רResh

“Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law.” The jot is iota — Greek for yod, the smallest letter in the Hebrew square script. The tittle is keraia, “little horn”: the tiny stroke that keeps two near-identical letters from becoming each other.

Resh is one half of the most famous of those pairs. ד dalet and ר resh differ by one small corner. So do ב and כ. So do ה and ח. Copying Hebrew faithfully means keeping strokes that small, and a scribe who lets one slide changes a word.

Notice what Jesus's argument is and is not. It is not about hidden meanings inside letters. It is about preservation — the text is kept down to the stroke. Yod's room carries this one in full.

The Bible's first word is bereshit, and inside it sits reshit — “beginning,” “the first of a thing,” the word also used for the firstfruits of a harvest. Behind reshit stands roʾsh, “head.” Wisdom in Proverbs says the same word about herself: “Jehovah possessed me in the beginning of his way.”

Psalm 119's resh stanza — verses 153 to 160 — opens on another resh word: reʾeh, “Consider mine affliction, and deliver me.”

Hebrew has a single word where English needs three. Ruach is the wind that blows, the breath in your lungs, and the Spirit of God — and the Bible plays on all three without apology.

Genesis 1:2: the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Psalm 147: “he causeth his wind to blow, and the waters flow.” And Ezekiel 37, in the valley of dry bones, uses the one word four ways in a single scene: prophesy to the breath, come from the four winds, breathe on these slain, and they lived.

A translator has to pick one English word each time. The Hebrew reader hears all three at once.