4-2-8 Problems With Gematria

Summing up, gematria can’t prove inspiration. So my explanation of the claims of gematria would be:

- pseudo-scientific methodology

- biased sampling of the literature

- co-incidence. Anyone with a background in statistics can tell you that there is such a thing as pure co-incidence. A photograph was once published in a British newspaper of three cars whose registration plates varied only by one letter each, were parked in the same direction, on the same street, of the same colour and year. And yet they were owned by people in totally different parts of the country.

Although some claim to ‘prove’ the Bible through its features relating to the number 7, I don’t think the Bible needs this crutch to support it. God’s word doesn’t need such appeals to validate it. Many documents have features of 7 if one looks close enough. John J. Davis gives an example of a 5^th century BC Aramaic document which has an opening sentence which contains 49 letters and signs; the first numerical sign in the verse was 21. When all the numerals of the sentence are added together the total is 28. The sentence contains only 7 sibilants. The date of the letter when written in numerals and each letter is added up, comes to 7. If gematria proves inspiration, then this document is inspired. Quite simply, patterns of gematria don’t prove a document is inspired.

It just isn’t so that “It [gematria] serves as a litmus test for the truth if you will”. By saying this, my friend is raising the stakes. If other books can be shown to have the same features, then they too are truth. Yet many of those books contradict both the Bible and the Qur’an.

A message claiming to be divine and apparently proved to be so because it contains a startling combination of numbers should still not be accepted if the historical and moral content of such a message or book fails to confirm its divine origin. Christians have rightly perceived that if the sources of the information in the Qur’an are found to have been in existence before the time of Mohammed, as indeed they were; and if its historical information is faulty; then the Qur’an cannot be accepted as divine. We thus find the " proof" offered by this type of numeric to be simply irrelevant.

Gematria: Problems In Methodology And Facts

The idea that the Qur’an has many number patterns in it divisible by 19 was promoted chiefly by Ahmed Deedat and a Dr. Khalifa. However their analysis has many problems. The opening blessing (the Bismallah) at the beginning of most of the chapters of the Qur’an is usually (but not always) ignored and some of the occurrences of words are not what Dr. Khalifa claims. This is enough to change the numbers and invalidate the theory.

The numerology system used by Khalifa and Deedat has a further problem for Moslems in that it doesn’t fit the entire Qur’an. In particular Q 9:128,129 is out of step with the numeric pattern and Khalifa and Deedat argue that these two verses should be removed from the text of the Qur’an. This is a severe problem for Moslems. To use the numerological theory to support the Qur’an’s veracity they have to reject part of the text of the Qur’an. Earlier Moslems believed that these two verses were part of God’s revelation. How can a Moslem be certain that there are not more surprises of this kind? As a result of this reasoning, Moslem authorities have rejected the numerology methods outlined and have threatened Deedat and Khalifa with branding as Murtad or as Kafir (either of which could be life threatening).

There are many conflicting texts of the Qur’an. There is the well known dispute between Shiite and Sunni Muslims over the composition of the text. Arthur Jeffery " Material for the History of the Text of the Qur’an" (New York, Russell F. Moore, 1952) has something like 90 pages just on variant readings of the text which are documented. So any claim to prove the Qur’an by gematria falls down because the exact original text is such a question of debate- and, it is a debate which cannot be resolved, seeing that Mohammad was illiterate and the book existed only in an oral form for some time.
Moslems themselves accept the problem which there is with the texts. Consider Saleh al-Wahaihu, " A Study of Seven Quranic Variants," International Journal of Islamic and Arabic Studies, Vol. V (1989), #2, pp. 1-57: " It is interesting to note that in scholarly Muslim journals, there is beginning to be a grudging acknowledgement of the fact that there are variant and conflicting readings on the text of the Qur’an”.
My friend’s argument depends heavily upon the numbers of verses in the Qur’an. But he is implying that the division of the book into verses was directly from God. How, therefore, can he explain that fact that the division of verses in the Qur’an is based on five different systems:

- the Kufah system, following the tradition of Ali;

- the Basra system, following Mohammed's companion Asim ibn Hajjaj;

- the Shami system of Syria used by Mohammed's companion Abdu'lla-h ibn Umar

- the Makkah system and

- the Madinah system.

