Hebrew Roots · letter 3 of 22
A hunter's throwstick — and the letter of the redeemer who buys his own back.
Sounds like
g
Its number
3
Its name means
gaml
Final form
none
Gimel is the third letter, and the story most people have heard about it is wrong. It is usually said to be a camel, because the Hebrew word for camel, gamal, sounds like the letter's name. But the oldest form of the sign looks like a curved throwing stick, and that is what the sign's original name most likely meant. The camel came later, from people guessing at the name — a good reminder of how easily a plausible story replaces the evidence.
The letter carries one of the Bible's great words: goel, the kinsman-redeemer. A goel was the near relative whose job it was to buy back what his family had lost — land, freedom, even a widow's future. Boaz is one. Job reaches for the word from the ash-heap. Israel's God takes the title for himself.
As always: the throwstick is where the shape came from, not a secret hiding inside every word that starts with gimel. Goel does not mean "redeemer" because of a stick. It means redeemer because that is what the word meant to the people who used it.
Everything in this band is checkable — something the biblical text or the manuscripts that carry it demonstrably do with this letter.
Verses 17 through 24 are gimel's block, and the first word of verse 17 is gemol — "deal bountifully with thy servant." It is the same root family as the word for repaying or dealing out to someone, and it starts the stanza that contains one of the psalm's most quoted lines: "Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law."
Goel is a family word before it is a theological one. When a man lost his land or his liberty, the nearest relative with the means to act had the right — and the duty — to buy it back. Boaz does exactly that for Ruth and Naomi. Job, sitting in ruin, says he knows his goel lives. Isaiah puts the title on God himself, over and over. The word is doing real legal work every time; that is what makes it land so hard when God claims it.
“Then the women said to Naomi, “Blessed be the LORD, who has not left you this day without a kinsman-redeemer. May his name become famous in Israel.”
Ruth 4:14 — Boaz the redeemer→
“But I know that my Redeemer lives, and in the end He will stand upon the earth.”
Job 19:25 — "I know that my Redeemer liveth"→
“Thus says the LORD, the King and Redeemer of Israel, the LORD of Hosts: “I am the first and I am the last, and there is no God but Me.”
Isaiah 44:6 — "his redeemer, Jehovah of hosts"→
In every one of the Bible's alphabet poems, gimel takes the third step. In Psalm 34 that step is "O magnify the LORD with me" — gadlu, a gimel word meaning to make great. In Proverbs 31 it is the line about the worthy woman doing her husband good and not evil all the days of her life.
“Surely none who wait for You will be put to shame; but those who are faithless without cause will be disgraced.”
Psalm 25:3→
“Magnify the LORD with me; let us exalt His name together.”
Psalm 34:3 — "O magnify Jehovah"→
“Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised; His greatness is unsearchable.”
Psalm 145:3→
“She brings him good and not harm all the days of her life.”
Proverbs 31:12→
“Judah has gone into exile under affliction and harsh slavery; she dwells among the nations but finds no place to rest. All her pursuers have overtaken her in the midst of her distress.”
Lamentations 1:3→
גֹּאֵל
goel — kinsman-redeemer
The relative who buys back what the family lost — Boaz for Ruth, and God for Israel.
The Kinsman-Redeemer→
גָּמָל
gamal — camel
The word that gave the letter its popular nickname — by sound, not by history.
Open the word→
גַּן
gan — garden
The enclosed garden of Genesis 2 — a planted place with a boundary around it.
Open the word→
גָּדוֹל
gadol — great
"Great is Jehovah, and greatly to be praised" — the psalms' standard word for size and weight.
Open the word→
What follows is devotional reading — meaning laid on top of the sign by readers who loved it, not a fact about what Hebrew words mean. It is carried here because it is old, beautiful, and genuinely part of how this letter has been received. It is kept behind this door so nobody mistakes it for grammar.
The Talmud preserves a schoolroom game in which each letter's name is heard as a phrase. Gimel and dalet, read together, become gomel dalim — "showing kindness to the poor" — and the tradition adds that gimel's leg is stretched out toward dalet because the giver runs after the one in need. That is a piece of ancient Jewish teaching about the letters, and a lovely one. It is not an explanation of what gimel-words mean, and the Talmud is not offering it as one.
Read this way by: Rabbinic tradition, b. Shabbat 104a (Rodkinson English translation, 1903 — public domain)