Level 1 · 22 letters
Twenty-two symbols, and before any of them made a sound, each one was a picture — an ox, a house, a foot, a door. Learn the pictures and the sounds follow, because that is the order in which they were made. You do not need fluency here; you need only the willingness to look at a letter and see the thing it once drew.
The first four symbols — א ב ג ד — as the pictures they were before they were letters. An ox head, a tent, a foot, a doorway.
Lesson film pending · exercises below are live
Before א was a letter, it was a picture. What did the picture show?
The Hebrew word אב (av) means “father.” Read its two symbols as pictures, in order. What do you see?
ד is the door. What number does the tradition assign it?
ה ו ז ח. A figure with arms lifted, a peg, a harvesting blade, a boundary of stone. Four pictures, and one of them is doing a quiet job in nearly every verse.
Lesson film pending · exercises below are live
ו — Vav — is drawn as a nail or a peg. Beyond fastening, what everyday job does this letter do in Hebrew?
ח, Chet, pictures a wall. Which sense follows from the picture?
ה is often rendered “behold” — a figure standing with arms lifted. What is its number?
ט י כ ל. At the tenth letter the counting turns over, and the alphabet begins to climb by tens.
Lesson film pending · exercises below are live
י — Yod — is the smallest letter on the page. What does its picture show?
Something changes at י. What is it?
ל, Lamed, is the shepherd’s staff. Which sense does it carry?
מ נ ס ע. The deep, the heir, the post that holds a thing upright, and the eye that takes it all in.
Lesson film pending · exercises below are live
The pictograph behind מ is water. Which cluster of meanings does the letter carry?
נ, Nun, is the seed. What number sits beneath it?
One of these letters is a prop that holds a thing upright. The other three are not. Which is Samech?
פ צ ק ר. A mouth opens, a hook catches, the sun rests on the horizon, and a head lifts. Here the alphabet leaves the tens behind and climbs by hundreds.
Lesson film pending · exercises below are live
פ — Pey — pictures the mouth. Which sense belongs to it?
ק — Qof — is drawn as the sun at the horizon. Which cluster of meanings does that image carry?
ר, Resh, is the head. Reading straight through the alphabet, its value is the largest you have met so far. What is it?
ש and ת close the twenty-two. Then the five letters that take a different form when they come to the end of a word — and what happens to them when you count.
Lesson film pending · exercises below are live
ש, Shin, pictures teeth. What sense is carried with it?
ת closes the aleph-bet. What is its picture, and what is its number?
Five Hebrew letters take a different shape at the end of a word. Which five?
