THE HEBREW ALPHABET AND LANGUAGE

Is it necessary to know anything about the Hebrew alphabet or the language in order to gain from study of the Zohar? The answer to this is probably ‘yes’. It is difficult to glean much from a discussion of the construction of the letter Aleph if you don’t know what that letter looks like. It is difficult to follow the gematria at all if you don’t know the numerical values of the various letters. It is said that the world has been created by the Word of G-d, and the Zohar expresses the belief that the language used was Hebrew. To understand the thinking of the rabbis, and perhaps to awaken certain mystical understandings, something of the Hebrew underpinnings should be known.

The Hebrew language is structured around a 3-letter root. This structure guides and informs almost every word, and although other letters are prefixed and suffixed to these roots, the root usually remains. From an examination of words which have the same root, much can be understood. For example, the words safar, sefer, sefar, siper, safera, sifora, and sefera mean respectively to count, book, census, to tell or talk, scholar or writer, number, and sphere. Generally speaking you can see how these concepts fit together.

The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters, none of which are technically vowels. The language was written without vowels until the Masoretic pointing system was developed after the 5^th century A.D. This is a system of adding dots and dashes above, below and inside the letters to indicate vowel sounds and differences in consonantal sounds. Without these symbols, it is not possible except from context to determine the difference between “book” and “census”, or between “to count” and “to talk”, for example. This lends enormous complexity to the translation of Torah or any ancient Hebrew text; the possibility for alternate meanings is enormous. The long oral tradition, however, has passed down the “correct” pronunciation and meaning of the Torah, and these have been codified in the Talmud, the Halakha and other writings in Jewish law.

Translation and interpretation is also complicated by the difficulties with tense in Hebrew. Partial translations are rife with problems, because without knowing the tense of an earlier verb in the same sentence, the tense of the present verb cannot always be reliably determined. To indicate a series of actions taking place in the past, the first in the series of verbs was written in the perfect tense and then all following verbs were written in the imperfect. To indicate a series of actions taking place in the present or future, the first verb was written in the imperfect tense and the subsequent ones in the perfect. This is one of the reasons why it has been easy for people to quote scripture to mean anything they want it to mean, and it seems to have happened most often where people take events that may already HAVE happened and speak about them as foretold for the future.

But the ambiguity and subtlety of expression of the Hebrew language also has enormous value for the mystic. It allows for openings that could not occur with other more modern languages, where such ambiguities do not exist.

What the Zohar does is to play with the alternate meanings a great deal. It is always openly or subliminally asking the question ‘what if?’ ‘What if’ it is the other word that is meant here? What if an alternate meaning reveals a new insight? What if we reversed the letters? What if we used the alphabet which substitutes the first letter in a word for the next letter in the alphabet? Or the alphabet which substitutes the first letter, Aleph for the last letter, Tet, and the second letter, Bet, for the second-to-last letter, Shin, and so on?

This radical use of the alphabet and language is one of the many techniques that are used in the Zohar to release the mind from its customary world-view, to countermand logic, and to overthrow reason --- it is only in this way that certain mystical understandings can be arrived at.

Put Heb. alphabet, with English sounds and numerical value here.

Except for quotations from the Torah, the Zohar is written in 13^th century Aramaic. Aramaic is a very close cousin of Hebrew, using the same alphabet and a great deal of the same vocabulary and sentence structure. Both languages are of course written from right to left (and top to bottom) rather than left to right. Anyone not knowing of the Hebrew and Aramaic mix in the Zohar might have difficulty when looking up words in a Hebrew dictionary.