God’s Name and Hebrew Numerals

● It may seem strange that the name of God could have affected the Hebrew system of numerals, but it did. Irving Adler explains in his book A New Look at Arithmetic:

“Some of the peoples who had alphabets used the letters of the alphabet to represent numbers. The ancient Jews, for example, used nine letters of the Hebrew alphabet to represent the numbers from one to nine. They used nine other letters to represent the multiples of ten, from ten to ninety. A third set of nine letters represented the multiples of one hundred, from one hundred to nine hundred . . .

“The use of letters of the alphabet to represent numbers has led to some interesting consequences. Letters used in a compound numeral may accidentally spell out a word. Then the use of the numeral may be affected by the meaning of the word. For example, in the Hebrew system of numerals, the number fifteen should have been written as יה, which means ten plus five. (Hebrew is read from right to left.) However these are the first two letters of the word יהוה which spells out Jehovah. Since it was forbidden by Jewish law to use the name of God in vain, the Jews wrote the number fifteen as טו, nine plus six, instead.”