Welcome to the Gematriaphone, a new “instrument” which lets you hear the Torah's hidden mathematical music. I created the Gematriaphone for the 2020 Powered By Sefaria Contest, which called for novel ways to showcase the wonderful resources of Sefaria, the internet's “Living Library of Jewish Texts.”

The main innovation of this site is a scroll-wheel interface that allows you to rapidly navigate to any word of Torah without having to repeatedly click buttons or load new pages. Once this scrolling feature was in place, it seemed natural to accompany the scrolling with images and sound. For this I turned to gematria, the ancient tradition of transmuting Hebrew words into numbers. The Gematriaphone is an instrument which makes music from gematria.

Gematria is a system for ascribing a numerical value to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

The numerical value of any word is simply the sum of the values of its letters. For instance, the first word of the Hebrew Bible, בראשית, meaning “In the beginning”, is given the numerical value of 913.

Although there are variant traditions, on this the site final-form letters (ך‎,ם,ן,ץ,ף‎‎) are not counted differently than their non-final counterparts (מ,נ,צ,פ,כ). Similarly, words that appear in the Torah connected with a maqaf, or hyphen, are counted as a single unit. Thus the phrase ויהי־כן, “and it was so,” is considered a single word with numerical value 240.

Tally of all words whose letters sum to