The Masoretic text preserves an unusual scribal note attached to a single Nun in the book of Judges: at Judges 18:30, in a verse naming a priest serving a graven image as a grandson of Moses, the text as transmitted writes the name with a Nun raised and suspended slightly above the line, changing the visible reading from Moshe, Moses, to Menashe, Manasseh, while the smaller, lifted letter allows the original, more damaging reading to remain faintly recoverable underneath. Talmudic and later commentary reads the device, called a nun teluyah, a suspended nun, as a deliberate softening: later editors, unwilling either to erase the true reading or to leave Moses's name openly attached to idolatry, are held to have inserted the extra letter in this hovering, provisional way rather than committing fully to either version.
The convention is one of a small number of suspended or otherwise irregularly placed letters the Masoretic tradition records at specific, named points in the biblical text, each preserved exactly by scribal law rather than corrected, distinct from Nun's ordinary square-script form and from the separate final form of Nun discussed elsewhere in this atlas. Nun's literal meaning, fish, is itself older than the square script, inherited from the palaeo-Hebrew writing that Jewish tradition holds the current alphabet replaced after the Babylonian exile, a transition discussed at greater length elsewhere in this atlas.