Words to Know

The Hebrew alphabet, named for its first two letters, alef and bet. It has twenty-two letters and no capitals. Our word "alphabet" comes from the Greek cousins of the same two letters, alpha and beta.

Hebrew is written and read from the right side of the page to the left. A Hebrew book opens from what looks to us like the back. Arabic goes this way too.

A person who writes out a whole scroll by hand, one letter at a time, with a pen and ink. The father and son in the lesson picture are scribes. Scribes still do this work today.

The small dots and dashes placed under or beside a Hebrew letter to show the vowel sound. Children's books use them. A scroll and a street sign do not, and a Hebrew reader fills the vowels in.

The long handwritten scroll kept in every synagogue. It is copied by a scribe with the same twenty-two letters, the way it has been for about two thousand years. In the lesson it is simply the most famous example of Hebrew writing.

Five Hebrew letters change their shape when they come at the end of a word: kaf, mem, nun, pey, and tsadi. If your name ends in an M or N sound, you used one.