Greek Roots · letter 6 of 24
The weapon, and the seventh number, though it is the sixth letter.
Phoenician · c. 1000–800 BC
Phoenician zayin: a weapon, blade and hilt.
Archaic Greek · c. 750–500 BC
An I-beam: the blade between two guards.
The classical capital · the New Testament's own letters
Every New Testament manuscript was written in capitals like this one: no lower case, and no spaces between the words.
The Phoenician drawing is the same one the Hebrew hall uses for that letter: at this date the two scripts were one alphabet in two neighbouring hands. The archaic Greek form is simplified from published hand-copies of the early inscriptions, not a facsimile of any single stone: early Greek scribes varied wildly, and wrote right to left as readily as left to right.
Sounds like
Probably zd or dz in the classical period, settling to a plain z by New Testament times. Say it like the zz in “adze” and you are close enough.
Written z in scholarly books.
Its number
7
it is letter 6, the gap is the lost letters, which kept their numbers
Its name means
weapon (from zayin)
in Phoenician, not in Greek
Borrowed from
Phoenician zayin
Well established
Here is a reader's first collision with Greek numbers. Zeta is the sixth letter, but its number is seven. The missing six belongs to a letter that is not on the wall any more: digamma, which sounded like w, fell out of Greek speech and out of Greek writing, and kept its number anyway.
That single fact: a letter that died but kept its value, is the key to the whole Greek numeral system, and it is the reason the number of the beast in Revelation is spelled with a sign most readers have never seen.
Greek has two words English flattens into “life”: bios, the life you can lose, count and spend, and zōē, life as a quality of being alive. John's Gospel and letters use zōē almost exclusively, usually with “eternal” attached, and the point is not primarily length but kind.
