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Hebrew Roots · letter 22 of 22

Taw

The mark: the last letter, and in Ezekiel's own script it was drawn as a cross.

How the shape travelled: three historical stages

How sure we are of this ancient picture

Well established

Original sign

A mark, the scratch you make to sign a thing.

Paleo-Hebrew

The same mark, tilted: the ✕ of the old inscriptions.

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

T, and in the older pronunciation a soft th when the letter loses its inner dot. Six Hebrew letters soften like that; taw is the last of them, and the one English speakers hear most easily.

Written t / th in scholarly books.

Its number

400

letters carried number values from the Hellenistic era on

Its name means

a mark

Final form

none

this letter does not change at the end of a word

Taw is the end of the alphabet and the plainest sign in it: a mark. Not a picture of an object, a mark: the scratch you make on a thing to say it is spoken for. The name taw is still an ordinary Hebrew noun with exactly that meaning, and the Bible uses it as one.

That noun turns up in one of the strangest scenes in the prophets. In Ezekiel 9, a man with a writer's inkhorn is sent through Jerusalem to set a taw, a mark, on the foreheads of everyone who grieves over the city's sin, and the destroyers are told to pass those people by. And in the script Ezekiel's own scribes used, the letter taw was drawn as an ✕. That last sentence is an epigraphic fact about the shape of a letter. What Christians have made of it is a reading, it is very old, and it lives in the readings band below.

Hebrew also says “from aleph to taw” exactly the way English says “from A to Z.” That idiom is the doorway to this letter's most contested territory (the little untranslated word spelled aleph-taw) and this room handles it plainly before sending you to the full museum.

Where Scripture itself plays with this letter

The mark in Ezekiel 9

“Go through the midst of the city… and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry over all the abominations that are done in the midst thereof.” English Bibles say “a mark.” The Hebrew word is taw, this letter's own name.

In the paleo-Hebrew script of Ezekiel's day, that letter was written ✕. So the mark on the forehead was, as a matter of how the alphabet was drawn at the time, a cross-shape.

Keep the two claims apart. That the letter was shaped that way is a fact about handwriting, checkable against inscriptions in the ground. That the passage is about the cross is a reading, an ancient one with a long history, set out in the readings band and in the full Taw study behind the door below.

Aleph and taw: the little word that is never translated

There is a two-letter Hebrew word, ʾet, spelled aleph-taw, that English Bibles never translate. It is not being hidden: it is a piece of grammar. It sits in front of a definite noun to say “this next thing is what the verb is acting on.” English does that job with word order and needs no word for it at all.

Genesis 1:1 has two of them: God created ʾet the heavens and ʾet the earth. That is genuinely striking to see. It is also worth knowing the size of the field: this little word appears something like eleven thousand times in the Hebrew Bible, and it sits in front of perfectly ordinary nouns everywhere, including, twenty verses later, in front of “the great sea-creatures.”

The idiom underneath is real and lovely: Hebrew says “from aleph to taw” for the whole of a thing, the way English says A to Z. The devotional reading built on top of it (Alpha and Omega) is in the readings band, presented as what it is.

The last stanza of the longest chapter

Psalm 119's taw stanza is verses 169 to 176, the end of a poem that has walked all twenty-two letters, eight verses each, one hundred and seventy-six verses about the word of God.

And it does not end in triumph. The last verse begins with this letter: taʿiti: “I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek thy servant.”

The alphabet finishes. The psalmist admits he has not.

Words that begin here

תָּו

taw — a mark, a sign

The letter's name working as an ordinary noun: the word in Ezekiel 9:4.

The Taw study→

תּוֹרָה

torah — instruction, teaching, law

Closer to “teaching” than to “legislation”: a parent's word before it was a lawyer's.

Open the word→

תְּהִלָּה

tehillah — praise, a song of praise

The Hebrew name of the book of Psalms is Tehillim: “Praises.”

Open the word→

The eight verses that are Taw’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 169–176 are the Taw stanza — eight lines that all open on ת. Every line stands open below, with one preacher’s comment on it directly underneath.

  6. “I long for Your salvation, O LORD, and Your law is my delight.”

