Sunday, June 26, 2005

THE SUDOKU CRAZE leads the Jerusalem Post ("Crazy about numbers") into an excursus on numbers in Judaism, especially gematria.
The Jewish people are no newcomers to numbers, or even to doing mental gymnastics with them. We find numbers in ancient Jewish sources: Starting off in the Bible with the days of the creation, there are the dimensions of Noah's Ark, the numbers of its inhabitants, and so forth (or fifth). Indeed, a whole book of the Pentateuch is entitled "Numbers" in English, because of the census of the Jewish people in the desert. Numbers featuring in the Bible's text range from one to 100 million (Daniel 7:10).

The traditional Pessah Haggada is positively overflowing with numbers, and the climax of the Seder is the numerical riddle song, "Who Knows One?" Numbers mentioned in the Haggada text range from 1?2 to 10 9 (one billion, or one with nine zeros after it).

Numbers often feature in discussions in the Talmud, and of course there is the discipline of gematria, which uses the numerical values of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet (aleph = 1, kaf = 20, koof = 100) as a means of interpretation and commonly accords significance to concepts or phenomena which share the same numerical value. There are several weird and wonderful methods used in calculating gematrias, such as "small numbers," "filling," "great numbers" squares and factorials.

Examples follow.

The craze (Sudoku, not gematria) has hit Britain too. My wife and son are working on Sudoku puzzles here even as I write.

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