Gimel is one of seven letters, remembered by the mnemonic shatnez getz, shin, ayin, teth, nun, zayin, gimel and tzaddi, that Jewish law requires a scribe to top with three small decorative crowns, called tagin, whenever they are written in a Torah scroll, tefillin or mezuzah, a rule recorded in the Talmud at Menachot 29b; the other fourteen Hebrew letters are written without them.
Rabbinic homiletic tradition, recorded in the Talmud at Shabbat 104a, also reads meaning into Gimel's shape alongside the letter that follows it: gimel is read as an abbreviation of gomel, one who bestows kindness, and its short extended foot is described as reaching toward the next letter, dalet, read as an abbreviation of dal, a poor person, as though a generous man were running to give charity before the poor man's need becomes visible to others. This paired image, part of a longer homiletic tour through the whole alphabet attributed to the sage Resh Lakish, is one of the best-known pieces of aggadic letter-shape interpretation in the entire Talmudic corpus and is still commonly taught to Hebrew school students today as a mnemonic for both letters at once. Gimel's ordinary shape, a vertical stroke with a short foot extended to the lower left, has stayed close to that description since the square Aramaic-derived script Jewish tradition holds was adopted after the Babylonian exile, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, though the letter's own name and meaning, camel, are older still, inherited from the earlier palaeo-Hebrew writing that script replaced.