    Psalm 119:174→

    “I have lounged for thy salvation, O LORD. He speaks like old Jacob on his deathbed; indeed, all saints, both in prayer and in death, appear as one, in word, and deed, and mind. He knew God's salvation, and yet he longed for it; that is to say, he had experienced a share of it, and he was therefore led to expect something yet higher and more complete.”

    Charles SpurgeonThe Treasury of David, Vol. 6 (1882)on Psalm 119:174→

  7. “Let me live to praise You; may Your judgments sustain me.”

    Psalm 119:175→

    “But in this faith, though the heathen rage furiously, and the people imagine a vain thing: though the flesh be slain while it preaches You: "My soul shall live, and shall praise You: and Your judgments shall help me" [Psalm 119:175]. These are those judgments, which it was time should begin at the house of the Lord. [1 Peter 4:17] But "they will help me," he says. And who cannot see how much the blood of the Church has aided the Church? How great a harvest has risen in the whole world from that sowing?”

    Augustine of HippoExposition on Psalm 119 (430)on Psalm 119:175→

  8. “I have strayed like a lost sheep; seek Your servant, for I have not forgotten Your commandments.”

    Psalm 119:176→

    “This is the finale, the conclusion of the whole matter: I have gone astray like a lost sheep often, wilfully, wantonly, and even hopelessly, but for thine interposing grace. In times gone by, before I was afflicted, and before thou hadst fully taught me thy statutes, I went astray. "I went astray" from the practical precepts, from the instructive doctrines, and from the heavenly experiences which thou hadst set before me. I lost my road, and I lost myself. Even now I am apt to wander, and, in fact, have roamed already; therefore, Lord, restore me. Seek thy servant.”

    Charles SpurgeonThe Treasury of David, Vol. 6 (1882)on Psalm 119:176→

More voices on these same eight verses2

  • “I have gone astray like a lost sheep,.... In desert places, as it is the nature of sheep to do (o).”

    John GillExposition of the Old Testament (1748-1763)on Psalm 119:176→

  • “Not only the sinner before conversion, but the believer after conversion, is unable to recover himself; but the latter, after temporary wandering, knows to whom to look for restoration.”

    Jamieson, Fausset & BrownCommentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)on Psalm 119:176→

How readers have meditated on this letter

✧The cross seen in the marka devotional reading

Christian writers noticed Ezekiel's taw very early. Tertullian, writing around the turn of the third century, took the letter's shape in the older script as a foreshadowing of the cross set on the foreheads of the saved; Origen and Jerome both handle the same passage, and Jewish discussion of the mark in Ezekiel 9 is preserved in the Talmud as well.

The shape of the letter is a fact you can check against inscriptions. Reading Ezekiel's mark as a prefiguring of the cross is a reading, one with eighteen centuries behind it, made openly by people who said plainly what they were doing. Offered here as exactly that.

Read this way by: Tertullian, Against Marcion III.22 (public domain, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 3); the same passage is handled by Origen and Jerome, and discussed in b. Shabbat 55a

✧Alpha and Omegaa devotional reading

Revelation has Christ say “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end,” taking up Isaiah's “I am the first, and I am the last.” Readers in the Messianic and Hebrew-roots stream have long heard the untranslated Hebrew ʾet (aleph-taw, first letter and last) as the same signature standing quietly in the Hebrew text, present already at creation.

Hebrew genuinely uses “from aleph to taw” for the whole of a thing, and Greek genuinely uses alpha-to-omega the same way. The completeness idiom is real in both languages, and the reading has a long history behind it. The full case is laid out in the Taw study.

Read this way by: The Messianic and Hebrew-roots devotional stream — Chuck Missler, Cosmic Codes (Koinonia House, 1999) and Learn the Bible in 24 Hours; cited, not quoted. The texts are Revelation 1:8 with Isaiah 44:6.

◈Contested ground: where these readings are argued againstcontested

  • Alpha and Omega

    Revelation is written in Greek and names Greek letters; there is no verbal borrowing from the Hebrew particle. And ʾet appears about eleven thousand times in the Hebrew Bible, in front of fish and cattle and city walls, so an argument that its presence marks Christ has to account for the other ten thousand. What survives is resonance, a completeness idiom shared by two languages, not a linguistic derivation.