You’ve probably heard about some famous examples of numbers being used as codes in the Bible. Specifically, you’ve likely heard that the number 666 was probably a reference to the Emperor Nero.
But why on earth do numbers mean words? And how does this “code” work?
Well, a lot of people try to make it sound all complicated, but it’s actually pretty simple.
In English, we obviously use a certain system of numbers (also called numerals): 1,2,3,4,etc.
What you may not know is that these numbers (1,2,3,4,etc.) are Arabic numerals. A system of numbers that comes to us from Arabic.
So, before we began using these Arabic numerals just a few centuries ago, what did we use?
Well, think back to the Romans. They had a system of Roman numerals (ring a bell?). In this system, the Romans used numbers such as I,V,X,L,C,etc.
As you can see, all of their numbers were just letters. The only way to tell whether something in writing was meant as letters or numbers was through context. If you saw V CANES, you could assume that the “V” represents “5”, so you could translate the phrase as “5 dogs”.
This system of Roman numerals is very similar to what the Greeks and Hebrews did.
Records are unclear, but it appears that the Greeks were the first to develop this system of counting (using their letters to represent numbers instead of spelling out the full name of the number).
The Greeks called this “isopsephy”, which comes from isos, meaning “equal” and psephos, meaning “count”.
Then, it appears that following Alexander the Great’s conquest of the east, the new Hellenistic (hellenistic just means Greek) Jews began to develop their own system of isopsephy.
However, just to keep us a little bit confused, the Hebrews made sure to change the name of isopsephy to “gematria”. Gematria still comes from Greek, but specifically it derives from the word geometria, which is also where we get our word “geometry”. It’s basically just a word that had to do with math, so naming a number system after a math word makes sense.
So, these systems of isopsephy (for Greek) and gematria (for Hebrew) were pretty much just the same sort of thing as Roman numerals.
The only big difference is that for the Romans, only a few letters were used as numbers and the rest were always just letters. For Hebrew and Greek though, every letter had a numerical value to go along with it.
Because of this, you could take any word in Hebrew or Greek, add up all the numbers/letters, and get a total value. This was done pretty commonly for different purposes. Again, the famous example of 666 alludes to Emperor Nero because if you add up the letters of his name in Greek, Neron Kaisar, you get 666.
Overall, a lot of people like to make this stuff sound all confusing, but just remember, it’s pretty much the same as Roman numerals.