Hebrew alphabet
Overview
23 Consonants:
א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ ל מ נ ס ע פ צ ק ר שׂ שׁ ת
Biblical Hebrew vs. Modern Hebrew
The letters, values, and pronunciations on this page are for Biblical Hebrew — the language of the Tanakh, written roughly 1200–400 BC. That's the Hebrew this site's word studies always mean when they cite an original-language term, and it's worth knowing it's a different thing from the Hebrew spoken in Israel today.
Hebrew was the everyday spoken language of Israel through the First Temple period, but by the time of the Babylonian exile it was already giving way to Aramaic as the language people actually used day to day — by the New Testament era Aramaic (and Greek) were the vernaculars, and Hebrew survived mainly as the language of Scripture, prayer, and rabbinic study (the Mishnah's Hebrew, from around AD 200, is already a distinct later stage from Biblical Hebrew). For roughly the next 1,700 years Hebrew was read and written but not spoken as anyone's native tongue.
Modern (Israeli) Hebrew is a 19th/20th-century revival, driven above all by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who pushed to make Hebrew a living, spoken language again for the growing Jewish community in Ottoman/British Palestine and, later, the state of Israel. It uses the same alphabet and is recognizably descended from Biblical Hebrew, but differs in real ways: a large layer of new vocabulary for things the biblical writers never needed words for (technology, modern institutions, and so on); a simplified verb system built around tense (past/present/future) rather than Biblical Hebrew's aspect-based system with its distinctive waw-consecutive constructions; and a pronunciation that collapsed several sound distinctions the Tiberian scribes still preserved — most speakers today no longer distinguish א from ע, or ח from כ, the way ancient (and still liturgical Yemenite) pronunciation does.
Practically: if you're reading a modern Hebrew dictionary, app, or native speaker's gloss on a biblical word, treat it as a helpful starting point, not the final word — a root's everyday connotation in modern Israeli usage can drift from what it carried three thousand years earlier, which is exactly why word studies on this site go back to lexicons built on the biblical corpus itself (see resources.md) rather than a modern dictionary.
Table
| Hebrew Letter | Name | Pronunciation | Transliteration | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| א | Alef | (silent) | ʾ | Guttural |
| ב | Bet | b as in boy | b | -- |
| ג | Gimel | g as in God | g | -- |
| ד | Dalet | d as in day | d | -- |
| ה | He | h as in hay | h | Guttural |
| ו | Waw | w as in way | w | -- |
| ז | Zayin | z as in Zion | z | -- |
| ח | Ḥet | ch as in Bach | ḥ | Guttural |
| ט | Tet | t as in toy | ṭ | -- |
| י | Yod | y as in yes | y | -- |
| כ | Kaf | k as in king | k | -- |
| ל | Lamed | l as in lion | l | -- |
| מ | Mem | m as in mother | m | -- |
| נ | Nun | n as in now | n | -- |
| ס | Samek | s as in sin | s | -- |
| ע | Ayin | (silent) | ʿ | Guttural |
| פ | Pe | p as in pastor | p | -- |
| צ | Tsade | ts as in boots | ṣ | -- |
| ק | Qof | k as in king | q | -- |
| ר | Resh | r as in run | r | -- |
| שׂ | Sin | s as in sin | ś | -- |
| שׁ | Shin | sh as in ship | š | -- |
| ת | Taw | t as in toy | t | -- |
- Transliteration is used to refer to hebrew words without using hebrew characters
- Guttural sounds include: ה, ע, א, and ח. Sometimes ר
Begadkephat
| Begadkephat Letter | Pronunciation | Transliteration |
|---|---|---|
| בּ | b as in boy | b |
| ב | v as in vine | b̠ |
| גּ | g as in God | g |
| ג | gh as in aghast | ḡ |
| דּ | d as in day | d |
| ד | dh as in the | ḏ |
| כּ | k as in king | k |
| כ | ch as in Bach | ḵ |
| פּ | p as in pastor | p |
| פ | ph as in alphabet | p |
| תּ | t as in toy | t |
| ת | th as in thin | ṯ |
Numbers
Hebrew does not have a separate set of characters to represent numbers (like the English 1, 2, 3, etc.). Rather, each letter of the Hebrew alphabet also does duty as a number — a system usually called gematria. This is just how the alphabet counts; later Jewish tradition (and, less carefully, some modern "Bible code" writers) built elaborate interpretive systems on top of it by comparing the numeric totals of different words, but that's a separate, much more speculative practice from the plain fact that every letter has a value.
