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Hebrew Roots · letter 13 of 22

Mem

The water letter, and the only letter that closes in the middle of a word.

How the shape travelled: three historical stages

How sure we are of this ancient picture

Well established

Original sign

Water, two running waves.

Paleo-Hebrew

One wave left, with a long tail dropped from its end.

final form

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

M, as in English. At the end of a word mem closes up into a square: ם.

Written m in scholarly books.

Its number

40

letters carried number values from the Hellenistic era on

Its name means

water

Final form

ם

the shape it takes at the end of a word

Mem is water. The sign is a wave, its name is the Hebrew word for water, and the letter has kept that shape for nearly four thousand years; Greek mu and English M are the same zigzag with the corners knocked off.

It is also one of the five letters that change form at the end of a word. Ordinary mem is open at the bottom left; final mem, ם, is closed on all four sides, a sealed box. Hebrew scribes have counted, catalogued and guarded that difference for two thousand years, and in one single verse of the Bible they kept a closed mem where it does not belong.

The words mem carries are the ones a kingdom is made of: mayim, water; melek, king; mashiach, the anointed one, Messiah. And Moses, whose name the text itself explains by the water he was pulled out of.

Where Scripture itself plays with this letter

The closed mem in the middle of a word

In the great birth prophecy of Isaiah: "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given" — the next verse opens with the phrase English Bibles render "Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end." The Hebrew word there, l'marbeh, is written with the closed, end-of-word form of mem sitting in the middle of the word. It is the only place in the entire Hebrew Bible where that happens. The Masoretes, the scribes who counted every letter, recorded the oddity and copied it forward rather than tidying it up. What they did not do is say why, and neither does the text. (English Bibles number this verse Isaiah 9:7; the Hebrew Bible numbers it 9:6.)

Water is the Bible's first surface

Before there is land, there is water. "The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" — mayim, in the second verse of Genesis. Water is what God divides on day two, what drowns the world in Noah's day, what splits at the Red Sea, and what a prophet strikes and a Messiah walks on. The letter that draws a wave is doing a lot of work in this book.

The mem stanza of Psalm 119: "Oh how love I thy law"

Mem gets verses 97 to 104, and the stanza opens with the psalm's most quoted line: "Oh how love I thy law! It is my meditation all the day." The first word, mah, is mem's. Six verses later he says the thing that explains the other 175: "How sweet are thy words unto my taste! yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth."

Words that begin here

מַיִם

mayim — water, waters

The letter's own name, and always plural in Hebrew: water is never spoken of as one thing.

Open the word→

מֶלֶךְ

melek — king

Israel asked for one, got one, and spent the rest of the Old Testament measuring them against God.

Open the word→

מָשִׁיחַ

mashiach — anointed one, Messiah

Someone with oil poured on him for an office: priest, king, prophet. The Greek for it is Christos.

The prophecies→

מֹשֶׁה

Mosheh — Moses

The text explains the name itself: "because I drew him out of the water."

Open the word→

The eight verses that are Mem’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 97–104 are the Mem stanza — eight lines that all open on מ. Every line stands open below, with one preacher’s comment on it directly underneath.

  2. “Your commandments make me wiser than my enemies, for they are always with me.”

    Psalm 119:98→

    “of knowledge, both of the matter of all useful, moral truth, and an experience of its application. wiser than mine enemies--with all their carnal cunning (De 4:6, 8). they are ever with me--The Hebrew is, rather singular, "it is ever with me"; the commandments forming ONE complete whole, Thy law.”

    Jamieson, Fausset & BrownCommentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)on Psalm 119:98→

  3. “I have more insight than all my teachers, for Your testimonies are my meditation.”

