Hebrew Roots · letter 9 of 22
The wheel or the coiled basket, and the letter that opens the word "good."
How sure we are of this ancient picture
Picture unclearOriginal sign
A wheel or a coiled basket, cross-marked or coiled.
Paleo-Hebrew
The same wheel, the cross squared to the rim.
Modern square
The letter as every printed Hebrew Bible sets it.
On the picture: Some read it as a coiled snake.
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 hard T, made further back in the mouth than the English one. Modern Hebrew speakers say it exactly like taw, the alphabet's other T: the two sounds fell together long ago.
Written ṭ in scholarly books.
Its number
9
letters carried number values from the Hellenistic era on
Its name means
wheel, basket
Final form
none
this letter does not change at the end of a word
Tet is the alphabet's quiet corner. Very few Hebrew words begin with it, and its shape has never been pinned to one picture beyond argument: a wheel or coiled basket is the leading reading, a coiled snake the serious runner-up. In a subject where the internet is full of confident answers, tet is a good place to learn what an honest, two-sided "here is what we know" sounds like.
What tet does have is one enormous word. Hebrew's word for good is tov (tet, waw, bet) and it arrives in the fourth verse of the Bible: "And God saw the light, that it was good." That is the first time anything in Scripture is evaluated, and God is the one doing the evaluating. By the end of the chapter the verdict has been repeated seven times and raised to "very good."
The same word keeps showing up at the head of tet's verses in the alphabet poems, which is not a code; it is simply what happens when a poet has to start a line with this letter. There are not many places to go, and "good" is the best of them.
"And God saw the light, that it was good." That sentence in Genesis 1:4 is the first evaluation in the Bible (the first time anyone judges anything), and the word is tov, spelled with tet at the front. Six more times the chapter says it, and on the seventh God looks at everything He has made and calls it very good. Every later use of the word in Scripture is standing on that first one.
A dozen Bible poems walk the alphabet, one letter per verse or per stanza. When the poet reaches tet, the same handful of words is available, and three of the most loved lines in the Psalms are the result. Psalm 25:8 opens "Good and upright is the LORD." Psalm 145:9 opens "The LORD is good to all." And Psalm 34:8 opens with a different tet word entirely: "Taste and see that the LORD is good." The letter did not put the goodness there. It did decide which line of the poem it would sit in.
Psalm 119 gives each letter eight verses of its own. Tet gets verses 65 to 72, and the poet spends them turning "good" over and over: "Thou hast dealt well with thy servant" (v. 65), "Thou art good, and doest good" (v. 68), and then the hardest line in the stanza: "It is good for me that I have been afflicted, that I may learn thy statutes" (v. 71). Eight verses, one letter, and a man arguing his way from God's goodness to his own suffering and back again.
טוֹב
ṭov — good
The Bible's first verdict: "God saw that it was good" — and the word tet is best known for.
Open the word→
טָהוֹר
ṭahor — clean, pure
The priest's working word: Israel's whole worship ran on knowing the clean from the unclean.
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טַל
ṭal — dew
"I will be as the dew unto Israel" — in a dry land, the quiet water that arrives overnight.
Open the word→
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 65–72 are the Tet stanza — eight lines that all open on ט. Every line stands open below, with one preacher’s comment on it directly underneath.
“You are good to Your servant, O LORD, according to Your word.”
Psalm 119:65→
“Teach me good judgment and knowledge, for I believe in Your commandments.”
Psalm 119:66→
“Scholastic discipline without personal discipline is insufficient for wisdom: for a man becomes wise not merely by listening: he must also conform. Hence the Psalm on wisdom reads: "Teach me goodness and discipline and knowledge." For there is no knowledge without precedent discipline, nor discipline …”
BonaventureCollations on the Hexaemeron, Collation 2 (1257)on Psalm 119:66→
“Before I was afflicted, I went astray; but now I keep Your word.”
