Greek Roots · letter 6 of 24
The weapon — and the seventh number, though it is the sixth letter.
Phoenician · c. 1000–800 BC
Phoenician zayin — a weapon, blade and hilt.
Archaic Greek · c. 750–500 BC
An I-beam: the blade between two guards.
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
Probably zd or dz in the classical period, settling to a plain z by New Testament times. Say it like the zz in “adze” and you are close enough.
Written z in scholarly books.
Its number
7
it is letter 6 — the gap is the lost letters, which kept their numbers
Its name means
weapon (from zayin)
in Phoenician, not in Greek
Borrowed from
Phoenician zayin
Well established
Here is a reader's first collision with Greek numbers. Zeta is the sixth letter, but its number is seven. The missing six belongs to a letter that is not on the wall any more: digamma, which sounded like w, fell out of Greek speech and out of Greek writing, and kept its number anyway.
That single fact — a letter that died but kept its value — is the key to the whole Greek numeral system, and it is the reason the number of the beast in Revelation is spelled with a sign most readers have never seen.
Greek has two words English flattens into “life”: bios, the life you can lose, count and spend, and zōē, life as a quality of being alive. John's Gospel and letters use zōē almost exclusively, usually with “eternal” attached — and the point is not primarily length but kind.
