MannaFest

Greek Roots · letter 18 of 24

Sigma

The letter with two shapes — and the one that spells the cross.

How the shape crossed the sea

Phoenician · c. 1000–800 BC

Phoenician shin — a tooth, or a composite bow.

Archaic Greek · c. 750–500 BC

The tooth tipped on its side into a zigzag of three or four strokes.

drawn on a broken line: this letter's origin is not settled

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

S, as in English.

Written s in scholarly books.

Its number

200

it is letter 18 — the gap is the lost letters, which kept their numbers

Its name means

tooth (from shin) — but the name does not match

in Phoenician, not in Greek

Borrowed from

Phoenician shin

Scholars split

Sigma is the only Greek letter that changes shape depending on where it sits. In the middle of a word it is σ; at the end it is ς. That is a scribe's convenience from the manuscript era, and it is one of the few places where Greek does what Hebrew does with its final forms.

It also opens the New Testament's bluntest word. Stauros is a stake, a pole, an upright post — the plain name for the thing the Romans killed people on. The Gospels do not soften it.

Where the New Testament uses this letter

The word of the cross

Paul calls the message ho logos ho tou staurou — the word of the stake. He knows exactly how it sounds. Foolishness to Greeks, a stumbling block to Jews, and he prints it anyway as the centre of what he preaches.

Flesh is not the same as body

Sarx, flesh, is one of Paul's hardest words. It can mean simple physical humanity, and it can mean humanity organised against God. Confusing the two produces a great deal of bad teaching about the body, because Paul's problem is not that people have bodies.

Words that begin here

σταυρός

stauros — cross, stake

The plain name of the instrument. No euphemism anywhere in the New Testament.

Open the word→

σωτήρ

sōtēr — saviour

A title Roman emperors used of themselves. The New Testament gives it to someone they executed.

Open the word→

σοφία

sophia — wisdom

The prize of the Greek world — which Paul says is found in a crucified man.

Open the word→

σάρξ

sarx — flesh

Physical humanity, and humanity in revolt. Same word, two jobs.

Open the word→