Hello, this is Pastor Steven Anderson from Faithful Word Baptist Search in Tempe, Arizona.
Today I'm going to be teaching you the Hebrew alphabet.
Before we get started, let me just say a few things about the Hebrew alphabet.
First of all, it's a lot more difficult than learning the Greek alphabet.
I remember when I first learned the Greek alphabet, I think it only took me a day or two,
whereas the Hebrew alphabet took me a couple of weeks to learn
just because it's a lot more foreign, it's so different from our English alphabet,
and there are a lot of letters that are easily confused with one another.
If you just want to see what the Hebrew alphabet looks like,
open up your King James Bible to Psalm 119.
The vast majority of King James Bibles will have it divided up into eight verse sections.
At the heading of each of those sections, you'll find the name of each of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet,
and usually they'll actually have the Hebrew character printed right next to it.
The first section will be called Aleph, and then it will show you what an Aleph looks like.
Hopefully your Bible does so.
There are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and they are all consonants.
None of them are vowels.
The vowel sounds were not written out in ancient Hebrew,
but if you open a Hebrew Bible today, it has these little dots and dashes and symbols
that tell you what vowels to use, and so we can talk about that later.
Right now, we just need to learn the 22 consonants or letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
Now, as I said, the Hebrew alphabet is difficult,
but there are still a lot of similarities between the Hebrew alphabet and the English alphabet
because our English alphabet is indirectly derived from the Hebrew alphabet
because the Greek alphabet is derived from the Hebrew alphabet,
and the Latin alphabet is derived from the Greek, and the English is derived from the Latin.
So there are a couple of steps in there, but our English alphabet is derived from the Hebrew alphabet,
even as can be seen by the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph and Bet,
which are very similar to our word alphabet.
So let's go ahead and get started with our first letter, which is going to be Aleph,
and I'm going to draw it for you on the board nice and big.
You start out by making a diagonal line like that at a 45-degree angle.
Then you're going to start just a little bit lower than the center point
and draw a curved line up like this,
and then you're going to start just above the center point
and come down with another curved line like this.
So this is the letter Aleph,
and I'm also going to be writing them across the top of the board
to complete the alphabet as we go, so I'm going to draw a little Aleph right here as well.
And the reason that I'm starting on the right side of the board
is because Hebrew is actually written from right to left.
Unlike Greek or English, which is written from left to right,
they write from right to left, so they're going to start over here and go this way.
Not only that, but even when you open up a Hebrew book,
you have to start from what, from our perspective, would be the back of the book.
You know, you flip it over and open from the opposite side,
and then you read from right to left.
So this is the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet,
and the name of it I'm going to write underneath,
and I'm going to use the same spellings that you'll find in the King James Bible,
Psalm 119, just to make it easy for you and make it consistent.
I'm going to use their spellings,
and I'm going to be, of course, teaching you the modern Hebrew pronunciation.
There's not really much difference between the modern Hebrew pronunciation
and the ancient Hebrew pronunciation,
so there's really no point in learning an ancient pronunciation
that may have sounded a certain way.
We might as well stick with the modern pronunciation.
And so let me teach you the pronunciation of Aleph.
I just did. It's actually silent.
So all this work to learn your first letter, and it turns out it's silent.
It doesn't make any sound.
So Aleph is just a silent letter.
You say, why in the world would you have a silent letter?
Well, it's more just like a place marker for vowel sounds,
and we'll learn more about that when we get into the vowel sounds.
But for now, just understand that the letter Aleph looks like this.
It's called Aleph, and it's silent.
Now, I would strongly recommend that you grab a piece of paper and a pen
as I go through this lesson, and I want you to make a row of each letter.
So when we're talking about Aleph, you should have your piece of paper,
and you should just be writing a whole bunch of Alephs across the page.
Start at the right side of the page and make a line of Alephs
all the way to the left side of the page, and that will really help drive this in.