| Hebrew Letter | Name | Value | Hebrew Letter | Name | Value | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| א | Alef | 1 | ל | Lamed | 30 | |
| ב | Bet | 2 | מ | Mem | 40 | |
| ג | Gimel | 3 | נ | Nun | 50 | |
| ד | Dalet | 4 | ס | Samek | 60 | |
| ה | He | 5 | ע | Ayin | 70 | |
| ו | Waw | 6 | פ | Pe | 80 | |
| ז | Zayin | 7 | צ | Tsade | 90 | |
| ח | Ḥet | 8 | ק | Qof | 100 | |
| ט | Tet | 9 | ר | Resh | 200 | |
| י | Yod | 10 | שׂ / שׁ | Sin / Shin | 300 | |
| כ | Kaf | 20 | ת | Taw | 400 |
So: א–ט give 1–9, י–צ give 10–90 in multiples of ten, and ק–ת give 100–400 (שׂ and שׁ share the value 300 — the dot that distinguishes them is a much later addition to the text).
Numbers as symbols
Gematria is about the alphabet; this is a different, and I think more interesting, observation — that Scripture itself uses certain numbers with recurring meaning, independent of which letters happen to add up to them. This isn't a hidden code to decrypt; it's a pattern you can see simply by reading, the same way a reader notices that "forty" keeps showing up at moments of testing. A few of the load-bearing ones:
| Number | Common significance | Example |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Unity — God's own oneness | "The LORD our God, the LORD is one" — Deuteronomy 6:4 (ESV) |
| 2 | Testimony, witness | A matter established by two or three witnesses — Deuteronomy 19:15 (ESV) |
| 3 | Divine completeness, resurrection | Jonah three days in the fish, a pattern Jesus points to His own resurrection with — Jonah 1:17 (ESV); 1 Corinthians 15:4 (ESV) |
| 4 | Creation, the earth | Four rivers out of Eden — Genesis 2:10 (ESV); four living creatures around the throne — Revelation 4:6-8 (ESV) |
| 6 | Man, falling short | Man formed on the sixth day — Genesis 1:26-31 (ESV); the beast's number, "a human number," 666 — Revelation 13:18 (ESV) |
| 7 | Completion, perfection, rest | God rests on the seventh day — Genesis 2:2-3 (ESV); Israel's seven appointed feasts — Leviticus 23 (ESV); the sevens structuring Revelation (churches, seals, trumpets, bowls) |
| 8 | New beginning | Circumcision on the eighth day — Genesis 17:12 (ESV); eight people brought safely through the flood into a new world — 1 Peter 3:20 (ESV) |
| 10 | Order, a complete testimony | The Ten Commandments — Exodus 20 (ESV) |
| 12 | Governmental completeness | The twelve tribes — Genesis 49 (ESV); the twelve apostles — Matthew 10:2-4 (ESV); the New Jerusalem's twelve gates and foundations — Revelation 21:12-14 (ESV) |
| 40 | Testing, trial | Forty days of flood — Genesis 7:12 (ESV); forty years in the wilderness — Numbers 14:33-34 (ESV); Jesus fasting and tempted forty days — Matthew 4:2 (ESV) |
A caution worth stating plainly: this is a pattern to notice, not a code to crack. Scripture doesn't hand us a cipher for generating new doctrine out of number-counting — it's the plain sense of the text, read straight, that carries the weight. Where a number's significance is worth pointing out, I've tried to do that in the studies themselves (see End Times and the prophecy studies, where sevens and forties come up often) rather than treating this table as a decoder ring.
Resources
- Zondervan
- E.W. Bullinger, Number in Scripture: Its Supernatural Design and Spiritual Significance (1894) — the classical source for most of the numeric-symbolism observations above; public domain, widely reprinted.