Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Counting the letters in Exodus 14 (Shem ha-Mephorash)

Most Golden Dawn students know that the Golden Dawn uses the Shem ha-Mephorash to create 72 angelic names that are associated with the 36 decans (and to 36 of the minor arcana of the Tarot)--two per decan and aforementioned Tarot card. And most of them also know that the Shem ha-Mephorash is created by writing out three lines from Exodus 14; three lines that each has 72 letters.

But are they aware of how rare it is to find three lines of 72 letters each, one right after other? I am not sure...in fact, I am not even aware of the rarity of the occurrence myself. It is towards that end that I counted up the letters in each of the sentences in Exodus 14 the other day.

(I tried to find a online source for the information, but I could not figure out the proper keywords to punch into a search engine to convince the web spiders to give me a quick answer--hence the counting of the letters the old-fashioned way.)

So the letter count for each sentence of Exodus 14 (provided that I did it right--do they make a large print Hebrew Bible?--please do not quote me on this without double-checking the count) is as follows:

Exodus 14:1--18 letters
Exodus 14:2--71 letters
Exodus 14:3--41 letters
Exodus 14:4--69 letters
Exodus 14:5--80 letters
Exodus 14:6--23 letters
Exodus 14:7--38 letters
Exodus 14:8--62 letters
Exodus 14:9--78 letters
Exodus 14:10--78 letters
Exodus 14:11--71 letters
Exodus 14:12--79 letters
Exodus 14:13--96 letters
Exodus 14:14--21 letters
Exodus 14:15--41 letters
Exodus 14:16--57 letters
Exodus 14:17--63 letters
Exodus 14:18--42 letters
Exodus 14:19--72 letters
Exodus 14:20--72 letters
Exodus 14:21--72 letters
Exodus 14:22--50 letters
Exodus 14:23--49 letters
Exodus 14:24--60 letters
Exodus 14:25--71 letters
Exodus 14:26--57 letters
Exodus 14:27--76 letters
Exodus 14:28--67 letters
Exodus 14:29--49 letters
Exodus 14:30--58 letters
Exodus 14:31--71 letters

Eyeballing this small sample, I would guess that finding three sentences of the same letter count one after another is pretty rare. But I could be wrong--after all, I have not counted all the other sentences in the Hebrew Bible yet.

1 comment:

Fr. A. said...

Excellent job! Such things are actually rather important and too many people ignore the dynamics. Anytime there is such a rare schema in play within scripture it points to several other important layers of meaning. Very refreshing work. Thank you.