The Aleph-Bet

Why Learn the Hebrew Alphabet?

You have picked up your scriptures thousands of times. You have read the words of prophets, pondered the psalms, and let the stories of Genesis settle deep into your heart. But behind every English translation lies an older voice — a voice that spoke in Hebrew.

When Moses recorded the creation account, he wrote in Hebrew. When David composed his psalms of praise and lament, the words flowed in Hebrew. When Isaiah cried out his visions of the last days, the language on his lips was Hebrew. The Old Testament — the foundation on which all scripture rests — was born in this language.

Learning the Hebrew alphabet is the first step toward hearing that original voice. You do not need to become a scholar to benefit from it. Even a basic familiarity with the letters opens doors that remain closed to most English readers. You begin to notice patterns in names. You start to see wordplay the translators could not preserve. You discover that the very shapes of the letters carry echoes of an ancient world — a world of ox-heads and houses, water and hands, doors and eyes.

This lesson will introduce you to all 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, called the aleph-bet (after its first two letters, just as our word “alphabet” comes from the Greek alpha and beta, which themselves descend from these same Hebrew letters). We will focus only on consonants here. Hebrew vowels are a separate system added much later, and we will explore them in a future lesson.

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to recognize the 22 letters, understand where they came from, and begin to see why they matter for your study of the scriptures.

A Brief History: From Pictures to Letters

The Hebrew alphabet did not appear out of nowhere. It has a history stretching back nearly four thousand years, and that history is one of the great intellectual achievements of the ancient world.

The Pictographic Origins

The earliest known alphabetic writing appeared around 1850–1550 BCE in the Sinai Peninsula, likely among Semitic-speaking workers who labored in Egyptian turquoise mines. These workers were surrounded by the complex hieroglyphic system of Egypt — thousands of symbols that required years of training to master. What they did was brilliantly simple: they took familiar Egyptian pictographs and adapted them using what scholars call the acrophonic principle.

The acrophonic principle works like this: each picture represents only the first sound of the word it depicts. A picture of an ox-head was called ‘alpu (the word for “ox”), so it came to represent just the sound at the beginning of that word — the glottal stop. A picture of a house floor plan was called baytu (“house”), so it represented just the /b/ sound. A picture of water (mayim) represented /m/.

This was a cognitive breakthrough of the highest order. Instead of thousands of signs, the entire range of spoken language could be captured with just 22 characters. For the first time in known history, writing became accessible beyond the priestly and scribal elite.

From Proto-Sinaitic to Modern Hebrew

These original pictographs — called Proto-Sinaitic script — evolved through several stages over the centuries:

• Proto-Sinaitic (c. 1850 BCE): The original pictographic forms from the Sinai. You can still see the ox-head, the house, the water waves.
• Paleo-Hebrew / Early Hebrew (c. 1050–1000 BCE): The pictographs became more abstract and stylized. This is the script used during the First Temple period — the script Moses, David, and Isaiah would have known.
• Middle Hebrew (c. 500 BCE): Transitional forms from the Persian period, as the older script began to give way.
• Aramaic Square Script (c. 200 BCE – present): After the Babylonian exile, the Jewish community adopted this script — the familiar block letters you see in a printed Hebrew Bible today. The Talmud calls it Ktav Ashuri (“Assyrian script”).

This means that the Hebrew letters we see in a modern Torah scroll are not the same shapes that were carved on the original tablets or written by the prophets of the First Temple period. The sounds and the order are ancient, but the letter forms were updated after the exile. The interactive chart at the end of this lesson lets you see exactly how each letter transformed across these stages.

A Fossil Record in Our Own Alphabet

Here is something remarkable: our own English letters descend from these same ancient pictographs. Turn our capital letter “A” upside down and you can still see the ox-head with its two horns — the ancient Aleph. The letter “M” preserves the waves of water — the ancient Mem. The letter “B” echoes the house floor plan — the ancient Bet. Every time you write the English alphabet, you are tracing lines that began in the Sinai desert nearly four millennia ago.

The 22 Letters

Hebrew is written from right to left. The alphabet consists entirely of consonants — there are no vowel letters in the original system. (Vowels were understood from context, and a system of dots and dashes was added centuries later to help readers.)

Here are all 22 letters, presented in their traditional order:

Letters 1–4: Aleph through Dalet

• Aleph is the silent letter — it represents a glottal stop, the brief catch in your throat between the syllables of “uh-oh.” It is the ancestor of our letter A.
• Bet gives us our B (and also produces a “v” sound in certain positions — more on that shortly).
• Gimel, depicted as a throwing stick or associated with the camel, is the ancestor of both our G and C.
• Dalet, the door, became our letter D.

Letters 5–8: He through Chet

• He represents a breathy “h” sound and was originally a picture of a person with raised arms — a figure of praise or calling out.
• Waw (also spelled Vav in modern Hebrew) was a hook or nail; it is the ancestor of our letters F, U, V, W, and Y — a remarkably productive letter.
• Zayin, the weapon, gave us our Z.
• Chet produces a guttural “ch” sound (like the Scottish “loch”) and was a picture of a fence or courtyard wall.

