The name of God

"Okay supposedly the 216 digit number is actually the name of God in Hebrew, and Hebrew is a language of numbers. In the movie, the Jewish guy explains that the word for Father is spelled 2+1 which equals 3, and the word for Mother is spelled 40+1 which equals 41, and the word for Child is spelled 4+30+10 which equals 44. Get it, Father + Mother = Child. Okay but here's the thing: if some of the Hebrew letters have a value greater than 9, then that means there are a lot of Hebrew letters that cannot be used in the 216 digit name of God, because every letter in that name consists only of the digits 0 through 9. That was a pretty big plot hole for me. Anybody who ever worked with alternate number systems such as hexadecimal would have picked up on that fairly easily, I would have thought."

good point but i dont think that this whole business about the name of god is literal. i mean think about it, how can there be a name with 216 letters? i think what these letters would spell out, might not even spell out actual words, but may be complete nonsense, a random assortment of letters, and maybe symbolize something. well, that was just what i thought about it.

"ALSO: Sol had the number figured out in the past, or nearly figured out in the past, but it gave him a stroke before he fully calculated the number or was able to figure out the use of it. Then after lecturing Max to give up his quest, and Max screaming at him how he will be the one to understand the number, Sol went and calculated it again himself and gave himself a second stroke (and that explains the handwritten copy of the number at Sol's house after Max went to visit him). And calculating the number broke both Max's old and new computer. It seems to me, this is not that hard a number to work out mathematically (except that it destroys your brain to do it), so why in all the thousands of years of history were only Sol and Max able to work it out?"

another good point. i suppose that other people in history have figured it out, but didnt what they had. either that or it was mistaken or identified as meaning something else. since patterns are a motif in the film, it can be inferred that the number is part of a pattern, or rather that it can be applied to patterns all across the universe since it represents the pattern of the universe itself. again, just what i thought about it.

"Hey, and how was he able to trepan / lobotomize himself in the bathroom, then chat with the little girl in the park so easily afterwards? I guess he must have had a bandaid or something on, but I could imagine running a 2" long, Ø1/4" drill bit into your head it would have bled pretty badly afterwards! Not the sort of injury you just kind of patch up and go wandering around with."

many people interpreted the ending as metaphorical or symbolic. max finally knew the number, and thus understood the universe and nature itself. it could be interpreted that the drilling represents his detachment from this universe as a physical being, since he now has non-human knowledge. it can also be interpreted as a fantasy, or a delusion. so can the very last scene with the little girl. another option , although highly unlikely, he didn't drill all the way through, and somehow was trying to erase the "mathematical" part of his brain. forgive me if this sounds ridiculous, i have no medical knowledge whatsoever, and have no clue whether this is physically possible. and once again, all of this is just my opinion.

i actually very much enjoyed the film. incredible atmosphere, performances, and simply captivating. great film.

"Okay supposedly the 216 digit number is actually the name of God in Hebrew, and Hebrew is a language of numbers. In the movie, the Jewish guy explains that the word for Father is spelled 2+1 which equals 3, and the word for Mother is spelled 40+1 which equals 41, and the word for Child is spelled 4+30+10 which equals 44. Get it, Father + Mother = Child. Okay but here's the thing: if some of the Hebrew letters have a value greater than 9, then that means there are a lot of Hebrew letters that cannot be used in the 216 digit name of God, because every letter in that name consists only of the digits 0 through 9. That was a pretty big plot hole for me. Anybody who ever worked with alternate number systems such as hexadecimal would have picked up on that fairly easily, I would have thought. ?




Im still not following this logic, sorry for my feeble lil brain. How is every letter in the name only of digits 0 through 9? not too keen on the Hebrew letter system, but adding digits up to from 216 doesn't seem to be that implausible

"then that means there are a lot of Hebrew letters that cannot be used in the 216 digit name of God, because every letter in that name consists only of the digits 0 through 9."

Or not. Just as the digit 4 followed by the digit 4 could be a three character word, the 44 might be better understood with the following digit. It is not necessarily a one to one correspondence.

"so why in all the thousands of years of history were only Sol and Max able to work it out? "

Why would you assume that? This movie is not covering all of history, just a certain story. Two possibilities that come to mind immediately:

1. Others in the past had found the number and went mad or died of it.

2. Finding the number was only possible with "large" computational power.

"how was he able to trepan / lobotomize himself in the bathroom, then chat with the little girl in the park so easily afterwards?"

He is an unreliable narrator after all.

Don't know if your numbers work or not but do you rmember that bit in the film where Max said it wasn't the number but the syntax?

I took it as the number did actually mean nothing and this is what the priests who had been trying to work it out since the Romans destroyed their temple didn't get. It was decypherring the groups of numbers within the number that mattered, not the number itself.