Alphabet Letter

Tzaddi צ

TZAH-dee

Also Known As Tzaddi

Hebrew Letters

Origin Develops the Achaemenid Aramaic chancery hand, adopted after the exile

Tzaddi is the eighteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, its name meaning fishhook and its gematria value ninety. It is one of the twelve Simple letters, attributed to the twelve zodiac signs, and is given to Aquarius. In the Hermetic scheme it corresponds to the tarot trump The Star and to the twenty-eighth path of the Tree of Life, joining Netzach to Yesod. As the fishhook, it symbolizes that which draws up what lies hidden beneath the surface, meditation and aspiration reaching into the depths; the word tzaddik, from the same root, means a righteous or holy person. Fittingly it belongs to Aquarius, the water-bearer, and to the card of hope and inspiration renewed. Tzaddi also takes a final form (Final Tzaddi) when it ends a word.

Facts

Disputed

Origin Period

Scholem places Sefer Yetzirah between the second and sixth century CE 5Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Books, New York, 1961) surveys the manuscript recensions of Sefer Yetzirah and finds no single stable text: the surviving copies diverge enough in wording and in the letter-to-planet and letter-to-sign correspondences that quoting "the text" requires naming which recension is meant. Comparing the linguistic style, the doctrinal content and the external references made to the work across centuries of citation, Scholem argues the book could have been composed anywhere from the second to the ninth century CE, a span of roughly a millennium, with later Kabbalistic and Hasidic writers each reading it through their own era's overlay. The atlas follows Scholem's range rather than a narrower guess, and does not print the per-letter planet and sign tables at all, because doing so would silently pick one contested recension over the others.

Origin Period

Survives in three recensions that do not agree in detail 5Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Origins

Origin Period

Develops the Achaemenid Aramaic chancery hand, adopted after the exile 1The Hebrew square script

Origin Period

Not the script of the earliest Hebrew inscriptions 1The Hebrew square script

Origin Period

Standard by the Hasmonean period; palaeo-Hebrew survives only on coins 1The Hebrew square script

Place of Origin

The Levant, by way of the Aramaic administrative script of the Persian empire. 1The Hebrew square script

Origin of the Name

Names travelled into Greek unchanged and meaningless 1The Hebrew square script

Origin of the Name

Northwest Semitic words inherited from the older linear script 1The Hebrew square script

Origin of the Name

Pictographic meanings (ox head, house, water) are modern reconstructions 1The Hebrew square script

Sense of the Name

fishhook 1The Hebrew square script

The pictographic sense is a modern reconstruction from the letter name rather than a meaning attested in the script's own period, and the atlas records that position elsewhere on this letter. The name itself is inherited; the picture behind it is inferred.

Contested Use

Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

A criticism of the predictive method, not of the tradition itself 4

Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

So many possible sums exist that a match can always be found 4

Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Used as proof: the beast of Revelation, verse prophecy, Bible codes 4

Identity

Alphabet

Hebrew 1

Script Type

An abjad: the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew square script record consonants, read right to left, with vowels supplied either by the reading tradition or, in pointed texts, by the Masoretic vowel-pointing system. 1The Hebrew square script

Position

Eighteenth of twenty-two in the Hebrew alphabet 1

Attributions

Associated Sound

Voiceless alveolar affricate ts, as in English cats 1

Attestation

Meaning in the Attesting Source

Hebrew letter mysticism is a continuous, living Jewish tradition 2Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Meaning in the Attesting Source

One of the twelve simple letters, with a single pronunciation 3Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Meaning in the Attesting Source

Runs through medieval commentary, golem lore, Abulafia, hasidic teaching 2Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Meaning in the Attesting Source

Still studied and practised today 2Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Meaning in the Attesting Source

The twelve assign to signs, months, cube-of-space edges, body faculties 3Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Meaning in the Attesting Source

Which sign goes with which letter is not recorded; order disputed 3Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Alphabet (class)

Hebrew 1

Script type (class)

Abjad 1

Learn More

Tzaddi: The Hebrew Letter of Fishhook

Tzaddi (Tsadi) is the eighteenth Hebrew letter and a simple letter; its name is traditionally glossed 'fishhook' and its value is 90. It has a distinct final form and is linked by commentators to the tzaddik, the righteous one. The Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation), the foundational text of Jewish letter-mysticism compiled in late antiquity, divides the twenty-two Hebrew consonants into three groups: three 'mother' letters (Aleph, Mem, Shin) assigned to the elements Air, Water and Fire; seven 'double' letters, each with a hard and soft pronunciation, assigned to the seven classical planets and to seven pairs of opposites; and twelve 'simple' letters assigned to the twelve signs of the zodiac and the twelve months. As a simple letter Tzaddi is assigned to the sign Aquarius and the month of Shevat.

