יYod

"Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law." The jot is iota, the Greek name for yod, the smallest letter on a Hebrew page. The tittle is keraia, which means "little horn" — the tiny stroke that is the only difference between letters that otherwise look identical: dalet ד and resh ר, bet ב and kaf כ, he ה and het ח. Cover the stroke and you cannot tell them apart; the stroke is the whole word. Jesus is not saying the letters hide a secret. He is saying the text is kept down to the smallest mark on it — and He says it about a text copied by hand for centuries before He said it, and centuries after.

"And Moses called Hoshea the son of Nun, Joshua." One letter separates the two names: Moses put a yod on the front, and Hoshea ("salvation") became Yehoshua ("the LORD saves") — the added letter is the first letter of the divine name. The man who would take Israel into the land carried God's name at the head of his own. Centuries later an angel gives the same name, in its shortened form Yeshua, to a child in Bethlehem: "thou shalt call his name JESUS; for it is he that shall save his people from their sins."

Each letter gets eight verses in Psalm 119. Yod's stanza, verses 73 to 80, begins: "Thy hands have made me and fashioned me." The first word of the stanza is yadeka, "thy hands" — the letter's own name, standing at the head of its own eight verses. It is the kind of thing a Hebrew poet does on purpose and an English reader never sees.