About Algorithms Used by the Esoteric Delights Gematria Database Application

Overview 

The Esoteric Delights Gematria Database employs a number of different algorithms that allow one to easily delve into some esoteric Hebrew- and qabalistic-/gematria-based practices online. 

The main functions of the gematria tools I have put together on this site to date include:

• The ability to translate English to Hebrew and Hebrew to English
• The ability to transliterate English into Hebrew
• The ability to calculate the gematria of Hebrew letters
• The ablity to search a database of Hebrew words and phrases by their gematria values
• The ability to search a database of Hebew words and phrases by their English translations.

Information about the algorithms utilized to provide these services is given below.

Translation

I do not maintain a dictionary for the express purpose of translating English-Hebrew or Hebrew-English.  All translation services are offered using the Babylon website as an intermediary.  When you enter text in the TRANSLATE English<-->Hebrew using Online Dictionaries... portion of the tool and click the Translate! button, what is happening is the Esoteric Delights site is passing your search term in the background to the Babylon website.  This site determines if you've entered Hebrew or English characters, and then does some web scraping to find your translation and return it to this site - so that you do not have to toggle between browsers and allow you to remain conveniently on one page.  Specifically, I am using Simon Mourier's open source C#.NET Html Agility Pack to convert the HTTP response to XML, then using XPath queries to identify the words and translations from Babylon's response, and presenting the scraped definitions for you to copy and paste into the Gematria calculator. 

In case the above technique doesn't work or you just want a concise suggested translation, as of 10/27/08 I've incorporated Google's Translation service that is made available through their Google Ajax API for Translation.

Transliteration

The transliteration service, in contrast to translation, is simply the act of finding the Hebrew letter equivalents of the English letters that you provide in the ...or TRANSLITERATE from English into Hebrew... portion of the tool and click on the Get Hebrew! button.  Because old Hebrew typically omitted vowels and Hebrew-English vowel equivalents are not 100% exact, I provided an option to Omit Vowels from the transliteration of text.  By leaving the Omit Vowels option unchecked, the transliterations made by this site use the following table of letter substitutions:

Please note that my algorithm gives preferential treatment for the 2-letter transliterations present for Cheth, Ayin, and Tzaddi, Shin, and Tau.  For example, if you were to transliterate "Taurus," it would parse this as T-au-r-u-s, not T-a-u-r-u-s, so you would get טערוס not טאורוס.  If you chose to Omit Vowels, you would simply get טרס. If you don't want to omit vowels but also do not want it to do things like turn what you think should be an Aleph into an Ayin, separate the letters by hyphens or spaces as I have done in this example.

Also, please note: there are probably a few different ways to transliterate Hebrew and my bias and source of knowledge doesn't stem from a deep knowledge of Judaica, linguistics, or Hebrew.  The system I came up with is a synthesis of things that I have borrowed from the Golden Dawn/Western hermetic tradition and settled more definitively on the transliteration pattern laid out by Lon Milo Duquette in his The Chicken Qabalah of Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford: Dilettante's Guide to What You Do and Do Not Need to Know to Become a Qabalist.

Gematria Calculation

This site provides two different algorithms to calculate gematria, the "standard" method which ignores the final form (sofit) values, and the Mispar Gadol method, which includes the sofit values.  For more information on these methods, as well as even more gematria techniques, there is a good overview here.  I have focused on these two because they are the most commonly encountered in the Western esoteric tradition.  When you enter text into the box under the ...then CALCULATE GEMATRIA of HEBREW Text... section of the tool and click Calculate Gematria!, it defaults to the standard method.  If you wish the sofit values for final Kaph, Mem, Nun, Peh, and/or Tzaddi to get a heavier weight, check the Count Final Values box before running the calculation.

The numeration of Hebrew letters is given below:

Disclaimer

If you have not done so already, please read the disclaimer.