Skip to content
mannafest.faith
Read

Hebrew Roots · letter 16 of 22

Ayin

The eye, and the letter Israel's scribes wrote oversized in the nation's daily confession.

How the shape travelled: three historical stages

How sure we are of this ancient picture

Well established

Original sign

An eye, pupil and all.

Paleo-Hebrew

Just the outline left, one closed loop.

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 sound English simply does not have: a squeeze at the very bottom of the throat, deeper than any English consonant is made. To an English ear it mostly registers as silence with a catch in it, which is why writers mark it with a little raised hook (ʿ) rather than a letter.

Written ʿ in scholarly books, the sign for the deep throat sound English has no letter for.

Its number

70

letters carried number values from the Hellenistic era on

Its name means

eye, spring

Final form

none

this letter does not change at the end of a word

Ayin is a drawing of an eye, and ʿayin is the Hebrew word for an eye. It is also, in the very same dictionary entry, the Hebrew word for a spring of water. Hebrew looked at a spring bubbling out of a hillside and called it the ground's eye, which is why the map of Israel is dotted with En-this and En-that.

The sound is the hard part. Ayin is made low in the throat, below where English makes any of its consonants, and an English speaker who tries it usually produces either nothing at all or a small cough. Hebrew has two of these deep throat letters; English has none. That is not a defect in either language, it is what happens when a sound has nowhere to land.

Where Scripture itself plays with this letter

The oversized ayin in Israel's daily confession

Open a Hebrew Bible at Deuteronomy 6:4 and two letters are drawn larger than everything around them: the ayin that ends shemaʿ (“Hear”) and the dalet that ends ʾechad (“one”). This is not a printer's flourish. The Masoretes, the Jewish scribes who copied and safeguarded the text through the early Middle Ages, catalogued the enlarged letters deliberately, and they are visible in the great manuscripts.

Put the two big letters side by side and they spell ʿed, the Hebrew word for “witness.” The scribes who wrote them that way knew exactly what they were doing. What the big letters do not do is change a single word of the verse: the sentence says what it says either way. This is a scribal act laid on top of the text, ancient and visible, and it is one of the strangest true things in the Bible's transmission.

Pe before ayin, the reversal that was dug out of the ground

Four chapters of Lamentations are alphabet poems: each verse begins with the next letter of the alphabet, in order. Chapter 1 runs normally, ayin at verse 16, then pe at verse 17. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 do the opposite: pe comes first, then ayin.

For centuries that was written off as a scribal slip repeated three times. It is not. Alphabets scratched onto pottery long before the exile, at ʿIzbet Ṣarṭah (about 1200 BC), Tel Zayit (tenth century BC) and Kuntillet ʿAjrud (about 800 BC), carry the same reversal. The poets were not slipping. They were using an order that was older than the one that eventually won.

This is the one place in this whole section where the biblical text and a physical potsherd shake hands. Pe's room carries the other half of it.

The eye letter keeps landing on the eye verses

In an alphabet poem the poet has to find a word starting with the right letter, and more than once the word he reached for was “eyes.” Psalm 145's ayin verse is “The eyes of all look to You.” Psalm 34's ayin verse is “The eyes of the LORD are on the righteous.” Psalm 119's ayin stanza, eight verses, all beginning with this letter, sits at verses 121 to 128.

It is a lovely coincidence of craft, and worth enjoying as exactly that: a poet under a rule, choosing a good word that fit it. It is not a code, and the poems never claim it is.

Words that begin here

עַיִן

ʿayin — eye; spring of water

One word for both, the springs are how the land sees.

Open the word→

עוֹלָם

ʿolam — age, forever, the vanishing point

Not quite “eternity”, it means as far as you can see in either direction.

Open the word→

עֵד

ʿed — witness

The word the two enlarged letters of the Shema spell between them.

The Shema→

עָוֺן

ʿawon — iniquity, guilt, the weight of it

One of the three great words for sin, and the one that carries consequence with it.

Open the word→

The eight verses that are Ayin’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 121–128 are the Ayin stanza — eight lines that all open on ע. Every line stands open below, with one preacher’s comment on it directly underneath.

  1. “I have done what is just and right; do not leave me to my oppressors.”

    Psalm 119:121→

    “"I have done judgment and justice." This was a great thing for an Eastern ruler to say at any time, for these despots mostly cared more for gain than justice. Some of them altogether neglected their duty, and would not even do judgment at all, preferring their pleasures to their duties; and many more of them sold their judgments to the highest bidders by taking bribes, or regarding the persons of men. Some rulers gave neither judgment nor justice, others gave judgment without justice, but David gave judgment and justice, and saw that his sentences were carried out.”

