This is a regular feature on IsraelSeen by Dr. Yitzkak Hayut-Man. An innovator, futurist, visionary and Bible scholar. I have the utmost respect for the man I consider a friend. He is among the few that is courageous enough to allow the “open source” of the Torah-Bible to be presented in new and interesting ways for our greater understanding. for more go to his web site: http://www.global-report.com/thehope/a78-re-genesis-now-project-preface-introduction
Genesis Numerology
Traditional Jewish exegesis makes much use of Gematria – assigning numerical value to letters of words and then seeing connections between words or expressions of similar numerical values. Researcher Me’ir Bar-Ilan[12] has recently published two books about “Hebrew Numerology”, which he presents as a new legitimate approach to the academic Bible studies. Bar Ilan relates to the symbolic value of specific numbers and utterly rejects Gematria and letter skipping.
Our approach is fairly close to that of Bar-Ilan, though it does not abstain from using some Gematria (which is, as noted above, quite common in traditional Midrashic interpretation and constitutes a basic work tool for the Qabbalah in general and of the latter, Lurianic Qabbalah, in particular), but we prefer specific type of Gematria – the “Geometrical Gematria” of “Configurate Numbers” – numbers that have symbolic spatial significance (see below).
The recent fashion of seeking numerical codes and equal skips in the Torah, brought on an avalanche of wisecracks and is likely to give a bad name to the notion of systematic numbers in the Torah that carry meaningful messages. Even Gematria Misrashim is mostly merely recreational, and can purport to prove just about anything, as the sages said: “(matters of) bird sacrifices and menstruation are real corpus of Halakha; (calculations of time) periods and Gematria are condiments to wisdom” (Avot 3:18). But there are authentic numerical codes that were evidently used already when the scriptures were written. The Pythagorean mystery schools, which swore to keep their knowledge secret, were perhaps the visible tip of the secret work of the scribes.
“Sefer Yetzirah” (that can be regarded as a Pythagorean book) emphasizes the role of Sefirah (counting), the Sefirot (later meaning of Divine emanations, but originally probably ciphers) and Misparim (numbers) in the work of creation (even though it totally abstains from Gematria). The writers and editors of the scriptures were called Sofrim (literally Talliers) and it is reasonable to assume that they took pains to count the verses, words and letters of their books. In the first portion of Genesis, anyway, we shall find many primal patterns, primal templates with which whole worlds were made.
The important numbers for our investigation will be “Configurate Numbers”, which mark basic geometrical forms made by placing a certain number of tokens (like coins or game tokens) on a (2D) surface in a form such as squares, triangles, hexagons or hexagrams (“stars”), as well as forms in (3D) volume (cube, pyramid, etc.) and even forming hyper-cubes in 4D and 5D hyperspace (which is the basic space that the Sefer Yetzirah deals with.
