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The Hebrew language has names for common numbers that range from zero to one million. Letters of the Hebrew alphabet are used to represent numbers in a few traditional contexts, such as in calendars. In other situations, numerals from the Hindu–Arabic numeral system are used. Cardinal and ordinal numbers must agree in gender with the noun ...
- Contents
- Introduction
- Writing Conventions
- Speech Conventions
- The Alphabetical System
- The Numerical System
The Hebrew Alphabet
The Hebrew alphabet has 22 characters, as shown in the following table. Each letter is considered to have a numerical value which is used in writing numbers and for numerological interpretations of words. Five letters have alternative glyphs when they occur at the end of words. These are encoded in Unicode as separate code points before the respective base characters, as follows: As the table shows, the final letters are sometimes assigned numerical values of their own which can be used in nu...
Numbers in Hebrew
Classical Hebrew has no numerals. The letters of the alphabet are used to express numbers and to index lists of items. For indexing there are two possible systems, the alphabetical system and the numerical system. To express numbers, only the numerical system is relevant. Both systems are written from right to left, like other Hebrew text.
This section applies to both systems, but I use the term “number” for the sake of simplicity. When numbers appear in isolation, e.g. as page numbers or as list indexes, they should be written with the letters alone. If they appear embedded in other text, punctuation marks are added to clarify that they are numbers and not words. The most common con...
The expression of numerals in speech is rather inconsistent. Sometimes they are spelt out letter by letter, sometimes pronounced as if they were words, and sometimes as the number they represent. ל״ו צדיקים “Lamed Vav Tzaddikim” (36 righteous ones) ט״ו בשבט “Tu Bishvat” (The date 15th of Shevat) ד׳ אמות “Arba amot” (four cubits) A text-to-speech im...
This simply uses the 22 letters of the alphabet in sequence: א ב ג … ר ש ת This can be extended to arbitrary length by chaining: א ב ג … ר ש ת אא אב אג … תר תש תת אאא אאב אאג …
Basic rules
The basis of the numerical system is quite simple, at least for numbers less than 1,000. Numbers are expressed using the numerical values in the table, written from greatest to least. For numbers greater than 499, the letter TAV is repeated as necessary.
Exceptions: substitution
If the last two digits of a number are 15 or 16, they should be expressed not as YUD HE (10+5) and YUD VAV (10+6), but as TET VAV (9+6) and TET ZAYIN (9+7). This is done to avoid a close resemblance to the Tetragrammaton (four-letter name of God) YUD HE VAV HE. Although this convention is originally derived from religious practice, it is universally used even in completely secular contexts.
Exceptions: reordering
The numerical value of each letter is fixed and not determined by position, so reordering a number will not change its value. This may be done when a number spells out a word with negative connotations (e.g. 298: RESH TSADI HET is the Hebrew for “murder” so it is sometimes written as RESH HET TSADI), or when the reordered form has especially positive connotations (e.g 18: YUD HET is often written as HET YUD, the Hebrew for “alive”). Unlike the previous exception, using the regular form in the...
Hebrew numerals. 1, 3, 9, 12, 20, 24, 30, 36, 60, more…. The system of Hebrew numerals is a quasi-decimal alphabetic numeral system using the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. In this system, zero does not have a place, and the number values for each letter are added together. Each unit (1, 2, ..., 9) is assigned a separate letter, each tens ...
Hebrew numbers 11-19. Numbers eleven through nineteen are formed with a combination of the number ten and one through nine. For example, the Hebrew number eleven is אַחַד עָשָׂר—a combination of one (אֶחָד) and ten (עֶ֫שֶׂר). Note that eleven and twelve have alternate forms.
Apr 29, 2011 · 9. In the hebrew bible, there number system is based off of hebrew letters. There is a single digit used going all the way up to 10, then it uses two digits... Untill it gets to 20, which is a single digit again. The actual hebrew numbers go in sequence of: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,20,30,40,50,60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 200, 300, 400.
1,000,000 ‘‘א (aleph apostrophe apostrophe ) 1,002,003 ג ‘ב‘א (aleph apostrophe bet apostrophe gimel ) 10,000,001 א ‘‘י (yud apostrophe apostrophe aleph ) Usually a quotation mark is inserted just before the last (leftmost) character to make it clear that this is a number and not a Hebrew word. So 5,699 would be written as:
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Sep 18, 2024 · So, to understand the numerals, you must learn the Hebrew alphabet and vice versa. Combining numbers: To form numbers above 10, Hebrew combines letters. For example, the number 16 is represented by the letters י״ו (yod, vav), combining the values 10 (י) and 6 (ו). Special cases: Some unique aspects, like the numbers 15 and 16.