But again, don't expect to learn the whole thing in one day.
So our first letter is Aleph. That's what it looks like.
You make this diagonal line.
You start a little below the bottom and curve up.
You start a little above the middle, and you curve down,
and that's what it looks like when you have an Aleph.
Now, if you look at it in the Bible in Psalm 119,
you'll notice it looks slightly different in print, as all letters do.
I mean, if you think about it, when we write an A in English,
just a lowercase a, we usually make it look something like this.
Yet when you see an A printed in a book, it'll often have a crazy look, something like that.
So the way things are printed is a little bit different than when we write them by hand.
So that is what a handwritten Aleph looks like,
and I've put it up there in the top right corner of the board.
Diagonal line down, start a little below the middle, curve up, a little above the middle,
and curve down, and this letter is silent, Aleph.
The next letter of the Hebrew alphabet is called Bet.
And Bet looks like this.
You make a right angle, and then you draw a base to it,
and then you put a dot in the middle.
And notice that the base of Bet goes a little bit beyond this vertical line,
just a little bit that way.
And then notice also that the baseline goes a little bit further than this top piece.
Whenever I look at this letter, I think of the game Hangman.
Now, it's not exactly shaped like a hangman, but that's just how I remember it.
But you can see the proportions of it there.
The bottom line's a little bit longer going out to the left.
There's this little extra piece hanging over, and then a dot right in the middle.
And this letter is called Bet, Bet.
Now, if we were to remove the dot from the letter Bet,
because the letter Bet makes a B sound, B-B-B-Bet, all right?
Aleph is silent, Bet makes a B-B sound.
But if we remove the dot from the middle of Bet,
now it becomes pronounced Vet, like a V-V-V-V sound.
And it's Vet, and it makes a V sound.
So whenever we see Bet with its dot, it makes a B sound.
But when we remove the dot, it becomes Vet and makes a V sound.
Second letter, I'm going to go ahead and throw one up here on our alphabet,
our Aleph Bet up here.
Put a dot in the middle, we've got Aleph Bet, all right?
Next letter is going to be Gimel.
And we're going to do that by coming down like that,
and then putting a little leg on this, and that is Gimel.
All right, let me draw another one for you.
Gimel. It's very similar to the lowercase lambda in Greek,
if that helps at all, if you know the Greek alphabet.
But this letter is called Gimel, and it makes a G sound.
So you can probably already see the similarity between the English
and Greek alphabets, and the Hebrew Aleph Bet,
because just like in Greek, we have Alpha Vita Rama,
we have here Aleph Bet Gimel, A-B-C, okay?
But this is not a C sound, it's a G sound, Gimel.
And by the way, the letter Gimel is actually where we derive our word camel.
The word camel actually comes from the word Gimel,
and it makes a G sound. Let me write out the name of it for you.
G-I-M-E-L.
It's how that's written in your Bible.
Gimel, the third letter of the Aleph Bet.
Now at this point, let me just point out to you that
each letter of the Hebrew alphabet has a numeric value.
So in addition to being letters, these actually also can act as numbers.
So the letter Aleph has a numeric value of one.
Bet has a numeric value of two, and Gimel has a numeric value of three.
So I'm just going to write the numbers underneath them
as we go over here on the right.
One, two, and three.
Aleph, Bet, and Gimel.
All right, there is Gimel.
Fourth letter.
You'd probably expect it to be some sort of a D sound, right?
A, B, C, D. Well, sure enough, it is a Dalet.
And Dalet is made by making a horizontal line
and then putting a vertical line right here.
So it's pretty much a right angle, but notice that there's this little overhang,
and that overhang becomes important when you're trying to distinguish
this letter from another very similar Hebrew letter later on.
And that's the thing.
There are a lot of Hebrew letters that are really similar to one another,
especially when they're in their printed forms in a book.
Very hard to tell some of them apart.
So you have to pay attention to every little thing about these letters,
every little detail.
