When I study scripture, I often take into consideration the meaning of the Hebrew letters. It enriches the meaning of the text. In this post I'll endeavor to explain why.
The shortest reason I incorporate the Hebrew letters into my study and meditation is that I am seeking emet (truth) and binah (understanding), like any serious Bible student who longs to know the Creator. I have simply found that attending to the letters themselves is a helpful path for me personally.
People are familiar with the expression, "The letter of the law." When it comes to understaning the Hebrew scriptures, I like to think in terms of the letters of the word. This gives me a very different way to think about ‘the letter of the law.’ In common usage, that phrase suggests a rigid, legalistic focus on rules. I, however, attend to the letters of the Torah not to become more legalistic, but to relate more deeply to God through His word by way of His letters. For me, each letter is a point of contact with the Author, not a weapon of bureaucracy.
Now put the letter Ayin into the context of the Hebrew word "Shema" (שֵׁמַע), which means both "ear" and "hearing." It ends with the letter ayin. So we have both "ears to hear and eyes" in the word shema.
Deuteronomy 6.4— Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one
Letter and Spirit
Hebrew letters are like vessels that can pour out deep revelation. In classical Jewish thought, Torah has both a precise, concrete side (the din, the detailed halachah) and an inner intention or ruach (the purpose, ethic and God‑ward orientation). The “letter” is a vessel for holding the endless and infinite spirit of the Torah.
Every level of text is meaningful: whole narratives, phrases, words, and even the shape and crowns of individual letters. In that world, a “letter” isn’t just a legalistic atom; it is a spiritual unit out of which divine speech and reality itself are built.
The spirit of the letter is animated and becomes fully intelligible in the living context of a 'word,' a verse, a mitzvah, or a life. A letter's presence at the beginning of a word is not accidental, its suggestive.
Hebrew Roots and Tri‑literals
Hebrew words are derived from a semantic root of typically three consonants. Those consonants carry a core meaning and potential. That core meaning is inflected to become several words.
Jewish mystical and linguistic traditions go one step further: they treat each of those consonantal “letters” as having its own character—name, numeric value, first appearance in Torah, and symbolic associations—which then color the root and word they form.
Letters as spiritual architecture
In Jewish mystical sources, the Hebrew alphabet is seen as the “spiritual underpinning of the entire universe,” with each letter a vessel of specific divine energy. Creation happens by divine speech, so the sequence of letters in a word is, in a sense, an architecture of reality; rearranging, counting, or meditating on them (gematria, notarikon, temurah) is a way of discovering hidden aspects of God’s action and will.
That means the “letters of a word” are not merely context for phonetics; they are micro‑contexts of meaning, each bringing its own symbolic freight, which then interact in the "shoresh" (root) and its derived words.
Here is an example where letters bring out the spirit of the word and how that provides a deeper understanding in the context the sentence or paragraph.
Consider the Hebrew word for truth—אֱמֶת (emet) as an example of how letters draw out the spirit of a word and deepen a whole sentence or paragraph.
Step 1: Word-level meaning
On the surface, 'emet' means “truth,” reliability, faithfulness; it is even called “the seal of the Holy One” in rabbinic literature. It appears in contexts where God’s word, covenant, or judgments are described as firm, trustworthy, and enduring.
Step 2: Letter-level meaning
"Emet" is spelled aleph–mem–tav:
- Aleph ( א ) – first letter of the aleph‑bet, often associated with God, oneness, “the beginning.”
- Mem ( מ ) – one of the “middle” letters; some traditions link it with “water” and with Torah flowing through history.
- Tav ( ת ) – last letter of the aleph‑bet, often read symbolically as “completion,” “seal,” or “the end.”
Note that emet is composed of the first, a middle, and the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, teaching that “truth” spans from beginning to end. Note the classic midrash which points out that if you remove the aleph ( א ) from emet, you are left with מת (met) which is the word “dead”, suggesting that when the divine presence (aleph) is removed, truth collapses into death or lifelessness. God and Truth are One.
Step 3: How this deepens a verse or paragraph
Take a verse or statement like “All Your commandments are truth” (for example, the language of Psalms 119 where God’s “judgments” and “Torah” are called emet). Reading only at the word level, we hear “Your commandments are correct / reliable.” But if we let the letters speak:
- Aleph adds the nuance that this “truth” is rooted in the divine source, not just in accuracy.
- Mem suggests that this truth flows through center of the human experience, like water, sustaining and sometimes testing.
- Tav frames it as something that holds all the way to the end, a truth that will be vindicated and revealed in fullness.
Now, when you read a paragraph about God’s "emet" in covenant——the letters push you to hear more than bare factual correctness. You begin to sense a truth that is God‑rooted (aleph), historically sustaining (mem), and eschatologically complete (tav), which in turn colors how you hear every line in that section about trust, faithfulness, and final vindication.
Letters In Creation
Jews and Christians hold that God spoke creation. Therefore it stands to reason that the letters existed before creation. In this light, the letters gravity is worthy of our attention. Jewish mystical and orthodox beliefs hold that the world was created with the 22 letters of the hebrew alphabet. They are of God.
Therefore, every letter in a biblical word participates in the act of creation at some level, and not only in the “message” level of syntax. Studying letters, roots, and their permutations becomes a way of engaging the same divine wisdom by which God continually sustains the world, not a marginal or merely decorative exercise.
Ultimately, while people have different approachs to studying the bible, we share very similar objectives. What works for each of us varies. The important thing is that our approach actually draws us into greater faithfulness to God—deeper love for Him and for others, clearer obedience to what He reveals, and increasing humility as learners before His word. I certainly appreciate what is to be gained from others methods. Being in the word is what's key.
