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Hebrew Roots · letter 6 of 22

Waw

The hook that joins, and the engine that drives the whole Old Testament story.

How the shape travelled: three historical stages

How sure we are of this ancient picture

Likely

Original sign

A tent peg or a hook, the kind that holds a curtain up.

Paleo-Hebrew

The hook opened into a Y on a long stem.

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

Originally a w as in "water." Modern Hebrew says v, which is why you will also see this letter called vav. It also does double duty as a vowel, marking an "oh" or "oo" sound.

Written w in scholarly books.

Its number

6

letters carried number values from the Hellenistic era on

Its name means

hook, peg

Final form

none

this letter does not change at the end of a word

Waw is the sixth letter and the simplest to draw: one stroke, top to bottom. It is named for a hook or tent peg, the small fitting that holds two things together, and holding things together is exactly what this letter does for the Hebrew language.

Hebrew's word for "and" is not a word. It is this single letter, attached to the front of whatever comes next. That is why the Old Testament so often reads "and... and... and": the narrative runs on a chain of waws. In the storytelling form of the verb, adding a waw actually flips the tense, so the letter is not just joining sentences; it is what moves the story forward. Take it out and the history of Israel stops being a story.

This is also the letter with two of the strangest true facts in the Hebrew Bible attached to it: a manuscript where one waw is deliberately written broken in half, and two psalms that walk the alphabet and quietly skip waw altogether. Both are below.

Where Scripture itself plays with this letter

The letter that drives the story

"And God said, Let there be light." "And God saw the light, that it was good." "And the evening and the morning were the first day." In Hebrew, every one of those "and"s is a single waw stuck to the front of the verb, and in this storytelling form it also does something English has no equivalent for: it pushes the verb into past narration. Grammarians call it the waw-consecutive, which is just a technical name for "the and that carries the story." It is the most common letter-as-word in the Bible, and Genesis 1 is built out of it.

The broken waw of Numbers 25:12

After Phinehas acts to stop a plague, God says: "Behold, I give unto him my covenant of peace." In the Hebrew manuscripts, the waw in the middle of the word shalom (peace) is written broken, split in two. The Jewish scribes who preserved the text recorded it as a fixed feature and copied it faithfully; Christian D. Ginsburg catalogued it in his 1897 survey of the manuscripts, and printed Hebrew Bibles still show it. The scribes did not tell us why. The break is simply there, in the word for peace, in a covenant granted after violence.

The two psalms that skip waw

Psalm 25 and Psalm 34 both walk the alphabet, and both leave waw out. Read Psalm 34 and you go from the he verse straight to the zayin verse; the sixth letter never gets its line. Stranger still, both psalms then add an extra verse at the end, outside the alphabet, and both of those extra verses begin with the same letter and the same idea: redeem. "Redeem Israel, O God, from all its distress." "The LORD redeems His servants." A missing letter and a bonus line about redemption, in two psalms, the same way twice.

The waw stanza of Psalm 119

Verses 41 through 48 are waw's block, and the poet had a problem, because almost nothing in Hebrew starts with waw except the word "and." So every one of those eight verses opens with an "and": "Let thy lovingkindnesses also come unto me." It is the plainest possible demonstration of what this letter does for the language.

Words that begin here

וְ־

we- / va- — and

Not a word but a letter: the most common thing on any page of the Hebrew Bible.

וָו

waw — hook, peg

The letter's own name as a real Bible word: the hooks that held the tabernacle curtains to their pillars.

Open the word→

וַיֹּאמֶר

wayyomer — and he said

The single most common narrative form in the Old Testament: one waw, and the story moves.

The eight verses that are Waw’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 41–48 are the Waw stanza — eight lines that all open on ו. Every line stands open below, with one preacher’s comment on it directly underneath.

  2. “Then I can answer him who taunts, for I trust in Your word.”

    Psalm 119:42→

    “"And so shall I make answer," he says, "to them that reproach me with the word" [Psalm 119:42]. It is doubtful whether it be "reproach me with a word;" or, "I will answer with a word;" but either signifies Christ. They to whom Christ crucified is a stumbling-block or foolishness, [1 Corinthians 1:23] reproach us with Him; ignorant that "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt in us;" [John 1:14] the Word which "was in the beginning," and "was with God, and was God." [John 1:1] But although they may not reproach us with the Word which is unknown unto them, because His Divinity is not known unto those by whom His weakness on the Cross is despised; let us nevertheless make answer of the Word, and let us not be terrified or confounded by their reproaches. For "if they had known" the Word, "they would never have crucified the Lord of glory." [1 Corinthians 2:8] ...Therefore, when the Psalmist had said, "I will make answer unto them that reproach me with the word:" he at once adds, "For my trust is in Your words," which means exactly, in Your promises.”

    Augustine of HippoExposition on Psalm 119 (430)on Psalm 119:42→

  5. “And I will walk in freedom, for I have sought Your precepts.”

    Psalm 119:45→

    “And I will walk at liberty - Margin, “at large.” Luther renders it, “freely.” The Septuagint, “in a broad place.” The Hebrew word means “wide, broad, large, spacious.” The reference is to that which is free and open; that in which there are no limits, checks, restraints; where a man does what he pleases. The meaning here is, that he would feel he was free. He would not be restrained by evil passions and corrupt desires. He would be delivered from those things which seemed to fetter his goings. This does not here refer so much to external troubles or hindrances, to being oppressed and straitened by external foes, as to internal enemies - to the servitude of sin - to the slavery of appetite and passion. Compare the notes at Rom 7:9-14. See also Job 36:16; Psa 118:5. The margin well expresses the sense of the passage. For I seek thy precepts - I seek or endeavor to obey them. I seek them as the guide of my life. I ask nothing else to direct me.”

    Albert BarnesNotes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869)on Psalm 119:45→

How readers have meditated on this letter

✧The peg that holds it togethera devotional reading

Because waw means peg or hook and because it functions as Hebrew's connector, devotional readers have long taken it as a picture of joining: heaven fastened to earth, promise fastened to fulfillment, one person joined to another. Some Christian writers have gone further and read the letter's plain vertical shape as a nail. Take these as meditations on a sign and a shape: the letter's grammatical job is to mean "and," and no Hebrew word means "nail" because of the way a stroke is drawn.

Read this way by: Devotional tradition, Jewish and Christian; offered as meditation, not exegesis

✧Peace with a crack in ita devotional reading

Preachers in both traditions have read the broken waw of Numbers 25:12 as commentary in ink: a covenant of peace that came through bloodshed carries a fracture in the word itself, or a peace that remains incomplete until a greater one comes. The break in the manuscripts is a documented fact. Every explanation of it is a reading; the scribes recorded the anomaly and gave no reason for it.

Read this way by: Jewish and Christian homiletical tradition on Numbers 25:12; the manuscript fact is catalogued in Ginsburg (1897)