A separate and much later system, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888), mapped the twenty-two letters onto the twenty-two trumps of the tarot along the paths of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. This tarot correspondence is a modern Western-esoteric overlay, not part of the ancient Hebrew or classical Kabbalistic tradition.

The Golden Dawn originally assigned Tzaddi to The Star (trump XVII), a natural fit for the water-bearer Aquarius. Aleister Crowley's Thelemic revision (1904) declared 'Tzaddi is not the Star' and swapped the trumps of Tzaddi and Heh (keeping their signs), giving Tzaddi The Emperor in the Thoth system; the original Golden Dawn attribution remains The Star.

Tzaddi: Scribal Tradition

Tzaddi is one of seven Hebrew letters, recalled by the mnemonic shatnez getz, that Jewish law requires a scribe to crown with three small decorative strokes called tagin in a Torah scroll, tefillin or mezuzah, a rule recorded in the Talmud at Menachot 29b. The ordinary, medial form of Tzaddi is drawn bent, resembling a Nun with a Yod attached at an angle to its back, and a widely repeated Kabbalistic and Chassidic teaching reads that bent posture as a picture of the tzaddik, the righteous person, humbled and burdened in this world, still upright in purpose but visibly stooped by hardship and restraint. That reading is completed only by looking at the letter's separate final form, used at the end of a word and discussed as its own entry elsewhere in this atlas, which straightens into a plain vertical stroke; commentators in this tradition read the straightened final Tzaddi as the same righteous person restored to an upright, unburdened state in the world to come, so that the two shapes of a single letter are read together as one continuous teaching about reward deferred rather than denied.

Tzaddi's literal meaning, a fishhook, is inherited from the older palaeo-Hebrew script that Jewish tradition holds the current alphabet replaced after the Babylonian exile, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, a plain everyday tool that later mystical commentary reworked into one of the more elaborate homiletic images attached to any Hebrew letter.

Connections

Associated With

The Star

In the Golden Dawn Kabbalistic attribution, The Star corresponds to the Hebrew letter Tzaddi by way of its Tree of Life path.

Source The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th editionIsrael Regardie

Contained In

Hebrew

Corresponds To

Path 28

Source Liber 777Aleister Crowley

Derived from This

Tsi Ⱌ

Why this is disputed. Glagolitic Tsi writes the affricate ts, a sound native to Slavonic with no Greek equivalent, so the letter is one the alphabet had to supply for itself rather than borrow from Greek. Its shape is close enough to the Hebrew and Samaritan letter Tzaddi that the resemblance has been offered as evidence for a Hebrew-Samaritan source, consistent with Cyril's documented contact with Hebrew and Samaritan speakers on his mission to Cherson. The rival idiographic school holds the resemblance is coincidental, since Glagolitic's whole alphabet is built from a small set of basic shapes that could converge on a Semitic letterform without borrowing.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Tzaddi X

Malachim Tzaddi stands for the Hebrew letter Tzaddi, and carries its value of 90. Agrippa prints the three scripts in Book III of De occulta philosophia as tables of Hebrew equivalents. The sign shapes vary between the manuscript and printed traditions; the letter for letter correspondence does not.

Source Three Books of Occult PhilosophyHeinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Tzaddi X

Passing the River Tzaddi stands for the Hebrew letter Tzaddi, and carries its value of 90. Agrippa prints the three scripts in Book III of De occulta philosophia as tables of Hebrew equivalents. The sign shapes vary between the manuscript and printed traditions; the letter for letter correspondence does not.

Source Three Books of Occult PhilosophyHeinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Tzaddi X

Celestial Tzaddi stands for the Hebrew letter Tzaddi, and carries its value of 90. Agrippa prints the three scripts in Book III of De occulta philosophia as tables of Hebrew equivalents. The sign shapes vary between the manuscript and printed traditions; the letter for letter correspondence does not.

