Final Tzaddi shares in the Talmudic debate, recorded at Shabbat 104a, over whether the five sofit letters were fixed by the early prophets or only confirmed later by the men of the Great Assembly, a question the Talmud leaves open. Its own shape, a plain straight vertical stroke with a small tick near the top, stands in deliberate contrast to the bent, angular shape of ordinary Tzaddi, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, which resembles a Nun with a Yod attached at an angle to its back.
A widely repeated Kabbalistic and Chassidic teaching reads the two forms together as a single continuous picture of the tzaddik, the righteous person: the bent medial form is read as that person's humbled, burdened posture in this world, while Final Tzaddi's straightened, upright stroke is read as the same person restored in the world to come, so that a single Hebrew root word for righteousness carries, in its two written forms, an entire teaching about reward deferred rather than denied. Final Tzaddi is also, in the extended gematria known as mispar gadol, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, assigned the value 900, the highest of any letter in the alphabet, completing a numeral sequence that, across all five sofit letters together, runs from 500 through 900 beyond the ordinary count's ceiling of 400 at Tav.