Hebrew Roots · letter 10 of 22

Yod

The smallest letter, and the one Jesus builds an argument on.

How the shape travelled: three historical stages

How sure we are of this ancient picture

Well established

Original sign

A forearm with an open hand on the end.

Paleo-Hebrew

The arm folded into a small zigzag, the smallest letter.

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

Y, as in "yes." One consonant, one stroke: the smallest sound and the smallest sign in the alphabet.

Written y in scholarly books.

Its number

letters carried number values from the Hellenistic era on

Its name means

hand, arm

Final form

none

this letter does not change at the end of a word

Yod is the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet, and it did not start that way. It began as a drawing of an arm and a hand, which is what its name still means. Over a thousand years of writing, the arm shrank until nothing was left but a single stroke, the mark a modern reader almost skips over.

That smallness is the reason yod has the most famous line in this whole subject attached to it. "Till heaven and earth pass," Jesus said, "one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." The jot is yod. This is the argument Jesus makes out of the shapes of letters, and the Gospels record it twice: here in Matthew, and again in Luke 16:17, where not one tittle of the law can fail. The argument is not about hidden meanings. It is about preservation. The smallest mark in the text is kept.

Yod also stands at the front of the divine name, and at the front of the names God gives when He steps into someone's story: Hoshea becomes Joshua by gaining a yod, and Joshua is the same name the angel gives Mary's son: the LORD saves.

The sign it began as

an arm with a hand on the end

Well established

The sign's picture and the letter's name agree, and the earliest inscriptions show it.

One of the securely identified signs. The name matches a living Hebrew word, and the earliest inscriptions draw exactly that: a forearm bent at the elbow with fingers at the end. What is worth noticing is how far the sign travelled: the arm shrank, over roughly a thousand years of writing, into the single small stroke a modern reader sees. Gardiner (1916) established the method; the identification has not been seriously challenged since.

In the older script

In paleo-Hebrew, yod is still recognizably an arm: a bent line with two or three short fingers at one end. In the square script it has shrunk to a comma-sized mark hanging from the top of the line, the smallest letter on the page.

Where Scripture itself plays with this letter

The jot and the tittle: Matthew 5:18

"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.

“For I tell you truly, until heaven and earth pass away, not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen, will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.”
Matthew 5:18→

The letter Moses added to a man's name

"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."

The yod stanza of Psalm 119 opens with hands

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.

“Your hands have made me and fashioned me; give me understanding to learn Your commandments.”
Psalm 119:73→

Words that begin here

יְהוָה

YHWH — the LORD: the covenant name

The name revealed at the bush begins with yod. Printed LORD in small capitals in most English Bibles.

YHWH: the covenant name→

יָד

yad — hand, arm

The letter's own name, and Hebrew's standard picture of power at work: "the hand of the LORD."

Open the word→

יְשׁוּעָה

yeshuʿah — salvation, deliverance

The noun behind the name Joshua, and behind Yeshua, the name of Jesus.

Open the word→

יָדַע

yadaʿ — to know

Not knowing about; knowing by experience and relationship, the way a husband knows a wife.

Open the word→

The eight verses that are Yod’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 73–80 are the Yod stanza — eight lines that all open on י. Every line stands open below, with one preacher’s comment on it directly underneath.