And one such detail with the Dalet is this little overhang
where it just hangs over just a little bit to the right.
And the letter Dalet makes a d-d-d-d sound.
I'm going to write out the name for it underneath.
The letter is Dalet, and it makes a d-d-d sound.
So, so far we have Aleph, Bet, Gemel, Dalet.
And Dalet is the number four, of course.
It's going to have a numeric value in Hebrew of four.
I'm going to go ahead and write it over here and put the number underneath it.
One, two, three, four.
Aleph, Bet, Gemel, Dalet.
All right?
And again, I hope you're making a roll of these on your paper,
you're writing these out.
The video may be moving too fast for you.
You may need to pause the video
and keep writing out more lines of that letter.
You're probably going to need to revisit this video
because, again, the Hebrew alphabet's probably a little bit too difficult
to learn in one sitting or in one day.
But I'm just going to move quickly.
You can pause the video at home.
The fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet is called Heh.
And Heh starts out by just making a right angle like that,
and then you make another line down here like that.
But what's very important is that there is a little gap here.
Okay?
See that little space?
Very important.
If that space is not there, then it's a different letter.
Okay?
So when we make the Heh,
we need to make sure that we leave a little gap there.
And the letter Heh makes an H sound,
just like our English H.
I'm going to write out the name of it right there.
Heh, Heh, Heh, Heh.
So this is the letter Heh,
and it has a numerical value of 5.
Go ahead and draw it over here.
Put the number 5 underneath it.
And do not forget to put that gap there.
Extremely important that you have the gap.
The sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet is called Vav.
And it's just a little thing at the top,
and then a line going straight down.
And we have the letter Vav,
and it makes a V-V-V sound.
Just like when we removed the dot from Bet,
and it made a V sound,
this letter makes the same sound, Vav.
But sometimes Vav can also be silent
and just be a marker for vowels.
The O sound or the U sound are frequently using Vav
as just a silent place marker.
So just think of Vav as being either a V sound,
if it's pronounced as a consonant,
it's going to be a V sound.
Otherwise, this one could be silent.
So just be aware of the fact that this one
is sometimes a silent letter, Vav.
Now here's a really easy way to remember the letter Vav.
You might have seen the energy drink called Monster.
Well, it actually seems like kind of a satanic logo
that they have with the energy drink Monster
because the letter Vav has a value of six.
Because remember, this is the sixth letter of the alphabet.
And you'll notice that the symbol for Monster,
if you look at their logo,
is basically three Vavs put together.
It's not a normal M.
It's actually three Vavs put together,
like a 666 in Hebrew.
And obviously 666 is the mark of the beast,
and a synonym for beast could be monster.
So I say that not to just tell you
not to drink the energy drink Monster.
I don't think that any of these energy drinks
are good for you anyway that you buy at the gas station.
I think it's all a bunch of garbage.
I stick with just traditional food and drink.
I don't do energy drinks.
But it just helps you learn the letter Vav.
I mean, this is just a really easy letter to learn
because every time you go to the gas station,
any time you see somebody with a Monster energy drink,
you can remember, oh, yeah, that's three of the letter Vav.
And it just helps you remember that Vav is the number six
and that this is what it looks like.
So the letter Vav is the sixth letter.
Let's look at the seventh letter.
Seventh letter is called Zion.
And the letter Zion is basically just a vertical line
and then a little diagonal line at the top like that.
Now, you'll notice it's not really that different from Vav.
This is Vav. This is Zion.
The difference, the big colossal difference
is that this vertical line is going into the middle
of this horizontal line, whereas with Vav,
this piece is kind of coming off
just to the left side only on Vav.
Whereas with this one, it's slanted.
Now, the way I've written it out for you,
they look really different
because I've got this really dramatic slant
going on with my Zion,
whereas my Vav is pretty much straight out there.
