Interesting video about the Hebrew alphabet

[Stargazer]

I spend a lot of time on YouTube. There are a few channels that really catch my interest, and one of those calls itself "magnify." He only publishes "shorts," except that he has published two long-form videos. One of them is "The Fascinating Secret Behind Hebrew Letters". I thought some of you might enjoy this one, too, so here it is:

 

[Okrahomer]

Very interesting -- thank you for posting!  Did I understand correctly:  "In the beginning, God created the "et" [i.e., the alphabet]?"

[Benjamin McGuire]

It's just not very accurate.

The whole thing about the word את is a good place to start. It is in fact translated in the first sentence of the bible in the King James - it becomes the word "the." English uses a number of verbal markers. "The", for example, is a marker used to indicate a definite object. So "the" is identified as a definite article. את is what is considered a linguistic marker that identifies a definite direct object. There is nothing equivalent in English - however - we have the definite article "the" and so a sentence can show the definiteness of a direct object in English by using the word "the". In this way, it is a Hebrew preposition. Of course, the first sentence of the Hebrew Bible is a bit of a mess, but the את points us to a direct object, so "in the beginning of God's creating the heavens and the earth" is a close approximation, and we give the nouns heaven and earth a definite article because the Hebrew makes them definite. The term can be found nearly 11,000 times in the Hebrew Bible. Now we could say that Hebrew already has a definite article (the He) and that the words for heaven and earth come with that definite article, so we aren't exactly translating it in the word "the" - but - Hebrew tends to try to create language agreement in ways that aren't exactly paralleled in English - and so we go the next point. The thing about את is that it can take a prefix - and one of these is the connective or consecutive waw. This looks like:  וְאֵ֥ת and in Genesis 1:1 (where it also occurs), there is a waw-connective prefixed to the et. The waw-connective is usually translated as "and," and so in that first verse, the waw-connective prefixed to the definite object marker becomes "and the" - "in the beginning of God's creating the heavens and the earth."

The idea of identifying it as the first and last letters of the alphabet - and all of the stuff that goes with it - is largely a medieval (Kabalistic) - and this is nice, but it's quite late (in terms of the development of the language). And if we try and take these ideas back as principles for understanding the Old Testament text without using an actual grammar or lexicon or dictionary, you will end up with complete nonsense. You cannot understand Biblical Hebrew this way. You can always find examples (as this video does) that seem to make the theory sound nice - but then what happens when we apply it to, say, Exodus 8:26 -

Quote

And Moses said, It is not meet so to do; for we shall sacrifice the abomination of the Egyptians to the Lord our God: lo, shall we sacrifice the abomination of the Egyptians before their eyes, and will they not stone us?

Remember all that stuff about letters? The word translated "not" here is לֹ֤א - and the "the" between sacrifice and abomination includes the את. So its all interesting, but it is all a mystical sort of reinterpretation of the text - and once you can actually read the biblical Hebrew it stops having a lot of meaning for you. I should also note that Hebrew itself is not (as the Jewish mystics will argue) the original language spoken by God. It is a derivative (or development) of the Cannaanite branch of the Northwest Semitic family. It's earliest roots as an independent language date only to about 1,000 BCE. So, we run into that problem as well. In any case, interesting, but take the whole thing with a large grain of salt ...

Edited March 7 by Benjamin McGuire

[Robert F. Smith]

On 3/7/2025 at 7:48 AM, Stargazer said:

..............."The Fascinating Secret Behind Hebrew Letters".,...............

...............

Very clever mnemonic device, which Jews use in a host of ways, but not to be taken as a factual analysis.