“Your hands have made me and fashioned me; give me understanding to learn Your commandments.”
Psalm 119:73→
“But though we were to allow some prerogative to the Protoplast as having been deemed worthy of the hand of God, still it must be one of honor, not of nature. For he came from the earth, as other people, and the hand that then fashioned Adam is also both now and ever fashioning and giving entire consistency [same human nature] to those who come after him.”
Athanasius of AlexandriaDEFENSE OF THE NICENE DEFINITION 3:9 (373)on Psalm 119:73→
“May those who fear You see me and rejoice, for I have hoped in Your word.”
Psalm 119:74→
“I know, O LORD, that Your judgments are righteous, and that in faithfulness You have afflicted me.”
Psalm 119:75→
“May Your loving devotion comfort me, I pray, according to Your promise to Your servant.”
Psalm 119:76→
“Let, I pray thee, thy merciful kindness be for my comfort,.... Shown in the provision and promise of a Saviour; in the forgiveness of sins through him; a discovery and application of which yields comfort under afflictions; according to thy word unto servant; a word of promise, in which he had assured him of his love, grace, mercy, and kindness; and that he would continue it to him, and comfort him with it: to make such a promise, and show such favour, was an instance of condescending grace to him, who was but his servant, and unworthy of his regard.”
John GillExposition of the Old Testament (1748-1763)on Psalm 119:76→
“May Your compassion come to me, that I may live, for Your law is my delight.”
Psalm 119:77→
“May the arrogant be put to shame for subverting me with a lie; I will meditate on Your precepts.”
Psalm 119:78→
“May those who fear You turn to me, those who know Your testimonies.”
Psalm 119:79→
“Let those that fear thee turn unto me,.... Whose companion he was fond of being, Psa 119:63; There were some good men, it seems, that turned from him, took the part of his enemies, and sided with them against him, which was matter of grief to him. Some think this refers to the affair of Bathsheba; when some that feared the Lord, that had been familiar with him, did not choose to keep company with him, but abstained from his conversation, having so foully sinned, and brought forth dishonour to God and on his ways.”
John GillExposition of the Old Testament (1748-1763)on Psalm 119:79→
“May my heart be blameless in Your statutes, that I may not be put to shame.”
Psalm 119:80→
“Let my heart be sound ... - Hebrew, “Be perfect.” See the notes at Job 1:1. The Septuagint here is “immaculate,” ἄμωμος amōmos. So the Latin Vulgate. It is the expression of a desire that the heart might be pure; that there might be no improper attachment for other objects; that there might be no defect of love to God. That I be not ashamed - See the notes at Psa 119:6. A man has no occasion to be ashamed of a pure heart; and that which can alone keep us from being ultimately ashamed is sincerity, uprightness, and purity in the service of God.”
Albert BarnesNotes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869)on Psalm 119:80→

More voices on these same eight verses1

“, JOD.--The Tenth Part. JOD. Thy hands have made me and fashioned me,.... Not the psalmist himself, nor his parents, but the Lord alone: for though parents are fathers of our flesh, they are but instruments in the hand of the Lord; though man is produced by natural generation, yet the formation and fashioning of men are as much owing to the power and wisdom of God, which are his hands, as the formation of Adam was. Job owns this in much the same words as the psalmist does, Job 10:8; see Psa 139:”
John GillExposition of the Old Testament (1748-1763)on Psalm 119:73→

How readers have meditated on this letter

✧The yod that was taken from Saraia devotional reading

A rabbinic story runs like this: when Sarai's name became Sarah, the yod that was removed went complaining before God at being struck out of the Torah, and was answered by being placed at the head of Hoshea's name when Moses made him Joshua. The story is aggadah, the Jewish tradition's storytelling mode, and it is told about the letter, not offered as an explanation of either verse. What it is really carrying is how seriously Jewish scribes took a single character: even a removed letter has somewhere to go. Both name changes are real and in the text; the conversation is not.

Read this way by: Rabbinic aggadah: b. Sanhedrin 107a (English: Rodkinson tr., 1903, public domain) and Genesis Rabbah 47:1; the name changes themselves are Genesis 17:15 and Numbers 13:16

✧The smallest stroke is kepta devotional reading

Christian expositors have taken Matthew 5:18 as the strongest sentence in the Bible about the care of Scripture: if the least letter and the least stroke of a letter are guarded, then nothing in it is loose or negotiable. The devotional turn, that a God who keeps the smallest mark of His word can be trusted with the smallest detail of a life, is a reading laid on the verse, and a very old one.

Read this way by: Matthew Henry, Exposition of the Old and New Testaments, on Matthew 5:18 (public domain)