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Hebrew Roots · letter 15 of 22

Samek

The prop under the text, and under the ones who fall.

How the shape travelled: three historical stages

How sure we are of this ancient picture

Likely

Original sign

The djed pillar, a support, braced three times.

Paleo-Hebrew

The same braced post, tightened up.

Modern square

The letter as every printed Hebrew Bible sets it.

On the picture: Minority reading: a fish.

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 plain S. Hebrew has two letters for this sound: samek, and sin, which is shin wearing its dot on the left, and telling them apart is a matter of knowing the word, not hearing it.

Written s in scholarly books.

Its number

60

letters carried number values from the Hellenistic era on

Its name means

support

Final form

none

this letter does not change at the end of a word

Samek is a pillar. The sign is an upright with crossbars, the name means a support, and its verb, samakh, is what you do when you lean your whole weight on something and it holds.

That verb does two jobs in Scripture that are worth putting side by side. A worshipper lays his hand on the head of the animal that will die for him: same word, and it means pressing down, not touching. And God holds up the people who are falling over: "The LORD upholds all who fall." One word for the hand that transfers guilt and the hand that catches a man.

Samek also has a job no other letter shares except pe. Long before anyone numbered chapters or verses, Hebrew scribes divided the text into sections, and they marked them with letters: a samek in the margin means one kind of break, a pe means another. This letter organizes the Bible.

Where Scripture itself plays with this letter

The verse that stands where the gap is

Psalm 145 walks the alphabet, and the nun verse is missing from the traditional Hebrew text. The letter that follows nun is samek, and samek's verse is "The LORD upholds all who fall and lifts up all who are bowed down." The upholding word is somekh, the letter's own verb. That the psalm's word for holding people up stands immediately after the place where a line has gone missing is a fact about the page, checkable in any Hebrew Bible. What readers have made of it belongs in the devotional band, where it is labeled.

The letter that marks the paragraphs

Chapters are medieval and verse numbers are from the 1500s, but the Hebrew Bible has always had its own sections, and two letters do the marking. A samek in the margin signals a closed section: a break inside a run of text. A pe signals an open one, where the scribe started a fresh line. These marks are older than any chapter division, they are already visible in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and they show a reader where the ancient scribes themselves thought one thing ended and another began. Two letters, quietly organizing the whole book.

The samek stanza of Psalm 119: "Uphold me"

Verses 113 to 120 belong to samek, and the poet puts the letter's own verb inside them: "Uphold me according unto thy word, that I may live: and let me not be ashamed of my hope" (verse 116). The Hebrew is samkeni, hold me up. The stanza that has to start every line with the prop letter asks God to be the prop.

Words that begin here

סָמַךְ

samakh — to lean on, to uphold

The hand pressed on a sacrifice's head, and the hand that holds up everyone who is falling.

Open the word→

סֵפֶר

sepher — book, scroll, document

Every scroll, letter and record in the Old Testament is one of these, including the ones in heaven.

Open the word→

סוֹד

sod — council, close counsel, secret

"He revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets" — the inner circle where a decision is taken.

Open the word→

סֻלָּם

sullam — ladder, stairway

It occurs exactly once in the whole Bible: Jacob's ladder, at Bethel.

Jacob's ladder→

The eight verses that are Samek’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 113–120 are the Samek stanza — eight lines that all open on ס. Every line stands open below, with one preacher’s comment on it directly underneath.

  1. “The double-minded I despise, but Your law I love.”

    Psalm 119:113→

    “, SAMECH.--The Fifteenth Part. SAMECH. I hate vain thoughts,.... Or thoughts: evil thoughts are undoubtedly meant, no other can be the object of hatred to a good man; they are such as are contrary to the law of God, and forbidden by it, mentioned in the next clause as the object of love, in opposition to these; and which are abominable to God, and defiling to men; should be forsaken, need pardon; and, if not pardoned, will be brought into judgment, and there exposed, and men punished for them.”

