בBet

Open a Hebrew Bible and the very first mark on the page is a bet. Bereshit — "in the beginning" — starts there, and so the whole of Scripture begins one step into the alphabet rather than at its head. The rabbis noticed early and never stopped discussing it; their reading is in the devotional panel below, kept there because it is a reading, not a grammar fact. The plain fact is enough on its own: the book that tells you how everything started does not start at the start.

Psalm 119 is built as an alphabet walk: twenty-two blocks of eight verses, one block per letter, and inside each block every verse begins with that letter. Bet's block is verses 9 through 16, and it opens with the question every young reader has asked: "Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?" The Hebrew word behind "wherewithal" starts with bet.

Fourteen poems in the Bible walk the alphabet down the page. Bet gets the second line in each. You cannot see it in English — the letters are Hebrew — but it is there in every one of these verses, and once you know, the poems read differently: they are not only saying something, they are counting something.

In the square script bet (ב) and kaf (כ) differ by one small squared-off corner. Jesus said that not one "jot or tittle" would pass from the law until all was fulfilled. The "tittle" is a Greek word meaning "little horn" — the tiny stroke that keeps one letter from becoming another. Bet and kaf are exactly the kind of pair he meant. His point was not that letters carry secrets; it was that the text is kept down to the stroke.