    Charles SpurgeonThe Treasury of David, Vol. 6 (1882)on Psalm 119:121→

  2. “Ensure Your servant’s well-being; do not let the arrogant oppress me.”

    Psalm 119:122→

    “Be surety for thy servant for good,.... The psalmist was, in a like case with Hezekiah, oppressed; and therefore desires the Lord would undertake for him, appear on his side, and defend him, Psa 38:14; and if God himself is the surety of his people, and engages in their behalf, they need fear no enemy. What David prays to God to be for him, that Christ is for all his people, Heb 7:”

    John GillExposition of the Old Testament (1748-1763)on Psalm 119:122→

  5. “I am Your servant; give me understanding, that I may know Your testimonies.”

    Psalm 119:125→

    “The blessed David asks the Lord for that very understanding by which he can recognize God's commands, which he well knew were written in the book of the law, when he says "I am your servant: O give me understanding that I may learn your commandments." Certainly he was in possession of understanding, which had been granted to him by nature, and also had at his fingers' ends a knowledge of God's commands which were preserved in writing in the law.”

    John CassianCONFERENCE 3:15 (435)on Psalm 119:125→

  6. “It is time for the LORD to act, for they have broken Your law.”

    Psalm 119:126→

    “It is time for thee, Lord, to work,.... To send the Messiah, to work righteousness; to fulfil the law, and vindicate the honour of it, broken by men. It was always a notion of the Jews that the time of the Messiah's coming would be when it was a time of great wickedness in the earth; and which seems to agree with the word of God, and was true in fact; see Mal 2:”

    John GillExposition of the Old Testament (1748-1763)on Psalm 119:126→

  7. “Therefore I love Your commandments more than gold, even the purest gold.”

    Psalm 119:127→

    “Therefore I love thy commandments,.... Because he was the Lord's servant, as Aben Ezra; or rather because the wicked made void the law. His love was the more inflamed and increased towards it by the contempt it was had in by others; he preferred it above gold, yea, above fine gold; or gold of Phez, a place where the best gold was, as was thought: the Septuagint and Vulgate Latin versions render it "the topaz"; and the Syriac and Arabic versions, "precious stones" or "gems"; see Psa 119:72.”

    John GillExposition of the Old Testament (1748-1763)on Psalm 119:127→

  8. “Therefore I admire all Your precepts and hate every false way.”

    Psalm 119:128→

    “All thy precepts concerning all things to be right - There are too many supplied words here to leave the text unsuspected. All the ancient versions, except the Chaldee, seem to have omitted the second כל col, All and read the text thus: “Therefore I have walked straight in all thy precepts.” I go straight on in all thy precepts, hating every false way. I neither turn to the right hand nor to the left; the false ways are crooked; thy way is straight. I am going to heaven, and that way lies straight before me. To walk in the way of falsity I cannot, because I hate it; and I hate such ways because God hates them.”

    Adam ClarkeCommentary on the Bible (1832)on Psalm 119:128→

More voices on these same eight verses1

  • “Be surety for thy servant - ערב arob, give a pledge or token that thou wilt help me in times of necessity. Or, Be bail for thy servant. What a word is this! Pledge thyself for me, that thou wilt produce me safely at the judgment of the great day. Then sustain and keep me blameless till the coming of Christ. Neither of these two verses has any of the ten words in reference to God’s law or attributes. The judgment and the justice refer to the psalmist’s own conduct in Psa 119:1”

    Adam ClarkeCommentary on the Bible (1832)on Psalm 119:122→

How readers have meditated on this letter

✧The witness written largea devotional reading

Jewish teaching has long read the two oversized letters of Deuteronomy 6:4 as a charge to the reader: say this sentence with attention, and you have taken your place as a witness, ʿed, to the God it confesses. Say it carelessly, and the big letters stand there unclaimed.

This is a reading laid on top of a manuscript fact. The enlarged ayin and dalet are really in the text; what they are for is tradition's answer, not the verse's. It has shaped how the Shema has been said, twice a day, for a very long time.

Read this way by: Jewish tradition on the enlarged letters (otiyot gedolot), catalogued by C. D. Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible (1897)

✧The eye and the springa devotional reading

That one Hebrew word covers both an eye and a spring of water has fed a good deal of devotional reflection: the God who sees is also the God who gives water in a dry place, and the two are somehow the same act of attention.

The double sense is a plain fact of the dictionary. The meditation is a reading laid on it, a beautiful one, and not a claim about what the letter or the word secretly means.

Read this way by: A common devotional reflection in Jewish and Christian teaching; the double sense of ʿayin is documented in Brown-Driver-Briggs (1906)