This makes it obvious that Mohammed did not undertake the division into verses. As far as the ordering of the Suras is concerned this was done by Khalif Uthman and thus the argument falls flat. For there is no evidence that Uthman was inspired by God in the way he divided up the verses.

The sheer intellectual desperation of my friend’s argument is reflected by some real heavy pressurizing of evidence to make it fit in with the ‘19’ pattern. Thus: “It takes 266 days or 38 weeks for a baby to fully develop. 266 is 9x14, 38 is 19x2”. Well I could just as well argue that the incubation period of the human embryo is 280 days (7 x 40). Or again: “The waves in the ocean break at 19 degrees”. Really? Every wave…every place…in the Arctic ocean too? How can this debatable suggestion transform human life in practice? How does it prove anything about the Qur’an?

“The Qur’an mentions 30 different numbers. The sum of these numbers is 162146, which equals 19x8534”

30 different numbers…? But 30 isn’t divisible by 19. If there were, say, 19 different numbers, then this would be seized upon as evidence, it seems.

“In all suras with Quranic Initials*, the initials occur in their respective sura in exact multiples of 19. Sura 2 for example has the initials A.L.M.”.

These are the initials of the scribes who copied them. A.L.M., for example, stands for Amar Li Muh. I do not believe there was, therefore, any intentional structuring of the initials of the scribes according to the number 19. Closer analysis of my colleague’s claims reveals that there are major problems in both methodology and the plain facts of the analysis suggested.

Thus in Sura 36, where the initials are Y and S, there are 48 S and 237 Y. Though neither of these sums can be divided by 19, the combined total is 15 x 19. This is not particularly outside the bounds of probability. The analysis suggested tries improve the results by stating for example that in all Suras with the initials ALM at the top, the respective letters in the three Suras combined add up to a figure that is divisible by 19. In this case the sum of all A's and L's and M's in Suras 2,3,7,13,29-32 add up to 26676, which is equal to 19 x 1404. In order to make this total divisible by 19, he had to leave the initials out in the case of Sura 7. The reason is that this Sura has the initials ALMS, which disqualifies it from being included, because it is not a Sura with the initials ALM. So in order to produce a number divisible by 19, he included Sura 7 but excluded the 98 S's. The same applies to the use of Sura 13 (ALMR) in this context. The same type of manipulation was used in the set of Suras 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 which begin with the initials ALR (except 13 which has the initials ALMR). Adding up all the ALR's of these six Suras, some Moslems have arrived at the sum of 9709 (= 19 x 511) but the sum is actually 10813 which is not divisible by 19. They arrive at this figure by adding all the letters indicated by the initials ALR of these Suras excepting Sura 13 (which begins with ALMR) and adds from this Sura only the figure 137, i.e. the number of times the initial R occurs, conveniently leaving out the A's and L's for otherwise the sum (10813) would not be divisible by 19, as we have shown. Other manipulations can be seen in Sura 42. Here the sum of all the letters as represented in the initials HMASQ is 570 or 19 x 30, but it is divided into 361 + 209 to fit the first sum into the total of all HM's. In order to increase the successes, Dr Khalifa [the Moslem who first popularised the idea of gematria ‘proving’ the Qur’an] gives the final figure for Sura 68 as 152, which is already reflected in the vertical column of the letter N and is therefore a duplication.

The various initials used at the heading of the suras are analysed below. Only the numbers italicised and highlighted in red on the internet edition are divisible by 19.

Frankly, if divisibility of all these figures by 19 is proof that the Qur’an is inspired by God…well, it isn’t. There are just too many problems with gematria.

Duncan Heaster