רResh

“Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law.” The jot is iota, Greek for yod, the smallest letter in the Hebrew square script. The tittle is keraia, “little horn”: the tiny stroke that keeps two near-identical letters from becoming each other.

Resh is one half of the most famous of those pairs. ד dalet and ר resh differ by one small corner. So do ב and כ. So do ה and ח. Copying Hebrew faithfully means keeping strokes that small, and a scribe who lets one slide changes a word.

Notice what Jesus's argument is and is not. It is not about hidden meanings inside letters. It is about preservation, the text is kept down to the stroke. Yod's room carries this one in full.

The Bible's first word is bereshit, and inside it sits reshit, “beginning,” “the first of a thing,” the word also used for the firstfruits of a harvest. Behind reshit stands roʾsh, “head.” Wisdom in Proverbs says the same word about herself: “The LORD created me as His first course.”

Psalm 119's resh stanza, verses 153 to 160, opens on another resh word: reʾeh, “Look upon my affliction and rescue me.”

Hebrew has a single word where English needs three. Ruach is the wind that blows, the breath in your lungs, and the Spirit of God, and the Bible plays on all three without apology.

Genesis 1:2: the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Psalm 147: “he causeth his wind to blow, and the waters flow.” And Ezekiel 37, in the valley of dry bones, uses the one word four ways in a single scene: prophesy to the breath, come from the four winds, breathe on these slain, and they lived.

A translator has to pick one English word each time. The Hebrew reader hears all three at once.