It allows you to interpret the Torah without reliance on any intermediary which may have political or religious biases that subtly distort the text in their favor.

The foundation for learning the practice of gematria is to learn the Hebrew alphabet. Even if you intend to only study English gematria this is necessary, so that you will be alive to the cryptic aspects of gematria. For instance, whether you write the word fire in English, or Hebrew (אש) or in Greek (πῦρ) all these words have the mnemonic value of 3, but it is only by studying Biblical Gematria with the Hebrew script that you can come to appreciate why (for instance) אש or fire has the value of 3 and what place it took in the ancient spiritual ecosystem of the universe.

ויאמרו אליו איה שרה אשתך

ויאמר הנה באהל

Genesis 18:9

And they said to him: Where is Sarah your wife?

And he said: Behold! In the tent!

—A Biblical Joke.

Learning the Hebrew Alephbet

Come and see: The first subject of the Torah we give to children is the Alphabet. This is a matter that mankind cannot comprehend, nor can it rise in their minds, not to mention saying it with their mouths. Even supernal angels and the most sublime can not comprehend it, as these matters are the mysteries of the Holy Name.

—Zohar, Acharei 73

ת ש ר ק צ פ ע ס נ מ ל כ י ט ח ז ו ה ד ג ב א

Assuming you don’t already know them, the first step in learning gematria is memorizing the twenty-two letters and five final forms of the Hebrew writing script.

When I was studying western Hermeticism I got along for years just using English transliterations of the Hebrew alphabet, i.e. a = aleph, b = beth, c = cheth, and so on. However, this simply won’t work for studying the rhetoric math of the Bible, chiefly because although transliterated Bibles exist, they are IPA phonetic transliterations, rather than letter-for-letter substitutions. I’ve provided a pdf with a letter-for-letter transliteration of the first two chapters of Genesis on the Shematria Gematria Calculator site as a stop gap, but there’s no substitute for learning the Hebrew alphabet.

https://www.shematria.com/assets/images/Genesis_transliteration.pdf

The good news is that the Tanakh was written before the Hebrew system of vowels (Niqqud) was invented, so you don’t need to learn the vowels and they have no value or part in the practice of Biblical Gematria. The best way to learn the alephbet is to engage your muscle memory and write it out. Readers can download a workbook for this which is hosted on the Shematria site, under the SITEMAP menu on the main page. You can print out your own sheets and trace each letter until writing the letters feels natural and you recognize them easily.

https://www.shematria.com

Testing yourself with flashcards is another method that is useful in solidifying character recognition. Online flashcards with correspondences for Biblical Gematria can be found on the main page of the Sanctum Regnum website.

https://thesanctumregnum.pythonanywhere.com

There are also many free apps available on the internet for phone, tablet, PC and VR which allow you to practice writing and learning the letters. When you can comfortably recall the name and number of each letter, come back to this section.

* * *

Although hand-writing the Hebrew letters is the best way to learn the Hebrew alphabet, once it is memorized, you’ll probably want to be able to practice typing it into a phone, tablet, or computer. This will help you use the gematria calculator, and to take notes of gematria. If you participate in a social media group and want to share your gematria findings, you’ll find it easier if you have a Hebrew keyboard set up on your device. This next section will explain how to set up your devices to use Hebrew and Greek writing scripts alongside your QWERTY keyboard. Don’t forget—Hebrew is written from right to left!

Setting up your keyboards on android

1. Select Settings, then General Management, then Language and Input.

2. Select On-screen keyboard and then tap on your default keyboard.

3. Tap Languages and types and select Manage input languages.

4. To activate a Hebrew keyboard, scroll down until you see עברית, and turn it on.

5. To activate a Greek keyboard, scroll down until you see ελληνικα and turn it on.

6. Open up a browser or note app to bring up the on-screen keyboard.

7. Swipe right along the space bar to bring up your Hebrew and/or Greek keyboards.

Just swipe the space bar again when you need to return to the English alphabet.