But again, in print,
when you're looking at small print in a book,
sometimes these two can be a little tough to distinguish,
which is why you want to just notice
that the vertical piece is coming into the center
of this diagonal with Zion.
Here's another tip.
Vav is a really common letter.
Zion is not as common.
So when in doubt, it's Vav, okay,
because Zion just isn't really as common of a letter anyway.
But you still want to learn the letter Zion.
The pronunciation of Zion is,
obviously, the letter makes a Z sound, Z-Z-Zion.
But the word Zion,
it's pronounced pretty similar to the place in the Bible,
Zion.
You know, sometimes Jerusalem is called Zion,
so that's just a way to help you remember this letter,
which is the seventh letter
and has a numeric value of seven, the letter Zion.
I'm going to draw it over here on our aleph bet,
put the slanted piece going down there,
and then we're going to put a seven underneath it
to remind us that Zion is the seventh letter
of the Hebrew alphabet
and has a numeric letter value of seven.
All right, so there we go, Zion.
So, so far, we've got aleph, bet,
gemel, dalet, heh, vav, Zion.
The next letter, the eighth letter,
is going to be het.
And this one is just like heh,
except without that gap.
That gap is gone, and sometimes you'll see
a little bit of an overhang there like that.
But pretty much, it's a lack of the gap.
So it's this three-line deal
without the gap that we saw in heh.
That's why it's so important to put that gap in heh
so that we can distinguish it from het.
Now, this is basically that letter
that a lot of Middle Eastern people use
that we don't use in America.
It's that kind of hawking of phlegm
kind of a sound.
Okay, so this letter, het, het,
it's basically just like the Greek letter
he, right, that hard H sound.
Or it's like a German CH sound,
like in the number eight, which is acht, right, acht.
It's that hard H,
clearing your throat kind of a sound.
Het, het, het.
Now, one of the ways that I remember
that het is the eighth letter of the alphabet in Hebrew
is that the German number for eight is acht,
and it has that sound in the midst of it, acht.
And that helps me remember that this is het, all right?
So I'm going to draw it over here
with the number eight below it.
And it's like the Greek he, and it is het.
Eighth letter is het.
All right, the ninth letter rhymes with het,
and it looks like that, and it is het, het.
And het makes a T sound.
And it has a numeric value of nine.
It is the ninth letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
I just remember that it follows het,
so it goes het, het, het, het.
And they rhyme with one another,
so that makes it easy to remember that one.
I'm going to draw it up here, the ninth letter.
Basically, you start drawing a square,
and then the roof just kind of caves in on you,
and you have the letter het, the ninth letter
of the Hebrew alphabet.
The tenth letter is going to be yud,
and yud basically just looks like an apostrophe.
It's pretty much what it looks like.
And it's written at the level of an apostrophe,
so it's written up high on the line.
So let's say I were to write a very common word, yom,
the word for day.
You might have heard of the holiday yom kippur.
So if I were to do that, I would put my yod like that,
and then I would put a vav,
and then I would put the final mem,
and we would have the word yom.
So that should just show you how yud looks
in relationship with the other letters.
It's high up on the page.
It's an apostrophe, basically, is what it looks like.
Or the most famous word in Hebrew,
the most common noun used in the Hebrew Old Testament,
is the name of God, which is in our King James Bible,
the Lord in all caps.
And this is also known as the tetragrammaton.
And the tetragrammaton goes yod, heh, vav, heh.
And we can talk more about the tetragrammaton in another lesson,
but that's what the tetragrammaton looks like.
So you'll see how the yud is up high,
yud, heh, vav, heh.
Those are all letters that you already know, in fact.
So yud, heh, vav, heh.
You can see that the yud is up high like an apostrophe.
That is the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, yud.
Next, the eleventh letter is going to be kaf, kaf.
Just like what you do when you're sick, kaf.
It is like a backward C with a dot in the middle, kaf.
And this makes a k sound.
