Final Peh takes part in the same Talmudic debate, recorded at Shabbat 104a, over whether the five sofit letters were fixed by the early prophets or confirmed only later by the men of the Great Assembly, a dispute the Talmud records without resolving in either direction. Its own shape closes the open bowl of ordinary Peh, discussed elsewhere in this atlas as a letter whose very name means mouth and whose open form was widely read as a figure for speech given voice. A commonly repeated homiletic reading completes that picture by treating Final Peh's closure as the same mouth shut, a figure for speech withheld, concealed or not yet spoken, an image that sits alongside, rather than replacing, the letter's more prosaic function as the required shape whenever an ordinary Peh happens to fall at the end of a word.
Because Final Peh is one of only two of the five sofit letters, along with Final Kaph, whose stroke drops noticeably below the writing line, a beginning reader untrained in Hebrew script can sometimes mistake one for the other at a glance, despite the very different words they close. In the extended gematria system known as mispar gadol, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, Final Peh carries the value 800, one of five extended values that only apply when a sofit letter is read under that less common numbering scheme.