Passing the River Tzaddi is drawn as a glyph-form for the Hebrew letter Tzaddi in the Transitus Fluvii, or Passing the River, one of three magical scripts Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa published in 1533, its name recalling a symbolic crossing of the Euphrates, rather than a script with independent letter meanings of its own; Tzaddi's own sound and classification, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, belong to the underlying Hebrew tradition.
As one of the Sefer Yetzirah's twelve simple letters, Tzaddi is assigned to the zodiac sign Aquarius and the Hebrew month of Shevat, and, in the same classical scheme, to the faculty of imagination. Agrippa printed Transitus Fluvii alongside Celestial and Malachim in Book III of his Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Cologne 1533, without citing a source for any of the three, and no earlier witness to any of them survives; the name, recalling the crossing of the Euphrates, is generally read as a reference to the exodus of Abraham's household out of Mesopotamia, a symbolic passage from an older world into the one Hebrew tradition claims for itself. That zodiacal and monthly assignment, like Tzaddi's meaning, fishhook, belongs to the underlying Hebrew letter rather than to this particular Renaissance glyph-set, which simply reproduces it in a different hand.