In the Salem Stake Institute class his week we will be looking at context and diversity in the meanings of Hebrew words in the creation stories.
To help you better understand what I write on the board in the videos, below are some charts of the Hebrew alphabet.
There are 5 different ways to write Hebrew letters:
1. Printed block letters : this is how Hebrew is written in books or newspapers or on websites. Of course, there are many type faces just like with English.
2. Simple handwritten script of block letters: this is how I write Hebrew on the board in class.
3. Modern Cursive Hebrew : these are very different shapes of the letters, designed to be fast to write for everyday use in Israel. (you will probably NOT ever need to read or write this way).
4. Ancient Hebrew found carved into stone (stele) by archeologists. You would only use this to read what is written on some ancient artifact.
5. Rashi typeface: Rashi (nickname for Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac (Shlomo Yitzhaki), known as Rashi (based on an acronym of his Hebrew initials), is one of the most influential Jewish commentators in history. He was born in Troyes, Champagne, in northern France, in 1040, and studied in Worms, Germany. Rashi’s best-known works are his comprehensive commentaries on the Bible and the Babylonian Talmud. All editions of the Talmud published since the 1520s have included Rashi’s commentary in the margins.) Rashi wrote in Aramaic and printers use a special script for his comments in the Talmud. Unless you decide to study Talmud in the original languages (good luck!), you won't need to know this script
Each letter began as a picture: one of the charts lists the names of those objects, which are often the names of the letters. For example, aleph (the first letter) was originally the head of a ox and aleph means ox. The initial sound of the word tells you the sound the letter typically makes.
Each letter was also a number, since Arabic numerals did not yet exist. That means that EVERY word has a numerical value, computed by ADDING the value of each letter. We will occasionally look at the numerical value of a word (really different way to read!),
You might want to print out a chart and glue it into your notebook as a reference.