Psalm 119:67→
“Before I was afflicted, I went astray,.... From God; from his word, his ways and worship; like a lost sheep from the shepherd, the fold, the flock, and the footsteps of it; see Psa 119:176; Not that he wilfully, wickedly, maliciously, and through contempt, departed from his God; this he denies, Psa 18:21; but through the weakness of the flesh, the prevalence of corruption, and force of temptation, and very much through a careless, heedless, and negligent frame of spirit, he got out of the right way, and wandered from it before he was well aware.”
John GillExposition of the Old Testament (1748-1763)on Psalm 119:67→
“You are good, and You do what is good; teach me Your statutes.”
Psalm 119:68→
“If the soul, with its capacity for pleasure and delight, has tasted this true and highest good and has adhered to both with the means at its disposal, putting away sorrow and fear, then it is wonderfully inflamed. Having embraced the Word of God, it knows no bounds, it knows no satiety, and says, "You are sweet, O Lord, and in your joy teach me your laws."”
Ambrose of MilanLetter 79 (397)on Psalm 119:68→
“Though the arrogant have smeared me with lies, I keep Your precepts with all my heart.”
Psalm 119:69→
“"The proud have forged a lie against me." They first derided him (Psa 119:51), then defrauded him (Psa 119:61), and now they have defamed him. To injure his character they resorted to falsehood, for they could find nothing against him if they spoke the truth. They forged a lie as a blacksmith beats out a weapon of iron, or they counterfeited the truth as men forge false coin. The original may suggest a common expression—"They have patched up a lie against me." They were not too proud to lie.”
Charles SpurgeonThe Treasury of David, Vol. 6 (1882)on Psalm 119:69→
“Their hearts are hard and callous, but I delight in Your law.”
Psalm 119:70→
“It was good for me to be afflicted, that I might learn Your statutes.”
Psalm 119:71→
“Sin abounded by the law because through the law came knowledge of sin, and it became harmful for me to know what through my weakness I could not avoid. It is good to know beforehand what one is to avoid, but, if I cannot avoid something, it is harmful to have known about it. Thus was the law changed to its opposite, yet it became useful to me by the very increase of sin, for I was humbled. And David therefore says, "It is good for me that I have been humbled."”
Ambrose of MilanLetter 83 (397)on Psalm 119:71→
“The law from Your mouth is more precious to me than thousands of pieces of gold and silver.”
Psalm 119:72→
“The law of thy mouth - The law which proceeds out of thy mouth, or which thou hast spoken. Is better unto me - The Hebrew is, “Good to me is the law of thy mouth above thousands of gold and silver.” Than thousands of gold and silver - Than any amount of wealth. It is to me the most valuable possession; that which I prize above all other things. Compare the notes at Psa 19:10.”
Albert BarnesNotes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869)on Psalm 119:72→
“The crafty malice of the wicked, in slandering him, so far from turning him away, but binds him closer to God's Word, which they are too stupid in sin to appreciate. HENGSTENBERG refers the "lie" to such slanders against the Jews during the captivity, as that in Ezr 4:1-6, of sedition.”
Jamieson, Fausset & BrownCommentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)on Psalm 119:68→
In the modern devotional stream often called "Hebrew word pictures," tet's circle is read as a basket or a coiled container, and so as good that is surrounded, wrapped up, kept hidden until the right moment. It is a widely taught meditation, and readers of this letter will meet it.
Read this way by: The modern "Hebrew word pictures" devotional stream — Frank Seekins, Hebrew Word Pictures; Jeff A. Benner, The Ancient Hebrew Lexicon of the Bible
Christian devotional writers have long treated the tet stanza of Psalm 119 as the place where a believer learns to say the letter's word about the worst season of his life. The poet does not say the affliction was good in itself; he says it was good for him, and names what it bought: that I might learn thy statutes. This is a reading of the stanza, not a claim about the letter, and it has fed a great deal of pastoral comfort.
Read this way by: C. H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of David, on Psalm 119:65-72
The basket that holds hidden good
Tet is one of the letters where the ancient shape itself is contested between two live readings (a wheel or basket, and a coiled snake), so this devotional reading rests on choosing one contested proposal and building on it. Hebrew scholars do not define words from the pictures behind their letters in any case.
