TYMK - Alphabet cheats

Mt 5:18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

If you wish to solve the riddle of the alphabet, you may approach it from two sides:

From the strokes

The metaphoric meaning of a letter... wait! wait! Letters don't have meaning!

Now you are starting to understand. Hebrew is the only known language that behaves this way. But because Hebrew was a dead language for so long, only to be revived when the Jewsih people started gathering in the first half of the nineteenth century , the meaning of the letters was lost. Only a memory that they had a meaning remained.

During the same time, the preserved sacred text (square letters) was transformed from sacred usage to common. Educational programs were started to teach the Jewish people their own language.

This is important because there is no authority for the meaning of the sacred alphabet letters. There is only a memory that they have meaning. The authority for the meaning will come from observations within scripture itself.

The letters derive their meaning from the strokes of the letters. There are two primary strokes which form all the other letters, and the second one is formed from the first.

These are the yod and the vav.

You may start with the strokes and try to make the metaphor of the letters from them, such that the meaning of the letters combine to form words. This is the hard way, though it is useful for validating the meaning when they are discovered other ways.

Yod

The first stroke is conceptually an infinitesimally small dot. That is difficult to draw and even harder to see, so the yod י is used to represent it. it is the same as the tenth letter of the alphabet. To the Greeks it is the iota. In English we call it a jot. Jesus said that the tiniest part of the law would not disappear before it was all fulfilled.

As a metaphor, the yod represents: the first idea that God had to create, the first void in himself that he made in which to put his creation, the creation itself, the creator, or if two yods are used, as two parts of the whole.

The formation of every letter starts by drawing a yod. Because of this we say that everything God intended to create, comes from the yod, since it forms the letters which form the words of creation.

The ideas here are still held by rabbis, even though they cannot solve the puzzle. Cabalists will assign meaning to them, but they very quickly prove to be unreliable.