The Library

Hebrew Roots

The Old Testament was written in Hebrew — an alphabet of twenty-two letters, read right to left, with no written vowels and a habit of building whole families of words out of three consonants. This section opens the language up for readers who do not know a word of it, and keeps going for readers who do.

22
Letters, each with its own page
8
Sign origins well established
8
Honestly unrecovered or disputed
23
Words your Bible left in the original

The twenty-two — every letter its own room

Walk them in order, aleph to taw, the way Psalm 119 walks them. Each room carries the sign the letter began as (with an honest grade for how well that origin is actually known), its sound and number, the places Scripture itself plays with it, its most famous words, and the readings the devotional tradition has laid on top of it — always labeled as readings.

Laid out right to left, the direction Hebrew is read. Aleph is at the top right; taw at the bottom left.

What makes Hebrew Hebrew

It is written without vowels

Biblical Hebrew wrote only consonants. Imagine English printed as ths sntnc hs n vwls — readable, if you already know the language. Around the seventh to tenth centuries AD, Jewish scribes called the Masoretes added a system of dots and dashes above and below the letters to preserve the pronunciation their tradition had carried by voice for centuries. Those marks are not part of the original writing, and every Hebrew Bible prints them anyway, because losing them would lose the reading.

Words grow from three-letter roots

Most Hebrew words are built on a skeleton of three consonants, and the whole family shares it. From k-t-b come the words for writing, a writer, a letter, a document. From q-d-sh come holy, holiness, sanctuary, to consecrate. English hides its families; Hebrew wears them on the surface, which is why the language rewards looking a word up.

One word can carry a dozen meanings

Hebrew has a small vocabulary doing a large job. Ruach is breath, wind, and spirit — all three at once, which is why Genesis 1:2 and John 3:8 read the way they do. Nephesh is soul, life, appetite, throat, and person. Translators must choose one English word where Hebrew held several, and that choice is where a great deal of interpretation quietly happens.

The letters are also numbers

Aleph is one, bet is two, yod is ten, taw is four hundred. This is real and ancient — and the honest date matters: using Hebrew letters as numerals is not attested in the biblical period. The earliest hard evidence is Hellenistic, and the securely dated anchor is coinage struck in 78 BC. So the number values are genuinely Jewish and genuinely old — and they are a later convention applied to an earlier text. Every number claim on this site inherits that caveat.

The words your Bible left in their own language

Amen. Hallelujah. Hosanna. Selah. Abba. Every English Bible carries a handful of words it declined to translate — and each one is a door into how the original readers heard the text. When Jesus says “one jot or one tittle,” he is naming the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the smallest stroke of a pen, and making an argument about how carefully God keeps his word.

Open the glossary — 23words explained →

A sample

Go further

How Hebrew works

The whole alphabet on one page, with the confidence grades side by side.

The word workbench

Every Hebrew and Greek word in the Bible, with its occurrences and forms.

The Taw museum

One letter, followed all the way down — the mark of Ezekiel 9.

Psalm 119 in the reader

The alphabet walking down the longest chapter in the Bible, eight verses a letter.

How Greek works

The New Testament's own language, opened the same way.

Strong's concordance

Look up any word in your English Bible and follow it to its original.