“Ever since the invention of alphabetic writing by the Phoenicians (or at least, by a northwestern Semitic people) in the second millennium BCE, letters have been used for numbers. . . .

Given their alphabets, the Greeks, the Jews, the Arabs and many other peoples thought of writing numbers by using letters. The system consits of attributing numerical values from 1 to 9, then in tens from 10 to 90, then in hundreds, etc., to the letters in their original Phoenician order. . . .

In these circumstances, every word acquired a number-value, and conversely, every number was ‘loaded’ with the symbolic value of one or more words that it spelled. That is why the number 26 is a divine number in Jewish lore, since it is the sum of the number-values of the letters that spell YAHWEH, the name of God.”

—Georges Ifrah, The Universal History of Numbers; from Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer, 2000.