The Hebrew Alphabet in Biblical times

As already explained, in Biblical times, the Hebrews used the letters of their alphabet as numbers. The Hebrew alphabet is quite different from the English alphabet and a few of these differences should be noted.

The letters of the Hebrew alphabet and their numeric values are shown below. The five finals are at the end of the table and are indicated by asterisk.

Thus anything written in Hebrew can have a numeric value calculated for it. However it should be noted that Ivan Panin did not use the values of the finals in his calculation of numeric values. He would use the numeric value of the normal letter instead of the final. He claimed that this gave results which fitted his heptadiac (sevens) structure for scripture, and the presence of this structure was proof that the finals should not be used.

I am not sure that his reasoning is valid, it seems to be a bit of a circular argument to me. There is a particularly good example in the names of Jesus in the Greek, which shows a significant symbolism that uses both of these numeric schemes. There is a symbolic pattern if the finals numeric values are used, and another if they are not. The two symbolisms complement each other. To me this indicates that there may be significant symbolism in calculating the numerics both ways. The Greek example is discussed in more detail in the 'Introduction to Greek Numerics'. I am not yet aware of such a good example in the Hebrew, but nevertheless I am inclined to think that the one argument should apply to the entire Bible.