Hebrew Roots · letter 1 of 22

Aleph

The silent first letter, named for the ox, strength that serves.

How the shape travelled: three historical stages

How sure we are of this ancient picture

Well established

Original sign

An ox head seen from the front, horns up.

Paleo-Hebrew

The head tipped onto its side, horns now pointing left.

Modern square

The letter as every printed Hebrew Bible sets it.

Stage 1 has no Unicode encoding, so it stays a drawing, simplified from the copies published by the scholars who studied the inscriptions themselves: Gardiner, Cross, Naveh, Hamilton. Ancient scribes varied, and no two carvings cut a letter exactly alike. Stages 2 and 3 are real Unicode text.

Sounds like

A silent catch in the throat, the tiny stop you make between the syllables of "uh-oh." Aleph carries whatever vowel rides on it; by itself it makes no sound you can hear.

Written ʾ in scholarly books, the sign for the silent catch in the throat.

Its number

letters carried number values from the Hellenistic era on

Its name means

Final form

none

this letter does not change at the end of a word

Nearly every alphabet on earth is walking in this letter's footsteps, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Cyrillic, and the one you are reading right now. Aleph is the first letter of the first alphabet family, and its name simply means "ox." The sign began, some three to four thousand years ago, as a little drawing of an ox's head, you can still see the horns if you turn a capital A upside down.

Here is the strange and wonderful part: aleph makes no sound of its own. The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet is silent, a small opening of the throat before a vowel. Jewish teachers have loved that fact for centuries: the alphabet begins with something you cannot hear.

Where Scripture itself plays with this letter

A dozen Bible poems open here

Twelve Bible poems walk the alphabet letter by letter, and every one of them starts its walk at aleph, the Psalms below, the good wife of Proverbs 31, and four of the five chapters of Lamentations. Count Psalms 9-10, where the pattern is broken and half the letters are missing, and Nahum 1, where scholars still argue whether the pattern is really there, and the number goes to fourteen. In Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the Bible, the first eight verses all begin with aleph, a full stanza built on this one letter.

The word "truth" spans the whole alphabet

The Hebrew word for truth is ʾemet, spelled aleph, mem, taw: the first letter of the alphabet, the middle letter, and the last. The rabbis noticed and loved it: truth reaches from beginning to end. That is an observation about a spelling, laid on the word by its readers, and it is a beautiful one.

From aleph to taw, Hebrew's A to Z

Hebrew says "from aleph to taw" exactly the way English says "from A to Z" — the whole of a thing. When Revelation calls Jesus "the Alpha and the Omega," it uses the Greek alphabet's version of the same idiom: the beginning and the end, and everything between.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and was and is to come—the Almighty.
Revelation 1:8→

Words that begin here

אֱלֹהִים

ʾElohim — God

The Bible's third word, and its subject: "In the beginning God created."

Open the word→

אֱמֶת

ʾemet — truth

First, middle, and last letters of the alphabet, the rabbis' favorite spelling in the language.

Open the word→

אָב

ʾav — father

The very first entry in the Hebrew dictionary, and the word behind "Abba."

Open the word→

אֶחָד

ʾechad — one

"Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is One" — the Shema's last word.

The Shema→

The eight verses that are Aleph’s own

Psalm 119 is the alphabet walking down the longest chapter in the Bible. Every letter gets eight verses, and every one of those eight verses begins with it. Verses 1–8 are the Aleph stanza — eight lines that all open on א. Every line stands open below, with one preacher’s comment on it directly underneath.

“Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the Law of the LORD.”
Psalm 119:1→
“And as he is Firstborn among brothers and rose from the dead "the firstfruits of them that slept"; so, since it became him "in all things to have the preeminence," therefore he is created "a beginning of ways," that we, walking along it and entering through him who says, "I am the Way" and "the Door" and partaking of the knowledge of the Father, may also hear the words, "Blessed are the undefiled in the Way," and "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."”
Athanasius of AlexandriaOrations against the Arians 2.21.64 (c. 356-360)on Psalm 119:1→
“Blessed are those who keep His testimonies and seek Him with all their heart.”
Psalm 119:2→
“They do no iniquity; they walk in His ways.”
Psalm 119:3→
“You have ordained Your precepts, that we should keep them diligently.”
Psalm 119:4→
“Oh, that my ways were committed to keeping Your statutes!”
Psalm 119:5→
“Then I would not be ashamed when I consider all Your commandments.”
Psalm 119:6→
“"Then I shall not be confounded, when I shall have regard to all your commandments." Blessed James says: "Whoever shall keep the whole law, yet offend in one point, is become guilty of all": not that for one transgression he is punished with as much …”
BonaventureCollationes de decem praeceptis, Collation 6 (Paris, Lent 1267)on Psalm 119:6→
“I will praise You with an upright heart when I learn Your righteous judgments.”
Psalm 119:7→
“"I will confess unto Thee," he saith, "O Lord, in the directing of my heart; in that I shall have learned the judgments of Thy righteousness" [Psalm 119:7]. This is not the confession of sins, but of praise; as He also saith in whom there was no sin, "I will confess unto Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth;" [Matthew 11:25] and as it is written in the Book of Ecclesiasticus, "Thus shalt thou say in confession, of all the works of God, that they are very good." [Sirach 39:15-16] "I will confess unto Thee," he saith, "in the directing of my heart." Indeed, if my ways are made straight, I will confess unto Thee, since Thou hast done it, and this is Thy praise, and not mine. ...”
Augustine of HippoON THE PSALMS, Psalm 119 (430)on Psalm 119:7→
“I will keep Your statutes; do not utterly forsake me.”
Psalm 119:8→

More voices on these same eight verses2

“Blessed are the undefiled in the way,.... Who are in the right way to heaven and happiness, which is Jesus Christ; the strait gate, and narrow way to eternal life; the only true way of life and salvation, in which way believers walk by faith.”
John GillExposition of the Old Testament (1748-1763)on Psalm 119:1→
“ANY attempt to keep the Law of God with the view of being saved thereby is sure to end in failure. So contrary is it to the express warnings of the Divine Lawgiver and so much does it run counter to the whole Gospel, that he who ventures to seek justification by his own merits ought to be ashamed of his presumption. When God tells us that salvation is not by the works of the Law, are you not ashamed of trying to procure it by your obedience to its precepts?”
Charles SpurgeonThe Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 1443: “A Clear Conscience” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition) (1878)on Psalm 119:6→

How readers have meditated on this letter

✧The silent letter and the God who speaksa devotional reading

A tradition passed down in Jewish teaching says that at Sinai, Israel heard from God's own mouth only the first letter of the first word, and that word ("I," ʾanokhi) begins with aleph, the letter with no sound at all. All of revelation, the tradition says, unfolds from a silence no ear could actually hear. This is a devotional reading laid on top of the letter, a meditation, not a fact about grammar, and it has fed reverence for the word of God for centuries.

Read this way by: Hasidic tradition (attributed to R. Mendel of Rymanov), reported in later Jewish teaching

✧One God, letter of onenessa devotional reading

Aleph's number is one, and devotional readers have long heard the letter whisper the Shema: "the LORD is One" (Deuteronomy 6:4). The letter's very construction in the square script, two yods joined by a diagonal waw, was read by the rabbis as a picture of things above joined to things below. A reading on top of the sign, not a fact about the word, and a window into how deeply this tradition loves its letters.

Read this way by: Rabbinic tradition on the letterform; the Shema connection is ancient and widespread