The Origin of Letters and Numerals According to the Sefer Yetzirah

THE ORIGIN OF LETTERS AND NUMERALS.

whole number of things, we multiply at each step by a number decreased by a unit . . . . . .”

He further says: “Many writers have from time to time remarked upon the extraordinary magnitude of the numbers with which we deal in this subject. Taquet Jean-André Taquet (1612–1660) was a Belgian Jesuit mathematician whose work focused on geometry and the calculation of probabilities. calculated that the twenty-four letters of the alphabet may be arranged in more than 620 thousand trillions of orders; and Schott Gaspar Schott (1608–1666) was a German mathematician and physicist known for his encyclopedic works on scientific instruments and mathematical oddities. estimated that if a thousand million of men were employed for the same number of years in writing out these arrangements, and each man filled, each day, forty pages with forty arrangements in each, they would not have accomplished the task, as they would have written only 584 thousand trillions instead of 620 thousand trillions.”

CHAP. II

THE TETRAGRAMMATON AND THE VOWELS

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All words arising from the combination of the letters are combined and permuted with the Tetragrammaton The "four-letter" name of God, usually transliterated as YHWH., called by the Book of Formation original: "Sefer Yetzirah"; a foundational work of Jewish mysticism that explains the creation of the universe through the Hebrew letters. “One Name” YHWH original: "יהוה", from which emanated the whole of creation and all languages⁸). According to the Book of Formation, the alphabet did not consist of consonants only, as is held by many Semitic scholars, but had vowels also, the letters of the Tetragrammaton themselves being vowels. Indeed, the ancients transcribed YHWH original: "יהוה" by the vowels i-e-u-o, and i-a-o-u-e⁹).

⁸) See text, § 9.
⁹) Comp. Renan, History of the People of Israel, Boston 1888, I, 69. Ernest Renan (1823–1892) was a French scholar of Semitic languages and a historian of religion.