Letters 9–12: Tet through Lamed

• Tet is an emphatic “t” — spoken with more force than the ordinary Tav.
• Yod is the smallest letter in the alphabet, just a tiny mark, yet it is one of the most important. It was a picture of a hand and arm, and it is the ancestor of our letters I and J. When Jesus said “not one jot” would pass from the law (Matthew 5:18), he was referring to the Yod — a powerful reminder that even the smallest detail of God’s word matters.
• Kaf was the palm of a hand (think of the “cupping” gesture) and gave us our K.
• Lamed was an ox-goad or staff — the tall shepherd’s crook used to guide animals — and it is the ancestor of our L. It is also the tallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet, rising above the line.

Letters 13–16: Mem through Ayin

• Mem, the water, is easy to remember — the waves are still visible in our letter M.
• Nun was a fish or serpent and became our N.
• Samech was a support or pillar — think of the tent-pole that holds up the structure — and it produces an “s” sound.
• Ayin is another “silent” letter, representing a deep guttural sound that has no equivalent in English. Its pictograph was an eye — and the Hebrew word for “eye” is still ayin.

Letters 17–19: Pe through Qof

• Pe was a mouth (the Hebrew word for “mouth” is peh) and is the ancestor of our P. Like Bet and Kaf, it has both a hard and a soft pronunciation.
• Tsade produces a “ts” sound (like the end of “cats”) and was a picture of a fishhook or a plant.
• Qof was the back of a head — perhaps a head with a ponytail — and it produces a deep “k” sound from the back of the throat. It is the ancestor of our Q.

Letters 20–22: Resh through Tav

• Resh was a head (seen in profile) and became our R.
• Shin was a tooth — and the three points at the top of the modern letter still suggest teeth. It produces either a “sh” or an “s” sound depending on where the dot is placed.
• Tav, the last letter, was a mark or cross — a signature. It is the ancestor of our T. In Ezekiel 9:4, God commands that a tav be placed on the foreheads of the righteous — a mark of protection. In the ancient script, that mark would have looked like a simple cross.

Letters That Do Double Duty

As you work through the alphabet, you will notice that several letters serve more than one purpose. Two features are worth knowing about now, even though we will explore them in detail in later lessons.

The Begadkephat Letters

Six Hebrew letters can be pronounced in two different ways — a “hard” sound and a “soft” sound. These six are traditionally remembered by the mnemonic Begadkephat (בגדכפת): Bet, Gimel, Dalet, Kaf, Pe, and Tav.

When one of these letters has a dot (called a dagesh) inside it, it takes its hard pronunciation: Bet = b, Kaf = k, Pe = p. Without the dot, it softens: Bet = v, Kaf = kh, Pe = f. In modern Hebrew, only three of these pairs are still actively distinguished (Bet/Vet, Kaf/Khaf, Pe/Fe), but in biblical Hebrew all six shifts were meaningful.

Matres Lectionis: Consonants as Vowel Markers

Because the original Hebrew script had no vowels, readers sometimes needed help knowing which vowel sound was intended. Over time, certain consonants began to do double duty as vowel markers — a practice called matres lectionis (Latin for “mothers of reading”). The four letters used this way are Aleph (א), He (ה), Waw/Vav (ו), and Yod (י).

When these letters appear at the end of a word or in certain positions, they may indicate a vowel sound rather than a consonant. For example, a Waw might signal an “o” or “u” sound, and a Yod might signal an “i” or “e” sound. This is why you will sometimes see the same Hebrew word spelled with or without these letters — the meaning is the same, but the spelling convention varies. We will cover this in depth when we study Hebrew vowels in a later lesson.

Why This Matters for Scripture

You might wonder whether learning 22 ancient letters is truly worth the effort. Here are a few glimpses of what opens up when you can recognize them.

Names become transparent. The name Isaac (Yitschaq, יצחק) shares its root letters with the Hebrew word for laughter (tsachaq, צחק). When you can see those shared letters — Tsade, Chet, Qof — the connection between the name and the story of Sarah’s laughter (Genesis 18:12) leaps off the page. The name is not just a label; it is a narrative compressed into a single word.

Wordplay becomes visible. The Hebrew prophets were masters of wordplay, and much of it depends on the consonantal structure of words. In Isaiah 5:7, God looked for mishpat (justice) but found mispach (bloodshed); he looked for tsedaqah (righteousness) but heard tse’aqah (a cry of distress). The near-identical sounds create a devastating contrast — but you can only hear it if you can see the letters.

The structure of the text comes alive. Several psalms (including Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the Bible) are acrostic — each section begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Without knowing the aleph-bet, you would never notice this elegant structure or understand why the psalm has exactly 22 sections.

Even at this early stage, you are beginning to build the foundation for a richer, deeper encounter with the word of God.

Chart Summary

Use the interactive chart below to explore how each letter evolved from ancient pictographs to modern Hebrew. You can see the Proto-Sinaitic pictograph, the Early Hebrew forms, the transitional Middle Hebrew shapes, and the modern square script we use today — along with audio pronunciation for each letter.