In the thirteenth century a new doctrine spread: kabbalism, or Jewish mysticism. One centerpiece of kabbalistic thought is gematria—the search for coded messages within the text of the Bible. Like the Greeks, the Hebrews used letters from their alphabet to represent numbers, so every word had a numerical value. This could be used to interpret the hidden meaning of words. For instance, Gulf War participants might have noticed that Saddam has the following value: samech (60) + aleph (1) + daled (4) + aleph (1) + mem (600)=666—a number that Christians associate with the evil Beast that appears
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