Chronogram

For instance, SVRGE O IEHOVA ATQVE DISPERGE INIMICOS TVOS ("Rise, oh Jehovah, and destroy your enemies", a slightly altered version of Psalm 68:2) gives 1625 as the year of building.

One double chronogram, in Latin and English, on the year 1642, reads, "'TV DeVs IaM propItIVs sIs regI regnoqVe hVIC VnIVerso."

Thus the dates of the epitaphs of the family of Asher ben Jehiel in the first half of the fourteenth century are indicated by chronograms (Almanzi, "Abne Zikkaron", pp.

4, 6, 9); and among sixty-eight Frankfort epitaphs of that century four chronograms have been preserved (Horowitz, "Inschriften... zu Frankfurt-am-Main", Nos.

In Bohemia and Poland, chronograms in epitaphs occur more frequently, and are often very clever; for example, the epitaph of the physician Menahem b. Asher Mazzerato, who died at Prague in 1680, reads as follows: איש צדיק ישר חכם וענו האלוף מהר״ר מנחם רופא מומחה (Lieben, "Gal 'Ed," p. 36); and the numerical value of the marked initial letters therein amounts to 440; i.e., 5440, the Jewish year in which Menahem died.

The year of death of the associate rabbi of Prague, Zalman, who perished in the great fire of 1689 (=5449 Jewish era), is indicated by the words 'באש יצא מאת ד (bolded letters equal 449) (ib.

In longer sentences, in which some of the letters were not utilized in the chronogram, those that counted were marked by dots, lines, or different type, or were distinguished in other ways.

The Italian, Oriental, and earlier Amsterdam editions frequently designate the thousand as לפ״ג ( = לפרט גדול, "the major era").

The following chronogram, which Rabbi Samuel Schotten adds to his work "Kos ha-Yeshu'ot" (Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1711), shows how artificial and verbose chronograms may be: "Let him who wishes to know the year of the Creation pour the contents out of the cup [i.e., count the word "kos," כוס with defective spelling = 80] and seek aid [ישועה = 391; together 471] in the sixth millennium."

A number of Hebrew poems were produced in the first half of the 19th century, in which the letters of each verse have the same numerical value, being generally the year in which it was written.

Two years later Jacob Eichenbaum wrote a poem in honor of a friend, each line of which had the numerical value of 581 ("Kol Zimrah", ed.

While this poem is really a work of art, in spite of the artifice employed, Eichenbaum's imitators have in their translations merely produced rhymes with certain numerical values.

Thus the tomb of the Persian poet Hafez in Shiraz has engraved on it the Persian words ḵāk-e moṣallā 'dust of Musalla' (Musalla was a park or pleasure ground in Shiraz made famous in Hafez's poem Shirazi Turk and other works); the letters of this phrase add up to the Islamic date 791 (equivalent to AD 1389/1390).