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Greek Roots · letter 4 of 24

Delta

The door — and the only letter that has a landscape named after it.

How the shape crossed the sea

Phoenician · c. 1000–800 BC

Phoenician dalet — a door-leaf on its hinge.

Archaic Greek · c. 750–500 BC

The door sealed shut into a triangle — and lent its name to river deltas.

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

D in the New Testament's day; modern Greek has softened it to the th of this.

Written d in scholarly books.

Its number

4

position and number agree here

Its name means

door (from dalet)

in Phoenician, not in Greek

Borrowed from

Phoenician dalet

Well established

Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, needed a name for the flat fan of land where the Nile splits and spreads before the sea. He called it the Delta, because that is the shape of the letter. Every river delta on earth is named after this letter, and this letter is named after a Phoenician door.

In the New Testament, delta opens the vocabulary of covenant and glory — two words whose Greek histories are worth knowing, because both were bent hard out of shape by the Bible.

Where the New Testament uses this letter

Covenant, or last will and testament?

Diathēkē is the word the Greek Old Testament chose for God's covenant with Israel. But in ordinary Greek it usually meant a will — the document that takes effect when someone dies. Hebrews turns on exactly that double sense: a testament, the writer argues, requires the death of the one who made it.

That is why English Bibles say “Old Testament” and “New Testament” at all. It is a translation decision, made in Greek, about a Hebrew idea.

Glory used to mean “opinion”

In classical Greek doxa is what people think — an opinion, a reputation. It has no weight in it. The Jewish translators of the Old Testament used it anyway, to carry the Hebrew kabod, which is a word about heaviness: the visible, crushing weight of God's presence.

So doxa came into the New Testament already loaded with a meaning ordinary Greek never gave it. This is the single clearest example of what the Greek Bible did to the Greek language.

Words that begin here

διαθήκη

diathēkē — covenant, testament

A will in ordinary Greek; a covenant in the Bible. Both senses are live in Hebrews.

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δόξα

doxa — glory

“Opinion” in Plato; “the weight of God's presence” by the time Paul writes.

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δικαιοσύνη

dikaiosynē — righteousness, justice

One Greek word where English needs two — which is why the same verses get translated so differently.

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δοῦλος

doulos — slave, bondservant

The blunt word for an owned person. Paul opens letters by calling himself one.

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