Okay, I'm going to write it out here with the King James,
Psalm 119 spelling just to give you consistency
if you want to use that English Bible to study these.
Kaf is a backward C with a dot in the middle.
Now, if you remove the dot from this one,
you also change the way that it sounds
because if you remove the dot, then it sounds like het.
And kaf will make a heh, that hard heh, that hard H sound
when you remove the dot.
But when you have the dot, it's kaf and makes a k sound.
Now, I don't want to teach these today
because it's just too much to take in.
Learning the 22 letters is enough.
But I just want to warn you that there are five letters
in the Hebrew alphabet that take a different form
when they're found at the end of a word.
Okay, that'll be in a different video.
But this is one of those that takes a different form
when it's at the end of a word.
But if it's at the beginning of a word or within a word,
this is what kaf is going to look like.
Okay, so let's go ahead and add it
to our running total here of letters.
Up top, backward C, put a dot in it.
It is the number 11 and the name of the letter is kaf.
After kaf, we have lamed.
Lamed basically is a vertical line.
And let me say this.
The vertical line in lamed is above the line.
This is a letter that actually protrudes above the line of text.
So it's really easy to spot in Hebrew text.
But you have this little vertical line.
Then you come over like this,
and then you swing down like this.
Okay, and that is lamed.
Let me make it a little bit bigger for you.
Come down like this, over, and then down.
That is the letter lamed.
Now, one way that I remember it
is that it kind of looks similar to a lightning bolt to me.
And it makes a l sound.
So lamed kind of looks like a lightning bolt.
That's how I remember it.
Let me write out the name of it for you.
This is the letter lamed.
So what I mean by the fact that it goes above the line
is that if we were to put it next to another letter,
like let's say we put it next to aleph,
that's how it would be written together with aleph.
You notice that the top of aleph
is lined up with this line right here,
and this is something that protrudes above the line.
Just like we have letters that hang below the line.
Like, for example, we do a lowercase p.
It hangs below the line.
This is just something that hangs above the line.
That's all.
And this letter is lamed.
It is the 12th letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
And I told you the wrong thing.
I lied to you because even though kaf is the 11th letter,
it does not have a value of 11.
It has a value of 20.
Okay, 20.
And lamed is going to have a value of 30.
So when we put it on our running total here,
yes, kaf is the 11th letter,
but its value numerically is 20.
So notice, now we're counting by tens.
With our first ten letters, we counted by ones.
We had aleph, bet, gimel, dalet, hei, vav, zayin,
het, tet, yud.
That gave us the numbers one through ten.
Yud is ten.
But now, starting with yud,
we're going to start counting by tens.
We're going to count by tens instead.
So now it goes ten, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90.
So we've got yud being a ten.
We've got kaf being a 20.
And we've got lamed being the number 30.
Lamed is the number 30.
The next letter is mem.
Now, this part of the alphabet is actually pretty nice,
the way that it follows something similar to our English pattern,
because it goes, you know, kaf lamed mem noon.
Lamed mem noon is sort of like L-M-N in our English alphabet,
so that makes it easy.
So we saw lamed, which has a value of 30,
which is the next letter of the alphabet.
It's actually the 12th letter.
Now let's look at the letter mem.
Mem starts out by making a triangle like this,
and then it's got a diagonal piece that comes up like that,
and then a little thing sticking out right here like that.
So this is kind of a weird letter,
and it's pretty easy to spot in the text.
It looks different in print than the way I'm drawing it.
This is the way you draw it by hand,
but when it's printed, it looks different.
So whip out Psalm 119 and the King James to see what it looks like in print.
It's a little bit different.
You can see the similarity,
but this is how you write it out when you're writing it by hand.
Hopefully you're making a row of these on your paper,
but you just basically come up and do a nice big triangle.
You swing in like that,
and then you have a thing sticking out like that,
and that is the letter mem.
It makes a M sound.
