Originally Posted by spin

I wonder when the Aramaic gematria was derived from geometry. I thought that geometry was coined in the renaissance, but I now discover that it goes back to antiquity. Herodotus uses it, though specifically for land measurement, as is the case with Aristophanes, the Clouds. The question must be, when did geometry become abstracted. In Greek Egypt it took on the meaning of land tax, obviously based on the measurement of the land. Cicero used it and I think that was the abstract partner to mathematics...

Yet, now I find in Jastrow's Dictionary of the Targumim, he claims that it comes from a corruption of grammatia (plural of grammateion), originally meaning "accounts". This could be correct and the notion of "divine geometry" only folk etymology. Jastrow indicates that Berakot 8a was already using letters based on their numerical values.