9. Tet | Paleo Hebrew Alphabet | The Words “Good” and “Trust,” Funny Looking Crowns, and more
The Hebrew word for “trust,” the origins of ancient pottery, and why when HE created everything, HE said it was “good.”
***
Timestamps:
0:00 Meanings for the Hebrew letter Tet
1:11 The word “Teet” (Miry Clay)
1:47 The reason for the letter shape
2:25 How pottery was invented… maybe.
4:03 How Tet is used in words
4:59 Word study: Trust (“Batach”)
5:40 Word study: Good (“Tov”)
7:01 The two Ts in the Hebrew Alphabet
7:48 Funny Hebrew word study: Crown (“Atar”)
9:42 Song: “Psalm 23”
***
For a free download of this video, visit our Downloads page.
***
Transcript:
Dawson: Most people try to avoid mire. Here I am looking for it. Today’s letter is tet and it’s a picture of a clay pot, a type of ancient container. Since ancient times, mankind has used containers such as clay pots and baskets to surround their goods with a layer of protection against vermin and the elements.
Clay pots were used to gather things together, to store things, to keep them and to cook food. So what we see in Hebrew, when the letter tet is used, it often has the meaning of those things. It also has the meaning of mud and clay, which is the basic substance that was used in containers in ancient times.
Some argue that tet is a basket type container rather than a clay pot and as we will see a little later, archaeologists link the two inventions together. But one strong case for tet being a clay pot rather than a basket is in the word “teet” which is translated in the bible as mire, mud or mirey clay.
[Music]
Dawson: This is – this is pretty cheap mire. See the good stuff or the bad stuff, depending on how you look at it, you wouldn’t see a footprint because your foot would be submerged and it’s one reason the tet is used because it surrounds your foot. Ah, there we go.
—
What’s your theory on the X marks the spot in the middle of the letter tet?
Carlos: That’s the support that you put a clay basket in. Tet is more like a bowl. Think more of a pottery. Don’t think along the lines of a woven basket. Don’t think along the lines of shaped reed baskets. Think more along the lines of made out of clay and supported by a copper stand to keep it so you can move it along without breaking it, pass it along.
Dawson: OK.
Carlos: You want to think like that more of a – more of when you say tet.
Dawson: There’s an urban legend of the basket-pottery connection. You want to hear it?
Carlos: Let’s hear it.
Dawson: OK. So they found clay pots all throughout Anatolia, through the Sumer region 5000 BC, 7000 BC. But the oldest clay pot that they have found is actually from Japan and it dates back to what they call the Jomon dynasty and Jomon is actually – it means corded design because the pots that they had found, they have an imprint on them as if they were shaped by a basket.
So, here’s the theory. The Jomon people knew how to make baskets. They found baskets prior to the clay pots in that civilization. They used clay to line the baskets to make it watertight and somebody left one of these clay lined woven baskets by the fire overnight, woke up in the morning. Hey, there’s a clay pot inside we could lift right out of the basket and that’s why it has got the corded design around it and that’s how they discovered if you heat up clay, it turns into a harder substance you could use independent of the basket.
Carlos: That sounds spicy at best. No, but it’s a nice story.
[Laughter]
[Music]
Carlos: Is that a chet or a hey?
Dawson: Tahor?
Carlos: Yeah.
Dawson: It’s a hey. In Hebrew, we often see words with the letter tet having to do with being surrounded or covered or enclosed in the same way that when you have a clay pot, the contents inside are surrounded and covered and enclosed. So, when you hear of our LORD being clad with zeal as a garment, there’s a tet there. When somebody pitches a tent over the earth, there’s a tet.
This next word here is “batach” and it actually uses a couple of letters that we’ve learned already. The first one is the beyt which is a picture of the house and can mean house or inside and the last letter is chet which we learned in our last episode and is a picture of a wall.
So when you add the tet in there, you’ve got a picture of being inside a surrounding wall or a house surrounded by a wall. So, what this picture represents is a place that is very secure and in Hebrew, this is the word for trust.
Another word in Hebrew that uses the letter tet is tov and this word means good. Now to get an understanding of why a picture of a storage container and a house mean good, think of an empty house for a second and let’s say you and your family are going to move into this house. What sort of things will you fill it with? It’s pretty likely that you will go to a few stores and pick up things that either you need or you want or just stuff that you like and you will bring it home and you will store it in your house.
In the same way, when Father created the heavens and the earth, HE filled it with things that HE considered worthy and necessary to make everything function the way HE wanted it to. HE had filled it with things that were good. It’s written that HE saw the light he created and it was good. HE saw the dry land and the seas and the animals and everything that HE created and it was good. It was worthy to be kept and stored in the creation that HE had made. So HE called it tov because it was good.
[Music]
Dawson: One sort of surprising thing about the Hebrew alphabet is that it has two Ts, one is tet and one is tov. Just like the Hebrew alef became our letter A today and the beyt became our letter B, the tov became our modern T. But what about tet? In Greek they called it theta and used it for the “th” sound in words and even to this day, if look up word pronunciations, you will often see that theta symbol which is derived from tet.
Now in your typical alphabet, it wouldn’t make any sense to have two duplicate letters that make the same sound but in Hebrew where the symbols and the meanings are important. It does make sense.
—
Let me show you a picture.
Lisa: OK.
Dawson: What do you think that is?
Lisa: That looks like – it looks like an elephant’s foot.
[Laughter]
Dawson: Well, you know, you’re right.
Lisa: Right? It looks like a hat.
Dawson: OK.
Lisa: It could also be like a container.
Dawson: OK.
Lisa: Like a crown of some sort.
Dawson: So, you are correct.
Lisa: OK. Which one?
Dawson: It is presumed to be either a hat or crown from the Bronze Age.
Lisa: Oh, OK, OK.
Dawson: Yeah, and they’ve found a few of them throughout Europe and so the thing that’s interesting about this and what it has to do with tet is that there’s some controversy on what exactly it is. Is it a hat or is it something that you should turn upside down and it’s a tet, it’s a container?
Lisa: It’s a container, OK, OK.
Dawson: And the word for crown in Hebrew, check this out. There’s the eyeball, the tet, and then the resh, which is the man’s head
Carlos: OK.
Dawson: So, in Hebrew, the word for crown is basically look at the tet on the guy’s head.
Lisa: Ah, ha-ha. So yeah, ha-ha. Yeah.
Dawson: Isn’t that funny?
Lisa: Yeah, that’s hilarious. So matter-of-fact.
Dawson: Yeah.
[Music]
[End of transcript]
***
Attribution:
Content: written and created by Original Hebrew.
Video & Music: all footage and music is original (CC0 1.0).
Sound Effects: original works, royalty free clips from purchased software, or public domain sounds from freesound.org.
Images: we try to use original images or images identified online as public domain, CC0, or “no known copyright restrictions” as much as possible. For all other images, it is believed that any use of copyrighted material constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. The material on this channel is provided without profit for educational and informational purposes only.
Fair Use: Copyright Disclaimer under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for \u201cfair use\u201d for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use. | Fair Use Definition (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use): Fair Use is a doctrine in the United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as for commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching or scholarship. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author\u2019s work under a four-factor balancing test. The term \u201cfair use\u201d originated in the United States. A similar principle, fair dealing, exists in some other common law jurisdictions. Civil law jurisdictions have other limitations and exceptions to copyright.