The Aleph and the Tav

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says Jesus — the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. But the Scriptures were Hebrew first, and in Hebrew those bookends carry a secret.

Three times in Revelation, Jesus takes a title that sounds like a riddle: "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end" (Revelation 1:8; 21:6; 22:13). Alpha and Omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet — the language Revelation was written in. But Jesus is a Hebrew speaking to a people formed by the Hebrew Scriptures. In their alphabet, the first and last letters are א Aleph and ת Tav.

God, and a cross

Read as Paleo-Hebrew pictures, Aleph was the ox — strength, a leader, God. Tav was a cross — a mark, a sign, a covenant seal. So "I am the Aleph and the Tav" lands, for a Hebrew ear, as: I am God, and I am the cross. The first and the last. The beginning and the end. Explore Aleph and Tav for yourself.

The hidden Aleph-Tav in Genesis

Here is where it becomes remarkable. In Hebrew there is a tiny two-letter word, את — et — spelled Aleph-Tav. Grammar books call it the "direct object marker": it flags the thing an action is done to, and it is normally left untranslated. It appears in the very first verse of the Bible: "In the beginning God created [et] the heavens and [et] the earth." Right there, in Genesis 1:1, sits an untranslated Aleph-Tav — the first and last letters, together, at the moment of creation.

You do not have to build a doctrine on it to feel its weight: the same Aleph-Tav that Jesus claims in Revelation is standing, silent and unspoken, in the Bible's opening line. The bookends were there from the beginning. We trace this from Genesis 1:1 in the free first chapter, and it opens up again in Revelation 1:8.

From the first verse to the last vision, the same two letters keep the same promise: God, and the cross — the first and the last.

This is the spine of the whole book — that the Cross is written into the alphabet, and therefore into everything the alphabet was ever used to say.