Greek Roots · letter 3 of 24

Gamma

The letter behind “it is written” — and behind every gospel that got written down.

How the shape crossed the sea

Phoenician · c. 1000–800 BC

Phoenician gimel — a hunter's throwstick.

Archaic Greek · c. 750–500 BC

Two strokes at a corner, the arm dropping away to the right.

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

A hard g, as in go. Before another gamma or a kappa it turns nasal, which is why angelos — “messenger, angel” — is spelled with two gammas and pronounced with an ng.

Written g in scholarly books.

Its number

position and number agree here

Its name means

throwstick (from gimel)

in Phoenician, not in Greek

Borrowed from

Phoenician gimel

Well established

Greek's word for writing starts here: graphō, to scratch or carve, and graphē, the thing scratched — a document. When the New Testament says hē graphē, “the Scripture,” it is using a completely ordinary word for a written text and letting the definite article do the work.

The form the Gospels reach for most often is gegraptai, “it stands written” — a perfect tense, meaning it was written and it still stands. That is the word Jesus answers the tempter with, three times, in the wilderness.

Where the New Testament uses this letter

“It is written”

In the wilderness Jesus does not argue. Each time, he answers with one word and a quotation: gegraptai — it stands written. The tense matters. Greek's perfect describes a past act with a standing result, so the sense is not “someone once wrote this” but “this was written and it is still in force.”

Tongues — the word is just “languages”

The Greek word at Pentecost is glōssa, which means a tongue in your mouth and a language you speak, exactly as English uses “mother tongue.” Luke then removes any doubt by saying the crowd each heard their own dialektos.

Words that begin here

γραφή

graphē — writing, Scripture

An everyday word for a document. “The writing” became “the Scripture” by usage, not by vocabulary.

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γράφω

graphō — to write

Originally to scratch or engrave — writing as something you cut into a surface.

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γινώσκω

ginōskō — to know

Knowing by acquaintance and experience, the way you know a person rather than a fact.

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γλῶσσα

glōssa — tongue, language

The organ and the language, in one word — as in the English “glossary.”

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