Beth: Scribal Tradition

Like every letter of the modern Hebrew alphabet, Beth is written in a square Aramaic-derived script that Jewish tradition holds replaced an older palaeo-Hebrew hand after the Babylonian exile, the letter's name itself an inherited Northwest Semitic word rather than a product of the newer script. Beth carries a scribal distinction from the very first word of the Torah: the opening word of Genesis, bereshit, in the beginning, is traditionally written with an enlarged Beth, a convention old enough to appear in early printed Hebrew Bibles and standard Torah scrolls alike.

Midrashic tradition offers several explanations for the enlargement; one widely repeated reading, found in variant forms across rabbinic commentary, notes that Beth is closed on three sides and open only toward the text that follows, and takes this as a figure for the proper direction of inquiry: a reader is invited to ask what unfolds forward from creation, the Torah's ongoing account, rather than to speculate about what existed before it, a question the letter's closed back is read as quietly discouraging. Because Beth is one of the seven Sefer Yetzirah double letters, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, a sofer must also take care to distinguish its hard and soft dagesh forms in vocalised texts.