Final Nun shares in the same Talmudic debate, recorded at Shabbat 104a, over whether the five sofit letters were fixed by the early prophets or only later confirmed by the men of the Great Assembly, a question the text leaves unresolved. Paleographers studying the wider history of the Aramaic-derived square script, the ancestor of the Hebrew alphabet discussed elsewhere in this atlas, have noted a separate, more general pattern behind why final forms exist at all: cursive handwriting tends to simplify and reshape a letter under the pressure of joining it smoothly to the letters before and after it, a pressure that does not apply to a letter sitting alone at the end of a word, so a word-final letter can preserve an older, less simplified shape even while its medial counterpart drifts further from that common ancestor over time.
Final Nun's own shape, a plain, unhooked vertical stroke descending below the line, fits that pattern: it is visually simpler than the medial Nun's small hooked head, and some paleographers read it as sitting closer to the letter's ancient, unadorned form than the busier medial shape most Hebrew readers see far more often. In the extended gematria system known as mispar gadol, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, Final Nun carries the value 700, part of the same extended sequence that gives the other four sofit letters values beyond 400.