Take this with the most non-serious mode: In the methods used by Gematria and various arts, there is a similar mechanism at play is there not? Transforming words into quasi-hash coordinate space that is computable and thus able to see what is related or equal?
Fascinating observation, thanks. Relevant to your comment but diverging farther from the original post: Coincidentally, I am taking a beginner's Kabbalah course right now. I wonder if some of the writers of scripture actually used steganography or other word encodings such as the ones you allude to intentionally. One obvious example of word play at the meta level might be Psalm 119.
Yeah, along those lines I’ve joked that the Bible admits it’s written by a LLM: “in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” - that rings like a recursive declaration statement with Genesis and other similar statements.
The people who invented numerological techniques knew that you could manipulate numbers using particular rules and discover new facts about the world -- for example that you could measure the length of strings and use that to determine, which ones would sound good if you plucked them at the same time.
Give the large number of successes that mathematics lead to, it only made sense that they would try to encode more things as numbers, including a more general method of translating _all words_ to numbers, using the most straight forward encoding they could think of -- just having the letters stand in for the numbers that the _same letters_ stood for when they were doing math.
It didn't develop this way in reality of course, but you could probably draw a fairly straight line of logical developments from numerology to word2vec and LLMs.