Setting up your keyboards on windows

1. Select the Start button, then select Settings > Time & Language > Language.

2. Under Preferred languages, select the language that contains the keyboard you want, and then select Options.

3. Select Add a keyboard and choose the keyboard you want to add. If you don’t see the keyboard you want, you may have to add a new language to get additional options. If this is the case, go on to step 4.

4. Return to the Language settings page and select Add a language.

5. Choose the language you want to use from the list, then select Next.

6. Review any language features you want to set up or install and select Install.

7. An icon will appear on your toolbar that allows you to select the language you wish to use with your keyboard. However, you will have to practice before you learn which letters are mapped to your keyboard. Hebrew keyboard stickers can be a great help with this.

Prefixes and Suffixes

Translators try their best to parse biblical Hebrew into English, but the two languages are structurally different which means that a translation is always an approximation at best.

Sometimes translations contain words that aren’t in the original text but are put there to make the sentence conform to the rules of English grammar. Though it is not necessary to learn the biblical Hebrew language to practice gematria, is highly useful to know the Hebrew prefixes and suffixes. The value of prefixes and suffixes are included as part of the nouns value and they take no other place in gematria than that but knowing them will help you navigate the source text and check the translation.

Open up Biblehub’s interlinear feature here:

https://biblehub.com/interlinear/genesis/1-1.htm

You’ll see that it displays the Hebrew bible by its Strong number, which is above a pronunciation guide, which is above the written Hebrew, and underneath that there is a translation and a designation of the words by grammar into nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions and all the other parts of speech.

The first word is בראשית which means in [the] beginning. The first letter, beth (ב), is a prefix with the meaning "in which is followed by the main word, ראשית, meaning beginning or rather more literally, at the head, since ראש means head. If we wanted to change this word to say simply the beginning we would remove the letter beth as the prefix and replace it with the letter heh like so: הראשית. We can also observe that the suffix to the word is a feminine plural, so the word is more like beginnings than beginning" (singular). There are eleven prefixes which are made by single letters placed at the beginning of a word. Each prefix letter introduces a new meaning.

They are:

aleph (א), bet (ב), heh (ה), Waw (ו), yod (י), kaph (כ), lamed (ל), mem (מ), nun (נ), shin (ש), and tav (ת).

Together with the suffixes, these letters are called the Otiyot HaShimush. To give you another example, the letter ו (Waw) is a common prefix which means "and, so if you read וחשך with the translation and darkness you will know that the and" is part of the word rather than a liberty taken by the translator to parse the sentence into English. Bear in mind that there can be more than one prefix attached to a word, so you ought to know the order that prefixes are combined too. As a general rule, the Waw always comes first and heh always comes last. The heh is often absorbed into the beth or lamed prefix.

Prefixes and their meanings:

ו (Waw). Meaning: and, but. If used with other prefixes the Waw comes first. The Waw can change past tense to future tense and vice versa, for instance changing he loved to he shall love.

ל (lamed). Meaning to, for.

ב (beth). Meaning: in, with, by.

כ (kaph). Meaning: like, as.

מ (mem). Meaning: from. If used with the heh prefix, mem comes before it.

ה (heh). Meaning: the. Heh is always the last prefix before the root word. If used with the beth, kaph or lamed prefixes the heh is omitted but the other prefix takes on its meaning. For instance; וביומי means in the days. Heh can also be used to indicate a question.

א (aleph). Meaning: I will when attached to a verb.

י (yod). Meaning: he will, or they will when attached to a verb.

נ (nun). Meaning: we will when attached to a verb.

ת (tav). Meaning: she will, you will, or they will when attached to a verb.

ש (shin). Meaning: that, which, who and whom.

Suffixes and their meanings:

Every Hebrew noun is either masculine or feminine; however, it is impossible to determine the gender of some nouns due to their lack of a suffix. For instance, the Hebrew word for God, אל, has no suffix.

A common suffix that denotes a masculine plural is ים, for instance מי (water) becomes מים (waters). The feminine plural is ות making a אפשר (possibility) into אפשרות (possibilities). To change a masculine noun to a feminine we need only add the ה (heh) to the end, for instance מלך (king) becomes מלכה (queen) with the simple addition of the heh. Possessive pronouns are also written as suffixes:

י : of me.

נו : of us.

ך : of you (masculine, singular).

ך : of you (feminine, singular).

כם : of you (masculine, plural).

כן : of you (feminine, plural).

ו : of him.

ה : of her.

ם : of them (masculine).

ן : of them (feminine).

Left to right:

— YHWH in Paleo-Hebrew is 220 with the Reversal Cipher.

(220) בראשית

— In the beginning in Hebrew

(220) התורה

— The Torah in Hebrew

— Λογος αΛ (220 with the Reversal Cipher)

— Word of God in Greek

Writing Scripts

The Hebrew alphabet today is written in an Aramaic writing script that was borrowed from the Babylonians after the fall of the first Temple. The proper name for this script is Ktav Ashuri, but is commonly called the square script, and it was used to write Aramaic.

Ktav Ashuri is derived from the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet and its Phoenician stylistic variants, which in their turn were derived from the Proto-Consonantal Script (PCS), which is the earliest known alphabetic writing script in the Levant. Ancient Near East scholars are certain that the Proto-Consonantal letters were derived from a set of specific Egyptian hieroglyphs, and that each letter carried a meaning in their names.

Today, most Hebrew writings are made in the Ktav Ashuri script, and so even though some biblical works would have originally been composed in the Paleo-Hebrew Script (Ktav Ivri), you should begin by learning the Hebrew Alphabet in the square script. Once you have that under your belt, you can set yourself the goal of learning these other older writings scripts too, so that you’ll be able to appreciate the way that the memory of the earliest letter-pictures and their role in creation was kept alive in the mind’s eye of the scribes, no matter what writing script they used.

Other writing scripts used with gematria are the Greek script and the Arabic Abjad.

The Proto-Consonantal Script

—AN ALPHABETIC INSCRIPTION FROM WADI EL SOL, DATED TO THE 18TH C. BCE, WRITTEN IN THE PROTO-CONSONANTAL SCRIPT.

The Proto-Consonantal Script (aka the Early (or Proto) Alphabet) was used by Hebrew-speaking people and Canaanites and was formed in Egypt (between 1859 and 1842 BCE). Twenty-two letters were represented by using Egyptian hieroglyphs. Some letters have more than one hieroglyphic character of origin.

Through the study of the origins of each letter, we can learn about the many of the words that are reserved to represent set values (mnemonic words), since most of these hold a letter value.

The PCS was written both left to right and right to left, and it is believed to have been formed by acrophony, meaning that each pictographic letter has a phonetic sound associated with the initial consonant in the word that is represented by the pictograph. By the middle of the fifteenth century BCE⁵, inscriptions with PCS were being composed by Hebrew speaking herders and miners, particularly in the Wadi-el-Hol region of Egypt, but also in the Southern Levant.⁶ Professor Lemaire (2017) suggested that early alphabetic writing was developed during the period of Hyksos domination in the south of Palestine, which would have been the Egyptian Delta around the 18th–17th centuries BCE. It is not known whether any numerals were associated with these letters, yet it’s possible. As an explanation for the origins of the alphabet it goes a long way towards explaining why it was those twenty-two letters in particular, coming from roughly twenty-five particular hieroglyphs out of the 700 that existed in ancient Egyptian, that were chosen to represent phonetic sounds and numbers.

It may be the case that these characters represented numerals before they represented phonetic sounds. There’s no intrinsic reason that this shouldn’t be the case, because while reading and writing is undoubtedly useful, numeracy was essential to the type of sophisticated and cosmopolitan civilization that Ancient Egypt was.

The acrophony that we see in the alphabet could simply be an effect of needing names and sounds for numeral characters that for all practical purposes suitably distinguished them from one another, which led naturally to their phonetic associations and the development of writing and reading. But on the other hand, it could be that these twenty-two signs had a ritual use association with the creation myths of the Hebrew speaking peoples.

Such devices would be useful for remembering and reciting oral history. Think of a place in ancient Egypt where numbers would need to be clearly distinguishable—if you were buying or selling something in a bustling, crowded market, then the more differentiated the names of the numeral characters are from one another, the easier will go the sale and purchase of items. Or if you are at a cattle market, or at a crowded state sponsored public event. There would have been numerous noisy work situations, or work situations that required land or cattle to be measured or counted, and numbers to be exchanged over a distance, or from within mines, from men and women shouting. Over time, and from constant common usage, the language would quickly evolve and adapt to make the numbers more distinguishable from one another.

If our hypothesis about the mathematical basis of the alphabet is correct, then evidence to prove the case may be discovered if special attention is given to PCS texts that don’t seem to make sense, because such texts are likely candidates to be calculations. There is a lack of consensus in the academic community over the meaning and origin of some of the PCS letters and their original names. On the other hand, there is broad agreement for most of the letters. This becomes relevant to the art of gematria because many mnemonic words have their origin in the pictograms of the PCS. For instance, the word for doors in Hebrew is daleth which is the name of the letter, and it has a set or given value of 4.

Regular use evolved the PCS script into Paleo-Hebrew, which is more formally known as Ktav Ivri, but however removed from their original shape the letters became, their origins were remembered in the letter names and their mnemonics. This is why a good working knowledge of the conventions of gematria, in particular those of the mnemonics words, comes in very handy.

b. Paleo-Hebrew/Phoenician/Ktav Ivri

Inscriptions made with Paleo-Hebrew appear in the archaeological record from around the tenth century BCE. In 1979, two tiny silver scrolls were discovered at Ketef Hinnom, inscribed with Paleo-Hebrew extracts from the Book of Numbers.

A Aleph, b Beth, g Gimel, d Daleth, h Heh, w Waw, z Zayin, x Cheth, j Teth, y Yod, k Kaph, l Lamed, m Mem, n Nun, s Samekh, [ Ayin, p Peh, c Tsade, q Qoph, r Resh.

They were dated to the end of the seventh century BCE and preserve the earliest known citations of texts that are also found in the Hebrew Bible.⁷ Some letters of the Paleo-Hebrew script are visually similar to their PCS origins, only more stylized. Others bear only a brief resemblance. They represent their alphabetic order value as well as a Biblical Gematria value. Like the PCS script that came before it, Paleo-Hebrew was written both left to right and right to left, but unlike the Ashuri script that would come after it, it possessed no sofit forms. These are special forms of some letters that are used at the end of words. It is likely that many biblical texts were originally composed in the Paleo-Hebrew script but were later written, letter-for-letter, in the Assyrian script. Starting with the return of the captives from Babylon, the Paleohebrew script was gradually replaced with Ktav Ashuri, although we can tell by the Dead Sea Scrolls that it continued to be written by small pockets of people right up until the first century CE. In some of the scrolls found in the Quram cave, the Ashuri script was used for most of the document but the name of God was written in Paleo-Hebrew.

c. Modern Hebrew/Ktav Ashuri

The main difference between Paleo-Hebrew and its descendent Ktav Ashuri in terms of the gematria of the scripts, is that Paleo-Hebrew had only twenty-two characters and no sofit forms.

The earliest adoption of Ktav Ashuri happened following the exile of the Kingdom of Judah in the sixth century BCE. By the first century BCE, Ktav Ashuri had become the dominant writing script and eventually became today’s normative Jewish Hebrew script:

ץ ף ן ם ך ת ש ר ק צ פ ע ס נ מ ל כ י ט ח ז ו ה ד ג ב א

Ktav Ashuri has some features that are not present in the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, namely the sofit (or final forms). In some late gematria ciphers, these final forms are given different numbers ranging from 500–900, and this gave rise to the mistaken idea that Hebrew gematria was copied from Greek Isopsephy, however in the Bible the sofit letters are numbered the same as their counterparts, because they first acquired their value with the Paleo-Hebrew writing script. The extended form of gematria was never actually used, except as a guide to which letters of the Greek alphabet should represent what Hebrew letter and Biblical Gematria value. Rather than seeking to find a letter-to-letter correspondence that was based on any historical origin of the Greek letters, the ancient scribes mapped the Hebrew cover-cipher (Standard Gematria) to the Greek cover-cipher (Standard Isopsephy) and then used the mapping of the cover-cipher to the Biblical 3 Gematria cipher to determine the numerical value of the Greek letters.

d. The Greek Writing script

The earliest Greek writing scripts were hieroglyphic scripts called Linear A (1800—1450 BCE), Linear B (1500—1200 BCE). Linear A was composed of about 120 characters. They also used a Cypriot syllabary⁸ between 1500 and 300 BCE.