It makes the M sound, mem,
and it has a numeric value of 40.
So let me write it up here on our running total right there like that,
and it is the number 40, mem.
After mem, we have the letter noon,
and by the way, just like cough,
mem is one of those letters that has a different form
when found at the end of a word,
but we're not going to cover that in this video.
Noon looks like this, okay?
Now, the main thing to understand about noon
is that it's much taller than it is wide.
It's a very slim letter when you draw it.
You do a little vertical line,
then you come down, and then you come over.
And also notice that the bottom comes out further than the top.
It comes out just a little further than the top,
and make sure you make this nice and narrow.
You don't want it to get confused with bet, all right?
Notice bet is wider than noon.
Noon is more tall and skinny.
Bet is wider.
Also, notice that bet has this little overhang right here, okay?
So it's different.
Noon is more of a tall and slender letter,
no overhang, and this part goes further than the top.
That is the letter noon.
It has a numerical value of 50.
And so let's look at our listing so far
of what we've got with the Hebrew alphabet.
You've got to memorize these letters,
memorize the sound they make,
memorize the name of the letter, what it looks like on the page,
and just memorize the order
so that you can recite the Hebrew alphabet in order.
Just like when you're a kid, you learn A, B, C, D, E, F, G,
learn this with Hebrew,
and memorize the fact that it goes
So noon is the 14th letter.
What comes after noon?
Samekh.
Now, Samekh is basically a circle,
and then it just has a little thing sticking that way, like that, okay?
This is the letter Samekh, all right?
And it makes an S sound.
Samekh.
Now, let me point out to you
that if you learned the Greek alphabet,
the letter Samekh looks a lot like a lowercase sigma in Greek.
But it's backwards, because remember,
sigma had the little piece sticking out this way.
That's the Greek lowercase letter sigma.
But remember, Hebrew is going from right to left.
So everything's going to be mirrored in Hebrew,
because we're going from right to left,
which is why the little tail sticks to the left
instead of going to the right as it does in Greek.
So this is our letter Samekh.
It makes an S sound.
Now, it is not an O.
There are no vowels in Hebrew.
But it is shaped like an O
with an extra little thing sticking out,
but it is an S sound.
But the fact that it's shaped like an O
can be helpful in just remembering its sequence,
because, you know, L-M-N-O-P, right?
So at least L-M-N-O, even though it's not an O,
at least it kind of looks like an O, right?
That helps me remember the sequence.
This is Samekh, and it has a numeric value of 60.
One of the things that I use to remember that
is that Samekh starts with an S sound and makes an S sound,
and so does the number 60.
So that's just a way to kind of get your numeric value down for that.
Samekh makes the number 60 S sound,
and it is the 15th letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
After Samekh, we have the letter I-N, I-N.
It's pronounced just like the Zion.
Remember the letter Zion, okay?
Except it's without the Z.
It's I-N, all right?
So the letter I-N looks like this.
It's almost like an English Y, like an English lowercase y,
except with the bottom of it kind of bent under like that.
So this is the letter I-N, and I-N is another silent letter.
So far we've learned two letters that are silent.
Aleph and I-N, they're both silent,
and then we talked about the fact that sometimes Vav is silent.
Sometimes Yud acts in a way that's pretty much like a silent letter too.
Yud and Vav are like that.
They kind of go either way, whether Vav makes a V sound
or whether it's just a silent letter.
Same thing with Yud.
Yud usually makes a Y sound, Yud.
But it can often be silent too.
So those two go either way, whereas Aleph and I-N are always silent.
So this is how it looks when we write I-N.
I'm going to draw another one up here in our running total, okay?
And the thing to pay attention to on this one is we don't want,
when we make our Y, we don't want to come down too far like that
because we don't want to start looking like another letter called Saadi
that we're going to learn in a few minutes.
So when we make I-N, we come down like this,
and then the other side of our Y, it needs to immediately pretty much head left,
okay, when we make the letter I-N, all right?
