The script that wrote Ezekiel
When Ezekiel ben-Buzi wrote in Babylonian exile c. 593–571 BC, two scripts coexisted in the Jewish scribal world. The older, paleo-Hebrew (also called Old Hebrew), descended directly from the Phoenician alphabet of the 11th century BC and was used in royal seals, Temple inscriptions, and the official scribal hand through the late monarchy. The newer, Aramaic square script, was beginning to displace paleo-Hebrew under Babylonian and Persian administrative influence; it would become the dominant Jewish liturgical hand by the time of the Mishnah.
For taw — the twenty-second and final letter — the script choice is decisive. In paleo-Hebrew, taw is + or ×: a simple cross or X. The Sinaitic prototype (c. 1500 BC, attested in the Wadi el-Hol and Serabit el-Khadim inscriptions) is a plain plus-sign. The Phoenician inheritance (the Ahiram sarcophagus, c. 1000 BC; the Mesha stele, c. 840 BC) is the same X. The Old Hebrew of the late monarchy (the Siloam tunnel inscription, c. 700 BC; the Lachish ostraca, c. 590 BC — Ezekiel's own generation) is a slightly tilted X.
In the Aramaic square script, taw becomes ת. The cross is gone. The shape no longer reads as a "mark"; it reads as a hooked letterform.
Why this is load-bearing
Ezekiel 9:4 commands a taw to be set on the forehead. The text does not say "the letter T." It says taw. If the prophet wrote in paleo-Hebrew (the dominant scribal hand for Hebrew sacred writing in his lifetime), and if the man clothed in linen marked the foreheads in the script of the prophet, the mark on the foreheads of the spared was a + or ×.
Two independent witnesses confirm the script question. The Dead Sea Scrolls (c. 250 BC – 70 AD) preserve dozens of paleo-Hebrew manuscripts of the Pentateuch — proof that paleo-Hebrew remained a living scribal hand for sacred text across the entire Second Temple period, three centuries after the Babylonian exile. And the divine Name (יהוה) is consistently written in paleo-Hebrew letters within otherwise-square-script Qumran scrolls, including the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa-a) — visible evidence that scribes regarded paleo-Hebrew as the older, holier, more sacred script and reserved it for the most sacred content.
If paleo-Hebrew was the script for the most sacred content, the taw of Ezekiel 9:4 is not the modern ת. It is the cross.
The aleph-bet as an A-to-Ω
The Hebrew alphabet runs from aleph (the leader) to taw (the mark). Twenty-two letters; a complete utterance. The Greek translation pattern carries the same structure: alpha to omega, the first letter to the last, used by the risen Christ in Revelation 1:8, 21:6, and 22:13 to name himself.
In Hebrew, the first-and-last bracket is aleph–taw — and the two letters together form the Hebrew word et (אֵת), the untranslated direct-object marker that appears 7,000+ times in the Hebrew Bible. The word literally means "the totality from beginning to end." It is the first non-prefix word of Genesis 1:1: bereshit bara elohim et ha-shamayim ve-et ha-aretz — "in the beginning God created et the heavens and et the earth."
The reading that aleph-taw in Genesis 1:1 anticipates the Alpha-and-Omega in Revelation belongs to the founder's editorial voice (this drilldown does not insist on it). What the page can establish on textual grounds: the first-and-last bracket of the Hebrew alphabet is aleph–taw, and the New Testament's Christological self-naming uses the exact equivalent in Greek. The bracket is intentional in both directions.