Hebrew Alephbet: Gimel, Dalet, Heh

Let's explore the Hebrew alphabet further. We already looked at the first two letters of the twenty-two Hebrew letters. The first two are alef (or aleph) and bet.

Now we move on to the next three, Gimel, Dalet, Heh.

3. Gimel

The third Hebrew letter is gimel, usually with a "guh" sound. It probably began as a drawing of a weapon or slanted stick. It evolved into capital Gamma in Greek and a similar symbol in Cyrillic, the Cyrillic Ge. I find that a little distressing since in my math research area, I regularly use the Greek lambda which looks too much like this!

In modern Hebrew there are different print or cursive drawings of gimel:

The Hebrew word for "roof" is gag. See Deuteronomy 22:8, where one is required to put a railing around one's roof.

4. Dalet

Dalet is the fourth Hebrew letter. Dalet makes the "d" sound, as suggested by the first letter in its name. Dalet may have come from an ancient proto-Sinaitic drawing of a door. Indeed, the Hebrew word for door is a modification of dalet; it is deleth. 

The word for "fish" in Hebrew is dag; dalet followed by gimel. Here the dalet has the dot to soften it but apparently that no longer has an effect on the "d" sound.

From the Hebrewpod101 video are the modern scripts for dalet

5. Heh

The fifth letter of Hebrew is heh, often making an "h" or "huh" sound.

In ancient times, heh was often used at the end of a word if there were certain vowel sounds (eg. Nineveh.)

In the TV series The Chosen, each episode opens with these two symbols, with the caption "Loaves and Fish". The Hebrew numbers are often drawn from the Hebrew alphabet, with the first letter, aleph, representing 1, and so on. Below we have the fifth and second letters of the Hebrew alphabet, representing 5 and 2. They stand for the five loaves and two fish used in the feeding of the 5000.

The four letters aleph-het-bet-het is sounded out as ahava. This is the word for love.

(Note that the dot in bet is missing, so the consonant bet has a v, not b, sound.)

From the Hebrewpod101 video are the modern scripts for heh:

Here are the first five letters in printed script, with arrows to suggest how to draw them. (Start from the top!)

Resources

In addition to the Hebrewpod101 video, Christian publisher Zondervan has a channel which includes this lecture in Hebrew. I am also using this text on basic Hebrew, Read Hebrew in 22 Days or Less by Seltzer, Lizorkin-Eyzenberg and Shir. (This is the best resource of the three.)