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Greek Roots · letter 1 of 24

Alpha

The first letter, borrowed from an ox — and the letter that gave Europe its vowels.

How the shape crossed the sea

Phoenician · c. 1000–800 BC

Phoenician ʾaleph — the ox head, lying on its side.

Archaic Greek · c. 750–500 BC

Greek stood the ox upright. The horns became the peak of A.

The classical capital · the New Testament's own letters

Every New Testament manuscript was written in capitals like this one — no lower case, and no spaces between the words.

The Phoenician drawing is the same one the Hebrew hall uses for that letter — at this date the two scripts were one alphabet in two neighbouring hands. The archaic Greek form is simplified from published hand-copies of the early inscriptions, not a facsimile of any single stone: early Greek scribes varied wildly, and wrote right to left as readily as left to right.

Sounds like

The a in father when it is long, the a in cat when it is short. Greek wrote the two with the same letter and expected you to know which you were reading.

Written a in scholarly books.

Its number

1

position and number agree here

Its name means

ox (from ʾaleph)

in Phoenician, not in Greek

Borrowed from

Phoenician ʾaleph

Well established

Somewhere around 800 BC, Greek traders who could not write met Phoenician traders who could, and took their letters. They took the shapes, they took the order, and they took the names — which is why the first letter of the Greek alphabet is called by a Phoenician word for “ox” that no Greek could translate.

What they did not take was the pictures. In the world the alphabet came from, every letter had been a little drawing of something. Greek kept none of that. A letter was a sound and nothing else, and “alpha” was just what you called the first one.

Then they changed something the Phoenicians had not thought to. Semitic writing marked consonants and let the reader supply the vowels. Greek had sounds left over — signs for throat-noises Greek did not make — so it spent them on vowels. Alpha was the first. Every alphabet that writes its vowels, including this one, is downstream of that decision.

Where the New Testament uses this letter

“I am the Alpha and the Omega”

Three times in Revelation the voice from the throne names itself by two letters — the first and the last. It is the Greek way of saying “everything, end to end,” the same way English says “from A to Z.” Hebrew has its own version of the idiom, “from aleph to taw,” and Revelation is written in Greek to Greek-speaking churches, so it says it the Greek way.

The force of it is position, not meaning. Alpha is not first because it is grand; it is first because it is first. What the sentence claims is that there is no part of the story that is outside him — not the opening of it, not the end of it, and nothing in between.

The letter that means “not”

Greek can put an alpha on the front of a word to cancel it — the same trick English inherited in “atypical” and “amoral.” The New Testament leans on it hard when it needs to say what God is by saying what he is not.

So an inheritance is aphthartos, un-rotting; God is aoratos, un-seeable; the gift is anekdiēgētos, un-tellable. When the writers ran out of words big enough, they took an ordinary word and put alpha in front of it.

Words that begin here

ἀγάπη

agapē — love

An ordinary, rather colourless Greek word for affection that the New Testament picked up and filled — 114 times.

Open the word→

ἀλήθεια

alētheia — truth

Literally “un-hiddenness” — alpha-not plus a root for concealing. Truth as the thing that has stopped being covered up.

Open the word→

ἀμήν

amēn — amen

Not a Greek word at all: Hebrew, wearing Greek letters, and left untranslated in every English Bible since.

Read it in the Hebrew hall→

ἀπόστολος

apostolos — apostle, one sent

A shipping term before it was a church one — the man dispatched with the cargo and the authority to act.

Open the word→

How readers have read this letter

✧The first and the last, read togethera reading

Readers have long set Revelation's “Alpha and Omega” beside Isaiah's “I am the first, and I am the last,” and heard the same voice in both — the God of Israel identifying himself, and then the risen Christ using the identification of himself. That is a reading of two texts laid side by side, and it is one the church has made from very early on.

Read this way by: Widespread in Christian exposition; the Isaiah pairing (Isa 44:6; 48:12) is standard in the commentary tradition

✧The silent aleph and the sounding alphaa reading

Hebrew's first letter makes no sound of its own; Greek's first letter is a full open vowel. Devotional readers have loved the pairing — the word that was unspoken in the older covenant given a voice in the newer one. It is a meditation built on a real difference between the two writing systems, and it is worth naming as a meditation: the change happened because Greek needed vowels, not because it needed a sermon.

Read this way by: A modern devotional pairing; the underlying facts about both alphabets are standard

◈Contested ground — where these readings are argued againstcontested

  • The silent aleph and the sounding alpha

    The reason aleph is silent and alpha is not has nothing to do with either covenant. Greek borrowed ʾaleph precisely because the sound it made — a catch in the throat — did not exist in Greek, which left the sign free for a vowel. The contrast is real; the theology is laid on top of it by the reader, not drawn out of it.