Hebrew numerals

The system was adapted from that of the Greek numerals sometime between 200 and 78 BCE, the latter being the date of the earliest archeological evidence.

These systems were inherited from usage in the Aramaic and Phoenician scripts, attested from c. 800 BCE in the Samaria Ostraca.

The Greek system was adopted in Hellenistic Judaism and had been in use in Greece since about the 5th century BCE.

[2] In this system, there is no notation for zero, and the numeric values for individual letters are added together.

Letters of the Hebrew alphabet are used to represent numbers in a few traditional contexts, such as in calendars.

Note: Officially, numbers greater than a million were represented by the long scale.

The number two is special: shnayim (m.) and shtayim (f.) become shney (m.) and shtey (f.) when followed by the noun they count.

[6] By convention, the numbers 15 and 16 are represented as ט״ו‎‎ (9 + 6) and ט״ז‎‎ (9 + 7), respectively, in order to refrain from using the two-letter combinations י-ה‎‎ (10 + 5) and י-ו‎‎ (10 + 6), which are alternate written forms for the Name of God in everyday writing.

[7][8] Combinations which would spell out words with negative connotations are sometimes avoided by switching the order of the letters.

The Hebrew numeral system has sometimes been extended to include the five final letter forms—ך‎ for 500, ם‎ for 600, ן‎ for 700, ף‎ for 800, ץ‎ for 900.

נפטר ביום כׄ אייר‎ ונקבר ביום כׄגׄ אייר‎ שנת תׄרׄצׄהׄ לפׄק‎ Passed away on day 20 Iyar And buried on day 23 Iyar Year 695 without the thousands [i.e. year 5695] Gershayim (U+05F4 in Unicode, and resembling a double quote mark) (sometimes erroneously referred to as merkha'ot, which is Hebrew for double quote) are inserted before (to the right of) the last (leftmost) letter to indicate that the sequence of letters represents something other than a word.

Hebrew numerals are used nowadays primarily for writing the days and years of the Hebrew calendar; for references to traditional Jewish texts (particularly for Biblical chapter and verse and for Talmudic folios); for bulleted or numbered lists (similar to A, B, C, etc., in English); and in numerology (gematria).