Alphabet Letter

Heh ה

HAY

Also Known As Heh

Hebrew Letters

Origin Develops the Achaemenid Aramaic chancery hand, adopted after the exile

Heh is the fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, its name meaning window and its gematria value five. It is one of the twelve Simple letters of the Sefer Yetzirah, which are attributed to the twelve signs of the zodiac; Heh is given to Aries. In the Hermetic scheme it corresponds to the tarot trump The Emperor and to the fifteenth path of the Tree of Life, joining Chokmah to Tiphareth. As the window, it symbolizes the opening through which light and vision pass, breath and revelation; it appears twice in the great divine name YHVH, where it stands for the Mother and the Daughter, form receiving and manifesting the creative force.

Facts

Disputed

Origin Period

Scholem places Sefer Yetzirah between the second and sixth century CE 5Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Books, New York, 1961) surveys the manuscript recensions of Sefer Yetzirah and finds no single stable text: the surviving copies diverge enough in wording and in the letter-to-planet and letter-to-sign correspondences that quoting "the text" requires naming which recension is meant. Comparing the linguistic style, the doctrinal content and the external references made to the work across centuries of citation, Scholem argues the book could have been composed anywhere from the second to the ninth century CE, a span of roughly a millennium, with later Kabbalistic and Hasidic writers each reading it through their own era's overlay. The atlas follows Scholem's range rather than a narrower guess, and does not print the per-letter planet and sign tables at all, because doing so would silently pick one contested recension over the others.

Origin Period

Survives in three recensions that do not agree in detail 5Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Origins

Origin Period

Develops the Achaemenid Aramaic chancery hand, adopted after the exile 1The Hebrew square script

Origin Period

Not the script of the earliest Hebrew inscriptions 1The Hebrew square script

Origin Period

Standard by the Hasmonean period; palaeo-Hebrew survives only on coins 1The Hebrew square script

Place of Origin

The Levant, by way of the Aramaic administrative script of the Persian empire. 1The Hebrew square script

Origin of the Name

Names travelled into Greek unchanged and meaningless 1The Hebrew square script

Origin of the Name

Northwest Semitic words inherited from the older linear script 1The Hebrew square script

Origin of the Name

Pictographic meanings (ox head, house, water) are modern reconstructions 1The Hebrew square script

Sense of the Name

window 1The Hebrew square script

The pictographic sense is a modern reconstruction from the letter name rather than a meaning attested in the script's own period, and the atlas records that position elsewhere on this letter. The name itself is inherited; the picture behind it is inferred.

Contested Use

Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

A criticism of the predictive method, not of the tradition itself 4

Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

So many possible sums exist that a match can always be found 4

Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Used as proof: the beast of Revelation, verse prophecy, Bible codes 4

Identity

Alphabet

Hebrew 1

Script Type

An abjad: the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew square script record consonants, read right to left, with vowels supplied either by the reading tradition or, in pointed texts, by the Masoretic vowel-pointing system. 1The Hebrew square script

Position

Fifth of twenty-two in the Hebrew alphabet 1

Attributions

Associated Sound

Voiceless glottal fricative h, as in English hat; frequently weak or silent word-finally 1

Attestation

Meaning in the Attesting Source

Hebrew letter mysticism is a continuous, living Jewish tradition 2Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Meaning in the Attesting Source

One of the twelve simple letters, with a single pronunciation 3Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Meaning in the Attesting Source

Runs through medieval commentary, golem lore, Abulafia, hasidic teaching 2Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Meaning in the Attesting Source

Still studied and practised today 2Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Meaning in the Attesting Source

The twelve assign to signs, months, cube-of-space edges, body faculties 3Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Meaning in the Attesting Source

Which sign goes with which letter is not recorded; order disputed 3Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Alphabet (class)

Hebrew 1

Script type (class)

Abjad 1

Learn More

Heh: The Hebrew Letter of Window

Heh is the fifth Hebrew letter and a simple (single) letter; its name means 'window' and its value is 5. Heh appears twice in the four-letter divine name YHVH and in Kabbalah is read as a letter of breath, revelation and the feminine presence. The Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation), the foundational text of Jewish letter-mysticism compiled in late antiquity, divides the twenty-two Hebrew consonants into three groups: three 'mother' letters (Aleph, Mem, Shin) assigned to the elements Air, Water and Fire; seven 'double' letters, each with a hard and soft pronunciation, assigned to the seven classical planets and to seven pairs of opposites; and twelve 'simple' letters assigned to the twelve signs of the zodiac and the twelve months. As a simple letter Heh is assigned to the zodiac sign Aries and the month of Nisan.

