My Lamppost

We were watching a rerun of the show Numb3rs last night and the theme happened to be biblical numerology. It’s interesting that Hebrew and Greek languages do not have numbers; rather, they give numeric values to letters. A numeric value given to letters or a string of letters is called the gammatria. For example, the name Jesus in Greek is translated to Iasous. Knowing that each letter in Greek has a corresponding numeric value, we deduce that the numeric value for Iasous (Jesus) is 888:

Here are some other values and the corresponding alpha meanings:

1 = Unity

2 = Male/Female, Yin/Yang

3 = Divine Perfection, Trinity

4 = Creation

5 = Grace and Redemption

6 = Man

7 = Spiritual Perfection

8 = New Beginnings

9 = Judgement, hmm, I don’t like judgement. It’s not my inclination to think that God judges. Therefore, I go with Gifts of the Spirit

10 = Divine Perfection

12 = Governmental Perfection

40 = Probation or Trial

153 = Divine Intervention - disciples catch 153 fish after the Resurrection; “fish” is translated to “ixthus” in Greek which has a numerical value (or gammatria) of 1224, which is 8 x 153.