    John GillExposition of the Old Testament (1748-1763)on Psalm 119:113→

  5. “Uphold me, and I will be saved, that I may always regard Your statutes.”

    Psalm 119:117→

    “Hold thou me up - Keep me from falling in the trials and temptations of life. The Hebrew word means to prop, uphold, support. The Septuagint is, “Aid me.” And I shall be safe - And I shall be saved; or, that I may be saved. It is an acknowledgment of entire dependence on God for salvation - temporal and eternal. And I will have respect ... - I will look to thy statutes; I will have them always in my eye. Compare the notes at Psa 119:6.”

    Albert BarnesNotes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869)on Psalm 119:117→

  6. “You reject all who stray from Your statutes, for their deceitfulness is in vain.”

    Psalm 119:118→

    “Thou hast trodden down all them that err from thy statutes - Compare the notes at Psa 119:21. Rather, “Thou hast made light of,” or “thou despisest.” The Hebrew word means properly to suspend in a balance; to weigh. Then it means to lift up lightly or easily; and then, to make light of; to contemn; to regard anything as “light.” The Septuagint and Latin Vulgate render it, “Thou dost despise.” That is, God regards them as of no account; as a light substance of no value; as chaff which the wind carries away. Compare Job 21:18; Psa 1:4; Psa 35:5; Isa 17:13. For their deceit is falsehood - This seems to be a truism - for deceit must imply falsehood. In the original this is an emphatic way of declaring the whole thing to be false, as the Hebrew language often expresses emphasis by mere repetition - thus “pits, pits,” meaning many pits. The psalmist first characterizes their conduct as deceitful - as that which cannot be relied on - as that which must fail in the end; he then speaks of this system on which they acted as altogether a “lie” - as that which is utterly “false;” thus giving, as it were, a double emphasis to the statement, and showing how utterly delusive and vain it must be.”

    Albert BarnesNotes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869)on Psalm 119:118→

  8. “My flesh trembles in awe of You; I stand in fear of Your judgments.”

    Psalm 119:120→

    “O the divine mystery of that cross, on which weakness hangs, might is free, vices are nailed and triumphal trophies raised. So that a certain saint said, "Pierce my flesh with nails for fear of you"; he says not with nails of iron but of fear and faith. For the bonds of virtue are stronger than those of punishment. Lastly, Peter was bound by his faith, when he had followed the Lord as far as the hall of the high priest; no one had bound and punishment had not loosened Peter, who had been bound by faith.”

    Ambrose of MilanOn the Holy Spirit 1.9.108 (397)on Psalm 119:120→

More voices on these same eight verses2

  • “Depart from me, ye evildoers,.... The same with the evil thinkers, Psa 119:113; According to Aben Ezra, they that think evil commonly do it; as they devise it, they commit it.”

    John GillExposition of the Old Testament (1748-1763)on Psalm 119:115→

  • “The "judgments" are those on the wicked (Ps 119:119). Joyful hope goes hand in hand with fear (Hab 3:16-18).”

    Jamieson, Fausset & BrownCommentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)on Psalm 119:120→

How readers have meditated on this letter

✧Where the alphabet stumbles, the next letter holds it upa devotional reading

The Talmud's discussion of Psalm 145's missing nun verse ends by pointing at the line that follows: David would not write the word for "fallen" into a praise psalm, and yet he supported the fallen in the very next breath: "The LORD upholds all who fall." Jewish and Christian preachers alike have loved the arrangement: a gap in the alphabet, and then the propping letter. The adjacency is in the text; the sermon is a reading, and it has been preached for well over a thousand years.

Read this way by: b. Berakhot 4b (English: Rodkinson tr., 1903, public domain); repeated widely in Christian preaching on Psalm 145

✧The pillara devotional reading

The devotional stream reads samek's column as support, stability, and what holds a thing up, and here the reading and the lexicon happen to point the same direction, since the name really is a word for a prop. That agreement is a coincidence of this letter, not a method that works across the alphabet. The sign's origin and a word's meaning are two different claims even when they land in the same place.

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