A separate and much later system, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888), mapped the twenty-two letters onto the twenty-two trumps of the tarot along the paths of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. This tarot correspondence is a modern Western-esoteric overlay, not part of the ancient Hebrew or classical Kabbalistic tradition.

The Golden Dawn originally assigned Heh to The Emperor (trump IV). Aleister Crowley's later Thelemic revision (1904), citing the line 'Tzaddi is not the Star', swapped the trumps of Heh and Tzaddi while keeping their zodiacal signs, so that in the Thoth system Heh carries The Star; the original Golden Dawn attribution remains The Emperor.

Heh: Scribal Tradition

Heh's square-script form leaves a small, deliberate gap where its left leg meets the roof stroke, a detail a trained sofer preserves carefully rather than closing up, unlike the fully enclosed letter Cheth, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, which looks almost identical to Heh but for that gap and an unbroken left side.

A widely repeated homiletic teaching, common in Chassidic and popular Jewish teaching on the letters, reads the two shapes together: Cheth's total enclosure is likened to a person sealed into wrongdoing, since the Hebrew word for sin, cheit, begins with the same letter, while Heh's open gap is read as the narrow way back always left open for repentance, however far a person has gone. Heh also occupies two of the four positions in the tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God at the centre of Jewish reverence for the divine name, and Kabbalistic literature reads its double appearance there, once with a plain vowel and once as the name's closing letter, as marking two distinct aspects of divine revelation, a theme separate from the letter's place among the Sefer Yetzirah's twelve simple letters, covered elsewhere in this atlas. A sofer must reproduce Heh's gap precisely, neither closing it into a Cheth nor widening it enough to be mistaken for a different letter entirely, one of several small proportional judgments that make Hebrew scribal training a matter of years of apprenticeship rather than simple copying.

Connections

Associated With

The Emperor

In the Golden Dawn Kabbalistic attribution, The Emperor corresponds to the Hebrew letter Heh by way of its Tree of Life path.

Source The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th editionIsrael Regardie

Contained In

Hebrew

Corresponds To

Path 15

Source Liber 777Aleister Crowley

Derived from This

Heh H

Passing the River Heh stands for the Hebrew letter Heh, and carries its value of 5. Agrippa prints the three scripts in Book III of De occulta philosophia as tables of Hebrew equivalents. The sign shapes vary between the manuscript and printed traditions; the letter for letter correspondence does not.

Source Three Books of Occult PhilosophyHeinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Heh H

Malachim Heh stands for the Hebrew letter Heh, and carries its value of 5. Agrippa prints the three scripts in Book III of De occulta philosophia as tables of Hebrew equivalents. The sign shapes vary between the manuscript and printed traditions; the letter for letter correspondence does not.

Source Three Books of Occult PhilosophyHeinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Heh H

Celestial Heh stands for the Hebrew letter Heh, and carries its value of 5. Agrippa prints the three scripts in Book III of De occulta philosophia as tables of Hebrew equivalents. The sign shapes vary between the manuscript and printed traditions; the letter for letter correspondence does not.

Source Three Books of Occult PhilosophyHeinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Related To

Ah ࡄ

Mandaic Ah and Hebrew Heh occupy the same place in the twenty-two letter Aramaic sequence. Hebrew keeps the inherited noun as the letter name and the numeral value 5; Mandaic keeps neither. Where the Mandaic shapes came from is disputed, a cursive Aramaic hand or the Parthian chancery script.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Epsilon ε

Greek Epsilon and Hebrew Heh are cognates. