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NUMBERS




If there is one thing that appears to be utterly and uniquely human in this world (as far as we now know) it is the idea of counting. A general sense of amount or quantity seems to be basically inherint in higher order animals at least - the ability to know if you are outnumbered or if you do not have enough of this or that, would seem to be a basic survival instinct - but the tabulation, the counting and recording of those quantities, the idea of number so to speak, seems unique to mankind.

I stress the recording of number, because the concept of counting is inextricably linked to memory. And it is memory, the fixing of events in time - the passing of the days, the course of the year, the awareness of the cyclical progression of cause and effect, that is key to mastery of one's own environment. By being able to look at a thing, as separate - one - and its relationship to another, and by being able to quantify that relationship, mankind dominated its surroundings.

This marked shift in the nature of early Humans and their interaction with their environment is thought to have occurred some 50,000 years ago. Marks notched into bone, hash marks on stone walls, all paint a testimony of watchful remembrance. Someone, somewhere was watching, and taking note. For number, while in essence is an abstraction, is intimately related to the process of Nature (TBAa, 81 in Hebrew). And as a tally of natural process, it affords command over those processes. Pattern recognition (which at its essence is numerical) is power. The power to accurately recall what has gone before, and more importantly, to predict what has not yet occurred.

Day follows night and night follows day, the moon waxes and wanes, the days grow longer and then shorter, the wandering luminaries cyclically dance against a (very) slowly revolving backdrop of stars. The universe is cyclical and periodic, and all that is must bow to that rhythm. What is cyclical and periodic can be counted, what is counted can be predicted, what is predicted can be controlled. The power of quantification, unleashed, is the power of the Universe itself. Learn your maths and YE SHALL BE AS UNTO GOD ITSELF. Or at least that is what my high school trigonometry teacher was intimating. But then again he was always drinking from his thermos of "special" coffee, so he might have been overstating the case a bit.

Thus it is not surprising when some 45000 sun-return-to-same-spot-on-horizon later that the notion of number was inextricably linked to the idea of letter... at least in the mindstream that resulted in the proto-Sinaitic alphabet. In Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic and the linguistically unrelated Greek, really any language system that adopted a form of that alphabet, the letters were numbers. Aleph א is the first letter in the Hebrew Alphabet (or HALPBITh 528 to be needlessly pedantic) and it is 1. Yod י (the 10th letter) is 10. Qoph ק (19th) is 100.

(The 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, along with the five "final letters" found in different form only at the end of a word, enumerate the values 1 through 900... 1 through 9, 10 through 90, and 100 through 900. The number 1000 is represented once again by the Aleph א, and indeed the meaning of the word ALP - the spelling of the letter Aleph, in full - is "One Thousand". The value of the word is of course, 111 ).

In. Hebrew. Words. Are. Numbers.

Eleazar of Worms entitled his treatise on the exegesis of the 73 Gates of the Torah, each one a method of analyzing the Torah by different linguistic and numerical techniques, Sefer ha-Chokmah (The Book of Wisdom), not only because Chokmah means "Wisdom", but because the word ChKMH is 73.

In the Alphabet of Rabbi Akiva, a Midrash on the Hebrew Letters, each letter, in reverse order, comes before God and pleads its case to be considered as the first letter of the Torah. One after another, each letter is denied for this or that reason until the letter Beth ב (2) who asks that it be the will of God to create the universe through it, and God acquiesces, for Beth begins the word BRKH (227)- Blessing - and the world in its multiplicity is a blessing to be treasured and appreciated (at least according to God here). Beth in full is spelled BITh (412) which also has the meaning of "House", and the Becoming of the World indeed encapsulates us all. It should be noted that the last letter of the Torah, Lamed ל has the value of 30. Together they spell LB, meaning Heart, and having the value of 32, a pretty gosh darn important number in Kabbalah, and Baphometrics I tell you what.

But what you ask, of our hapless Aleph? Should it not begin the commencement of the universe as it is the first letter? Well, says God, that is a good question. But Aleph has a different path... being the letter to open the word for God, ALHIM (86), and the first letter of the first word of the revelation of God to his people, ANKI (81) "I Am", and the first letter and ultimate meaning of the word for "One", AChD (13). [You are one, aren't you? A Fool with your one, one, one...]

The general name given to this sort analysis of number and letter is Gematria, of which there are techniques myriad. It's usage dates back at least to the reign of Sargon II of Assyria in the 8th Century BCE (Assyrian is a Semitic language). There are some slightly debated direct usages of gematria in the Tanakh, and a few in the (Greek) New Testament, but it really started to take off in those wild early years of Rabbinical exegesis in the 2nd Century CE or so. It's usage in Kabbalistic works is extremely widespread, though not universal. There is a conceit in the understanding of Gemtria, that words or phrases that have the same number valuation are in some way akin. That for instance, the shared value of BRKH, blessing, and ZKR, memory, has import... that they indeed are in someways interchangeable. That maybe, just maybe, the Serpent and the Messiah aren't all that different after all...

What is the Nature of I Am?



Below please find assorted articles, not currently in any sort of organized order, regarding numbers, gematria, sephiroth, random thoughts on logic, math and what it is to be many, none, or one...