הHe

In Genesis 17, God makes his covenant with Abram and renames him: Abram (four Hebrew letters) becomes Abraham (five). The added letter is he. In the same chapter Sarai becomes Sarah, and again a he stands at the end of the new name. The text says plainly why the names change — "a father of a multitude of nations have I made thee" — and says nothing at all about the letters. But the letters really did change, at the exact moment the covenant was cut, and that is a fact you can see on the page.

Hallelu-Yah is two Hebrew words: hallelu, "praise ye," and Yah, the short form of the divine name. The first word starts with he. It runs through the last psalms like a drumbeat, and the Greek spelling of it, "Alleluia," carries into Revelation untranslated — one of the very few Hebrew words the whole church kept saying in Hebrew.

Hebrew has no separate word for "the." It attaches a he to the front of the noun instead. That one breath is the difference between "a king" and "the king," between "light" and "the light" — and translators lean on it constantly. The most common he in the Bible is not a word at all; it is this hardworking prefix.

In Genesis 2:4, inside the phrase usually rendered "when they were created," the Hebrew manuscripts write one he noticeably smaller than the letters around it. It is one of a short list of undersized letters the Masoretes — the Jewish scribes who preserved the text — recorded and kept. They left no explanation. They simply refused to smooth it out, and printed Hebrew Bibles still carry the small letter today.

Verses 33 through 40 belong to he, and the stanza is one long request to be taught: "Teach me, O Jehovah, the way of thy statutes." Hebrew forms a whole class of "cause me to" verbs with this letter, and the poet uses them one after another — teach me, give me understanding, make me to go, incline my heart.