דDalet

"Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law." The "jot" is the Greek name for yod, the smallest Hebrew letter. The "tittle" is a word meaning "little horn" — the minute stroke that separates near-identical letters. Dalet and resh are the classic pair: one small squared corner is the whole difference between them. This is the one place where Jesus argues from the shape of letters, and the argument is not about hidden meaning at all. It is about preservation: the text is kept down to the stroke.

"Hear, O Israel: Jehovah our God, Jehovah is one." In the Hebrew manuscripts, two letters in that verse are written oversized: the ayin that ends the first word, shema ("hear"), and the dalet that ends the last word, echad ("one"). Put those two large letters together and they spell ed, the Hebrew word for "witness." This is a real feature of the manuscripts, catalogued by the Masoretes — the Jewish scribes who preserved and annotated the text — and printed in Hebrew Bibles to this day. Why the scribes did it, they did not say; that the ink is oversized on the page, anyone can see.

Verses 25 through 32 are dalet's block. It opens at the lowest point in the psalm — "My soul cleaveth unto the dust" — and climbs, eight verses later, to "I will run the way of thy commandments." The stanza is a small rescue in miniature, and every line of it begins with this letter.

In Psalm 25 the dalet verse is the prayer "Show me thy ways, O Jehovah" — derakheykha, a dalet word for roads or paths. In Psalm 34 it is "I sought Jehovah, and he answered me." The poets are keeping the alphabet and praying at the same time.