Mem (מ) — the 13th Hebrew letter | MannaFest

Sounds like

m

Its number

40

Its name means

mayim

Final form

ם

Mem is water. The sign is a wave, its name is the Hebrew word for water, and the letter has kept that shape for nearly four thousand years — Greek mu and English M are the same zigzag with the corners knocked off.

It is also one of the five letters that change form at the end of a word. Ordinary mem is open at the bottom left; final mem, ם, is closed on all four sides, a sealed box. Hebrew scribes have counted, catalogued and guarded that difference for two thousand years, and in one single verse of the Bible they kept a closed mem where it does not belong.

The words mem carries are the ones a kingdom is made of: mayim, water; melek, king; mashiach, the anointed one — Messiah. And Moses, whose name the text itself explains by the water he was pulled out of.

Where Scripture itself plays with this letter

Everything in this band is checkable — something the biblical text or the manuscripts that carry it demonstrably do with this letter.

The closed mem in the middle of a word

In the great birth prophecy of Isaiah — "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given" — the next verse opens with the phrase English Bibles render "Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end." The Hebrew word there, l'marbeh, is written with the closed, end-of-word form of mem sitting in the middle of the word. It is the only place in the entire Hebrew Bible where that happens. The Masoretes, the scribes who counted every letter, recorded the oddity and copied it forward rather than tidying it up. What they did not do is say why, and neither does the text. (English Bibles number this verse Isaiah 9:7; the Hebrew Bible numbers it 9:6.)

Water is the Bible's first surface

Before there is land, there is water. "The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" — mayim, in the second verse of Genesis. Water is what God divides on day two, what drowns the world in Noah's day, what splits at the Red Sea, and what a prophet strikes and a Messiah walks on. The letter that draws a wave is doing a lot of work in this book.

The mem stanza of Psalm 119 — "Oh how love I thy law"

Mem gets verses 97 to 104, and the stanza opens with the psalm's most quoted line: "Oh how love I thy law! It is my meditation all the day." The first word, mah, is mem's. Six verses later he says the thing that explains the other 175: "How sweet are thy words unto my taste! yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth."

Words that begin here

מַיִם

mayim — water, waters

The letter's own name, and always plural in Hebrew — water is never spoken of as one thing.

Open the word→

מֶלֶךְ

melek — king

Israel asked for one, got one, and spent the rest of the Old Testament measuring them against God.

Open the word→

מָשִׁיחַ

mashiach — anointed one, Messiah

Someone with oil poured on him for an office — priest, king, prophet. The Greek for it is Christos.

The prophecies→

מֹשֶׁה

Mosheh — Moses

The text explains the name itself: "because I drew him out of the water."

Open the word→

How readers have meditated on this letter

What follows is devotional reading — meaning laid on top of the sign by readers who loved it, not a fact about what Hebrew words mean. It is carried here because it is old, beautiful, and genuinely part of how this letter has been received. It is kept behind this door so nobody mistakes it for grammar.

✧The sealed mem of Isaiah 9a devotional reading

Both Jewish and Christian preachers have read the closed mem in l'marbeh as meaning something: a kingdom shut up until its appointed time, an increase that is sealed and then opened, and in some Christian homiletics a sign of the closed womb of the virgin birth in the very verse about the child. These readings are old, and they are readings. What the manuscripts give us is the fact — a final-form mem, once, word-medially, guarded by scribes who would not correct it. The reason was not written down. Everything after that is interpretation, and should be labeled as such wherever it is preached.

Read this way by: Jewish and Christian homiletical tradition; the manuscript fact is catalogued in C. D. Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible (1897)

✧Water as depth and chaosa devotional reading

The devotional word-picture stream reads mem's wave as the deep, the crowd, the unknown — what flows and cannot be held. Scripture itself does use water that way, from the deep of Genesis 1 to the sea that is no more in Revelation 21. But it does so with words and images, not by means of a letter, and words starting with mem are not thereby about water. The imagery is real; the derivation is not.

Read this way by: The modern "Hebrew word pictures" devotional stream (Frank Seekins; Jeff A. Benner) — named, not endorsed

Where this letter leads

The prophecies — where mashiach leads→

Isaiah — the book with the closed mem in it→

Psalm 119 in the reader — the mem stanza→