It needs to immediately head to the left, come down, boom, boom.
That is the letter I-N.
And it has a numerical value of 70.
It is the 16th letter, it has a value of 70, and it is silent.
The next letter is going to be the letter pay.
Let me draw it out for you nice and big here.
All right, the letter pay, it also has a dot in it right here,
and the letter pay makes the puh sound.
And if we remove the dot from the letter pay,
then it actually makes a puh sound, like a P-H sound, if you will,
an F sound or a P-H sound, puh, puh, puh, pay.
But with the dot, it's going to be the letter pay, all right?
So let's go ahead and write it up here with all the rest of our letters.
And we'll be sure to put our dot in it.
And this is the letter pay.
It has a numeric value of 80.
And you draw it by just making a big loop.
Let me draw another one for you.
You start here in the middle, and you basically come up and over
and then loop around, something like that, and then put your dot,
and boom, that's the letter pay.
Let me draw it for you again.
Start in the middle, come out and over, loop around, boom, just like that.
Put your dot in the middle.
That is the letter pay.
And then after pay, we have the letter tsadi.
And the letter tsadi, you can draw by first making a diagonal line
coming from the right, like that, and then you come down like this
and you join up with it, and then you curve to the left like that.
That is the letter tsadi.
Again, it kind of looks similar in some ways to ayin,
but the difference is that it has this long tail that goes to the right
and then heads left, as opposed to ayin, which just headed left right away.
Ayin was like that, the silent letter ayin, all right?
Whereas tsadi does like that, okay?
So it has a longer, squigglier tail.
Okay, it has that same part at the top, but then it comes down
and curves over like that, okay?
The way I like to write it is I do that part first,
and then I just come down and over like that.
So that is the letter tsadi.
And tsadi has a numeric value of 90, all right, 90.
Right after pay comes tsadi.
I'm going to put it up on our list here up here,
curve it back over, and give it a numeric value of 90.
Next, we have the letter kauf.
Now, we've already seen a letter called kauf.
This one is called kauf.
They both make a k sound, and this one is basically a vertical line,
and then it has this angle thing going on like that
that doesn't quite make contact with the vertical line.
So it almost looks like a flag or something like that.
But it's a vertical line, and then it's got that angular thing going on,
and this is the letter kauf, all right?
And we're going to spell that the way it's found in a King James, Psalm 119.
So you can study it, kauf, all right?
And it makes a k sound.
It has a numeric value of 100.
Go ahead and write it up here.
There is the letter kauf, and underneath it we will put the number 100, okay?
Then after kauf, we have the letter reish.
And reish is basically just a right angle that's kind of rounded, though, okay?
Reish makes the r sound.
Now, in Hebrew, you'll hear people rolling r's.
In some parts of the world, they'll roll the r.
In some parts, it'll sound more like a French r or a German r.
You know, people pronounce this in different ways.
I personally cannot roll my r's, so I just try to do the best I can with this letter
and just pronounce it pretty much like an English r
because that's the only sound that I can really make.
I can make it sound a little German sometimes, but this makes the r sound, the r.
You know, I can't roll it, but this is the reish, all right?
Reish, and it's an r sound.
I think a pretty easy way to remember this one is that
it almost looks like a backwards lowercase r in some ways.
But remember, we have to distinguish reish from dalet, all right?
They look pretty similar, especially in print.
In small, they're going to look really similar.
The difference with dalet is this overhang.
That is the colossal difference,
whereas this is just a nice, rounded, smooth lack of a corner.
This is a sharp edge with a little overhang.
So this is reish, and reish represents 200.
So let's go ahead and put it up here.
So you'll notice now we are counting by hundreds.
We started out with the first nine letters, we just had single digits.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
Then we got into our double digits.
Ten, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90.
Now we're getting into hundreds, 100, 200, okay?
Kof and reish.
