Greek Roots · letter 14 of 24

Xi

The letter of the tree they hanged him on — and the middle digit of 666.

How the shape crossed the sea

Phoenician · c. 1000–800 BC

Phoenician samekh — a pillar or support, ribbed.

Archaic Greek · c. 750–500 BC

Three bars on a spine. The spine was later dropped and the bars kept.

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

The ks of “box,” written with one letter.

Written x (ks) in scholarly books.

Its number

it is letter 14 — the gap is the lost letters, which kept their numbers

Its name means

pillar (from samekh) — but the name does not match

in Phoenician, not in Greek

Borrowed from

Phoenician samekh

Scholars split

Xylon means wood — timber, a stick, a beam, a living tree. The New Testament writers use it, deliberately, for the cross. Peter and Paul both do it, and both are quoting the same line from Deuteronomy about a man hanged on a tree being under a curse.

It is a hard word chosen on purpose. Stauros names the instrument; xylon names the shame.

Xi has a second claim on a reader's attention. In Greek numbers it is 60 — the middle digit of the number in Revelation 13:18, spelled χξϛ.

What it was borrowed from

Phoenician samekh

Scholars split

Two or more serious readings, all defended by working scholars, none settled.

The shape and the position are not in doubt: Ξ sits in samekh's slot and looks like samekh's ribbed pillar. The NAMES are the problem. Greek's three s-letters — xi, sigma, and the archaic san — carry names that do not line up with the Phoenician letters their shapes came from, and “sigma” arguably sounds more like samekh than “xi” does. Several reconstructions of the shuffle exist; none has carried the field. This is a real, live gap in the scholarship, and the hall grades it as one rather than picking a winner.

In the older script

Archaic xi has three horizontal bars threaded on a vertical spine. Later Greek dropped the spine and kept the bars, which is the Ξ printed today.

Where the New Testament uses this letter

“Hanged on a tree”

Four times the apostles say it that way rather than saying “crucified,” and each time the Old Testament line is in view: cursed is everyone that hangs on a tree. Paul builds a whole argument on it in Galatians — the curse was real, and it was taken.

The same word for the tree of life

The Bible's last chapter uses xylon again, for the tree of life whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. The word that named the instrument of the curse names the tree at the end of the story.

Strangers and foreigners

Xenos is a stranger, a foreigner, a guest — the word behind “xenophobia,” and behind the New Testament's insistence that Christians are resident aliens wherever they live.

Words that begin here

ξύλον

xylon — wood, tree

The cross, named as a tree — and the tree of life, named with the same word.

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ξένος

xenos — stranger, foreigner

Both the guest and the host could be called xenos. Hospitality is built into the word.

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