The Hebrew alphabet (1)

Right to left

Most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew. Here are the first three words of Genesis 1:1.

Trace the words with your eye. Hebrew is read from right to left. A line begins at its right edge, and a Hebrew book opens from what an English reader would call the back. Your eye will keep drifting left at first, but after a few lines it begins to feel natural.

There is a second thing to know. The Hebrew alphabet is made of 22 consonants and nothing else. In the earliest writing there were only consonants, and readers supplied the vowels from knowing the language. The little dots and dashes you see under and around the letters are vowel points, added much later. We will learn them in Vowel points, once the alphabet is complete, so for now just notice that there are marks and let them be.

One more note before we begin. The sounds taught in this course are the standard academic pronunciation, which is close to modern Israeli Hebrew. The play buttons you will see (אָב) use your device's modern Hebrew voice. It is close to what we teach but not identical, so treat the buttons as a helpful sample and the table below as the standard for this course.

The first eleven letters

Every letter has a name. The "panel" column shows the Latin spelling that the app's 원어 panel prints under each word. English sound guides are approximations, and a couple of the sounds have no English equivalent.

א makes no sound of its own. Think of it as a placeholder for a vowel to sit on: the sound you hear comes from the vowel mark that goes with it. In the panel's transliteration א appears as ' or is not written at all.

ב and כ can also appear with a dot inside, בּ and כּ. That dot can change the sound, and we will meet the rule later in the course. For now, remember "ב is usually v, and בּ with the dot is b". The throaty sound of ח and of the softer כ is the one that English speakers find hardest; clear your throat gently and you are close.

Telling look-alikes apart

Several letters look alike at first. Learn just one difference for each pair.

ב and כ are both rounded, but ב has a flat bottom with a corner and כ curves smoothly underneath. ה has a gap between its left leg and its roof, while ח is closed. ו is one straight stroke, and ז is the same stroke with a small bar across the top. ד has a sharp corner at the top right, and a letter you will meet next lesson, ר, is rounded there. When in doubt, look for the corner.

Reading short words

Now read from right to left. We will explain vowel marks only as much as each word needs.

אָב, "av", means "father". Starting at the right: א is silent, ב is v, and the vowel mark gives "a". It occurs more than 1,200 times in the Old Testament. אָב

יָדוֹ, "yado", is "his hand". Its dictionary form יָד, "yad", is י (y) plus ד (d), and it means "hand". It appears over 700 times. The ending וֹ is a suffix meaning "his"; here the ו stands for the vowel "o" and not for v, something we will sort out when we learn the vowels. You meet it in Genesis 22:10, where Abraham stretches out "his hand".

אֶחָד, "echad", means "one". It is א (silent), ח (the throaty h) and ד (d), and it appears about 970 times. In Genesis 1:5 it is the "one" in "day one", which most English Bibles translate "the first day". אֶחָד

Now go back to Genesis 1:1.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Genesis 1:1

You do not know most of these letters yet, and you are not meant to. Just look for the ones you do: the rightmost letter of בָּרָא is ב, and אֱלֹהִים begins with a silent א and also contains ה and י. If you can spot even one familiar letter, you are doing exactly what this lesson asks.

Summary

Hebrew reads right to left, and its alphabet is 22 consonants; the vowels come later as points. Today you learned א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ. Tell look-alikes apart by corners and gaps (ב/כ, ה/ח, ו/ז). The other eleven letters are waiting in the next lesson, and the vowel points come in the lesson after that.

Words in this lesson

• אָבavfather1,209 times in the OT
• יָדyadhand727 times in the OT
• אֶחָדechadone970 times in the OT

Practice