Α α Alpha, Β β Beta, Γ γ Gamma, Δ δ Delta, Ε ε Epsilon, Ζ ζ Zeta, Η η Eta, Θ θ Theta, Ι ι Iota, Κ κ Kappa, Λ λ Lambda, Μ μ Mu, Ν ν Nu, Ξ ξ Xi, Ο ο Omicron, Π π Pi, Ρ ρ Rho, Σ σ/ς Sigma, Τ τ Tau, Υ υ Upsilon, Φ φ Phi, Χ χ Chi, Ψ ψ Psi, Ω ω Omega,  ϝ Digamma, ϟ Koppa, ϡ Sampi.

The earliest Greek writing scripts were hieroglyphic scripts called Linear A (1800—1450 BCE), Linear B (1500—1200 BCE). Linear A was composed of about 120 characters. They also used a Cypriot syllabary⁹ between 1500 and 300 BCE.

The Greek alphabet was developed from the Paleohebrew alphabet, and it began to be written in 750 BC. The order and names of the letters are derived from Paleohebrew, for example alpha α comes from aleph א, and beta β comes from beth ב.

The Greeks used five of the Paleohebrew consonants to represent vowel sounds: יyod became ι iota,ו waw became υ upsilon, אaleph became α alpha, עayin became ο omicron, and הheh became ε epsilon. Three new letters were also added to the alphabet: φ phi, χ chi, and ψ psi. The Greek alphabet was the world's first alphabet that fully represented both consonant and vowel.

The Greeks began using gematria (which is called Isopsephy when used with the Greek script) in the 5th -6th Century BCE in the city of Miletus. The early Greek use of Isopsephy used the Milesian system which resembles the Standard Hebrew Gematria cipher in its values and organization. By the 4th Century BCE the Euclidean alphabet had 24 letters but three extra letters were kept representing numerals alone: ϝ digamma, ϟ koppa, and ϡ sampi. The most common use of Isopsephy was used in the Christian Cannon during antiquity by Jewish writers, who transposed the Biblical Gematria cipher onto the Greek script.

e. The Arabic Writing Script

ج ث ت ب ا ر ذ د خ ح ض ص ش س ز ف غ ع ظ ط ن م ل ك ق ي ء ه و

The Arabic script evolved from the Western Aramaic script used in Petra. It has been in popular use since the 4th century CE, but the earliest inscription in Arabic has been dated to 512 CE.

In the 7th century new Arabic letters were created by adding dots to existing letters so that the extra consonants of Arabic could be represented. Some diacritics for short vowels were also introduced to ensure the Qur'an could be spoken aloud with less chance for error.

f. The Galay writing script

I can’t end this section without mentioning a new writing script of my own design that. It works for any language that uses the Latin writing script (this one), as well as Hebrew and Greek.

I created Galay from the spatial arrangement of the Seven Palaces. The letter positions on the Seven Palaces provide the basis of a writing script that is both 11 logographic and alphabetical. An example of the Galay writing script. Logographic scripts have thousands of word glyphs to memorize, so before you read a word you must remember it. It can take more than a decade to properly read a logographic script, whereas you can read Galay from the moment you can recall twenty-two spatial positions, which takes days at most, or hours—not years. With practice, Galay readers move from deductive reading to glyph recognition until it becomes automatic, which makes the process of 34 reading much faster!

I created Galay several years ago. The letter positions on the Seven Palaces provide the basis for a writing script that is both logographic and alphabetical! Do you like it?

And this is Genesis 1:1-2: