The Aleph-Bet — reading the consonants
The alphabet the Bible is written in
Biblical Hebrew is written with twenty-two letters, all consonants, read from right to left. That is the whole ancient alphabet: no capital letters, no lowercase, and — in the ancient text — no vowels at all. The vowel marks you see under and inside the letters in a modern Hebrew Bible were added centuries later by the Masoretes, the scribal families who preserved the reading tradition. Lesson 2 tells that story; this lesson is the consonants themselves.
The twenty-two letters
א aleph (silent), ב bet (b/v), ג gimel (g), ד dalet (d), ה he (h), ו vav (v), ז zayin (z), ח chet (the throaty ch of "Bach"), ט tet (t), י yod (y), כ kaph (k/kh), ל lamed (l), מ mem (m), נ nun (n), ס samekh (s), ע ayin (silent, a throat-catch), פ pe (p/f), צ tsadi (ts), ק qoph (q), ר resh (r), שׁ shin (sh) / שׂ sin (s), ת tav (t).
Final forms
Five letters change shape when they end a word: kaph becomes ך, mem becomes ם, nun becomes ן, pe becomes ף, and tsadi becomes ץ. So the mem in the middle of שָׁמַיִם (shamayim, "heavens") is מ, but the one that closes the word is ם. Once you can spot the five final forms, you can see where every Hebrew word ends — which, in an alphabet with no capitals and (anciently) no vowels, is half the battle of reading.
Your first verse
Genesis 1:1 — read it right to left: בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ. Word by word: bereshit (in the beginning), bara (he created), Elohim (God), et (the untranslated marker that points at the object), ha-shamayim (the heavens), ve-et (and-marker), ha-aretz (the earth). Seven words — and the Lantern Direct's rendering, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," is those seven words in order.
Why it matters on this site
Every Hebrew word on The Lantern carries its transliteration, its gloss, and its grammatical parsing — the same data these lessons teach from. When a Lantern Direct note says chesed is "loyal love" or that Sheol stays Sheol, these lessons are how you check the translator's work with your own eyes.
The words themselves
← The Language Shelf · The Vowels — the layer the Masoretes added →