Let's go ahead and just run through the whole alphabet for a quick review.
And of course, you should be writing these out.
You're writing a row of reishes right now.
And again, pause the video if you need to write out more of them.
And again, this is probably something you're going to have to learn
over the course of many days.
It took me a week or two to get this down.
So we've got reish, and then the next letter is called shin.
And shin looks like this U-looking shape here,
but it's got a little line dividing it.
So it becomes a three-prong deal when you write it.
But notice that this prong starts further to the left
and then points to the right, okay?
So it's a diagonal thing in the middle.
This is the letter shin, and it gets a dot right here
above the rightmost prong.
And this is going to be the letter shin.
I'm going to put it up here now.
This is a numeric value of 300.
There is the letter shin, numeric value 300,
and this makes a sh sound, sh, shin, all right?
But sometimes you will see shin.
In fact, very often you will see shin without the dot on the right side.
Rather, it will have the dot on the left side like this.
And then it becomes pronounced sin, and it's a s sound,
just like samech, all right?
So when the dot is on the right, it's shin.
When the dot is on the left, it is sin.
So it makes a sh sound when we have the dot over here like this,
and then when we have the dot over here like this,
it makes a s sound like the letter samech, all right?
It's a pretty easy letter, I think,
because I think the difficult letters in Hebrew are the ones
that look just like another letter,
and you're constantly having to tell them apart,
whereas shin doesn't look like any of the other letters.
It's nice and different,
and so it makes it a lot easier to learn it, and there you have it.
We only have one letter left, all right,
because so far we've written 21 letters on the board,
all consonants, two of them are silent,
two more of them are sometimes silent,
but they're all consonants.
None of them are vowels.
So the last letter is the letter tov,
and tov is going to be a straight line to the right,
come down, and then a vertical line here
with a little thing jutting off to the side.
Sometimes you'll see it kind of diagonally upward like that,
but the letter tov is the final letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
It has a numeric value of 400,
and I'm going to go ahead and write it up here,
and the one that this one can often be confused with is het, okay?
Het, if you remember het, looked like this,
and so they're very similar,
especially when you're looking at them in fine print.
It's hard to tell them apart.
This is the colossal difference right here.
That little tail is what you have to watch out for
because when you put that little tail on, it is tov, all right?
This is the letter tov.
Without the tail, it's het, all right?
So we've got het, and then we've got a different letter, tov.
And sometimes in the printed versions,
you'll see a little bit of a hangover on this sharp corner up there,
but you'll always have that little part right here.
This is what tells you that you're dealing with tov.
Always watch for that, and tov makes a t sound just like tet.
So there are actually two letters in Hebrew that make the t sound, tet and tov.
And the name of this one is pretty easy to remember if you know the Greek alphabet
because the Greek letter t is also called tov, a very similar name.
So there you have it.
Now you have learned all 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, all consonants.
There are going to be five more consonant forms that you're going to need to learn
because remember I mentioned to you earlier in the video
that five of these letters have a different form when found at the end of a word, okay?
And those five forms that are the final ending forms, I'm going to cover in another video.
This is enough for you to learn right now just to memorize these 22 letters,
what their names are, what their numeric values are, and the sound that they make.
And again, if you're ever out and about with your King James Bible
and you want to study, you don't even need the video in front of you.
You don't even need any Hebrew textbook in front of you.
All you have to do is just whip out a King James Bible, Psalm 119, and you can study this.
You can memorize this.
Next time you're sitting around with a little spare time and you've got a Bible handy,
you can work on reinforcing these letters.
Now you'll notice that the numbers stops at 400 because we had our 1 through 9,
we had our 10 through 90, 100 through 900,
where we're going to get the numbers 500, 600, 700, 800, and 900 are from those five final forms.
And so that's going to round out our 27 numeric values, 1 through 9, 10 through 90, and 100 through 900.
But these are the 22 letters of the Hebrew aleph bet.