Source Three Books of Occult PhilosophyHeinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Related To

Asz ࡑ

Mandaic Asz and Hebrew Tzaddi occupy the same place in the twenty-two letter Aramaic sequence. Hebrew keeps the inherited noun as the letter name and the numeral value 90; Mandaic keeps neither. Where the Mandaic shapes came from is disputed, a cursive Aramaic hand or the Parthian chancery script.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Final Tzaddi ץ

The word-final form of Tzaddi rather than a separate letter. Hebrew writes five of its consonants differently at the end of a word, and the two shapes stand for one and the same letter. The value 900 recorded here is the extended mispar gadol reckoning; in standard gematria the final form counts 90, exactly as Tzaddi does.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Sad ص

Cognate letters. Arabic sad and Hebrew tzaddi both continue the twenty-two letter Northwest Semitic alphabet, and they hold the same place in the inherited order and the same numeral value, 90. Neither is derived from the other.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Saday (Tsa) ጸ

Saday and the Hebrew tzaddi continue the Semitic emphatic s. Ge'ez has a second emphatic sibilant beside it, sappa, where Hebrew has only the one letter.

Source Comparative Dictionary of Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic)Wolf Leslau

Sade

Both signs continue the same Northwest Semitic consonant inherited from a shared abjad ancestor; this is a cognate correspondence, not a borrowing in either direction. Ugaritic and Hebrew share the same twenty-two-consonant core, with Ugaritic adding six further signs Hebrew never developed separately.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Sadhe ܨ

Syriac Sadhe and Hebrew Tzaddi stand at the same place in the twenty-two letter Aramaic sequence and carry the same letter-numeral value, 90. The Syriac script grew out of the local Aramaic cursive of Edessa and the Hebrew square script out of the same Aramaic alphabet, so the two letters are inherited from one ancestor rather than borrowed from each other.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Sappa (Tza) ፀ

Sappa wrote a second emphatic sibilant that Hebrew had merged into tzaddi before its alphabet was fixed. Arabic keeps the same consonant as dad, so the relation here is to the letter that absorbed the sound rather than to an equivalent.

Source Comparative Dictionary of Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic)Wolf Leslau

Tsaadiy ࠑ

Samaritan Tsaadiy and Hebrew Tzaddi are cognates at the value 90, both continuing the same Paleo-Hebrew sign and both standing for the emphatic s of the older language. Hebrew has a final form of this letter and Samaritan does not, the finals being an Aramaic square script development.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Tzaddi X

Celestial Tzaddi is a cipher glyph standing for the Hebrew letter Tzaddi; Agrippa's Book III prints Celestial, Malachim and Passing the River as tables of Hebrew equivalents, letter for letter.

Source Three Books of Occult PhilosophyHeinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Tzaddi X

Malachim Tzaddi is a cipher glyph standing for the Hebrew letter Tzaddi; Agrippa's Book III prints Celestial, Malachim and Passing the River as tables of Hebrew equivalents, letter for letter.

Source Three Books of Occult PhilosophyHeinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Tzaddi X

Passing the River Tzaddi is a cipher glyph standing for the Hebrew letter Tzaddi; Agrippa's Book III prints Celestial, Malachim and Passing the River as tables of Hebrew equivalents, letter for letter.

Source Three Books of Occult PhilosophyHeinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Sources

1. The World's Writing Systems

Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), Oxford University Press, 1996the chapter on the Aramaic scriptView the Source

2. Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid

Moshe Idel, State University of New York Press, 1990the chapters on the letter-combination traditions and their reception

3. Sepher Yetzirah (Book of Formation)

Anonymous (traditionally attributed to Abraham)On Tzaddi as a simple letter and the sign AquariusView the Source

4. Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought

Underwood Dudley, Mathematical Association of America (Spectrum series), 1997the chapters on the beast, on the law of small numbers and on biblical sevensView the Source

5. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism

Gershom Scholem, Schocken Books, 1961the chapter on early Jewish mysticism, on Sefer YetzirahView the Source

Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation in Theory and Practice

Aryeh Kaplan, Samuel Weiser, 1997On the twelve simple letters and the zodiacView the Source

The Encyclopedia of Tarot, Volume I

Stuart R. Kaplan, U.S. Games Systems, 1978For the Golden Dawn attribution (Aquarius, The Star) and Crowley's revisionView the Source

Liber 777

Aleister Crowley, Walter Scott, 1909Corresponds To: Path 28View the Source

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Tzaddi צ

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