The system of Hebrew numerals is a quasi-decimal alphabetic numeral system using the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. 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.
The current numeral system is also known as the Hebrew alphabetic numerals to contrast with earlier systems of writing numerals used in classical antiquity. 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.
In this system, there is no notation for zero, and the numeric values for individual letters are added together. Each unit is assigned a separate letter, each tens a separate letter, and a separate letter. The later hundreds are represented by the sum of two or three letters representing the first four hundreds. To represent numbers from 1,000 to 999,999, the same letters are reused to serve as thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands. Gematria Jewish numerology uses these transformations extensively.
In Israel today, the decimal system of Hindu-Arabic numeral system ex. 0, 1, 2, 3, etc. Is used in almost all cases money, age, date on the civil calendar The Hebrew numerals are used only in special cases, such as when using the Hebrew calendar, or numbering a list similar to a, b, c, d, etc, much as Roman numerals are used in the West.