    Psalm 119:99→

    “But what means the following verse, "I have more understanding than my teachers"? [Psalm 119:99]. Who is he who had more understanding than all his teachers? Who, I ask, is he, who dares to prefer himself in understanding above all the Prophets, who not only by speaking taught with so excellent authority those who lived with them, but also their posterity by writing?...What is here said, could not have been spoken in Solomon's person....I recognise plainly Him who had more understanding than His teachers, since when He was a boy of twelve years of age, Jesus remained behind in Jerusalem, and was found by His parents after three days' space, "sitting in the temple among the doctors, hearing them and asking them questions." [Luke 2:42-46] The Son Himself has said, "As My Father has taught Me, I speak these things." [John 8:28] It is very difficult to understand this of the Person of the Word; unless we can comprehend that it is the same thing for the Son to be taught as to be begotten of the Father...."He took upon Himself the form of a servant;" [Philippians 2:7] for when He had assumed this form, men of more advanced age might think Him fit to be taught as a boy; but He whom the Father taught, had more understanding than all His teachers. "For Your testimonies," He says, "are my study." For this reason He had more understanding than all His teachers, because He studied the testimonies of God, which, as concerning Himself, He knew better than they, when He spoke these words: "You sent unto John, and he bore witness unto the truth. But I receive not testimony from man," etc. [John 5:33-36]”

    Augustine of HippoExposition on Psalm 119 (430)on Psalm 119:99→

  7. “How sweet are Your words to my taste— sweeter than honey in my mouth!”

    Psalm 119:103→

    “The soul presses forward for a glimpse of hidden mysteries, to the very abode of the Word, to the very dwelling place of that highest Good, and his light and brightness. In that bosom and secret dwelling place of the Father the soul hastens to hear his words, and having heard them, it finds them sweeter than all things. Let the prophet who has tasted this sweetness teach you, when he says, "How sweet are your words to my lips, above honeycomb to my mouth."”

    Ambrose of MilanLetter 79 (397)on Psalm 119:103→

  8. “I gain understanding from Your precepts; therefore I hate every false way.”

    Psalm 119:104→

    “Through thy precepts I get understanding,.... Of the will of God; of his worship, the nature and manner of it; of his ordinances, their use and importance; and of his doctrines, and the excellency of them; therefore I hate every false way; of worship; all superstition and will worship, the commandments and inventions of men, and every false doctrine; all lies in hypocrisy, for no lie is of the truth; every thing that is contrary to the word of God, and is not according to truth and godliness. The Targum is, "I hate every lying man.''”

    John GillExposition of the Old Testament (1748-1763)on Psalm 119:104→

More voices on these same eight verses1

  • “THIS is a time of feasting and we may as well have our feast as other people have theirs. Let us see whether there is not something for our spiritual palate, something to satisfy our spiritual appetite, that we may eat, and be content, and rejoice before the Lord. Do you not think that two of the words in our text are very strange? If you had written them, would you not have said, "How sweet are Your Words unto my ears"? The Psalmist says, "How sweet are Your Words unto my palate!"”

    Charles SpurgeonThe Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 2340: “The Best Christmas Fare” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition) (1893)on Psalm 119:103→

How readers have meditated on this letter

✧The sealed mem of Isaiah 9a devotional reading

Both Jewish and Christian preachers have read the closed mem in l'marbeh as meaning something: a kingdom shut up until its appointed time, an increase that is sealed and then opened, and in some Christian homiletics a sign of the closed womb of the virgin birth in the very verse about the child. These readings are old, and they are readings. What the manuscripts give us is the fact: a final-form mem, once, word-medially, guarded by scribes who would not correct it. The reason was not written down. Everything after that is interpretation, and should be labeled as such wherever it is preached.

Read this way by: Jewish and Christian homiletical tradition; the manuscript fact is catalogued in C. D. Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible (1897)

✧Water as depth and chaosa devotional reading

The devotional word-picture stream reads mem's wave as the deep, the crowd, the unknown: what flows and cannot be held. Scripture itself does use water that way, from the deep of Genesis 1 to the sea that is no more in Revelation 21. But it does so with words and images, not by means of a letter, and words starting with mem are not thereby about water. The imagery is real; the derivation is not.

Read this way by: The modern "Hebrew word pictures" devotional stream (Frank Seekins; Jeff A. Benner) — named, not endorsed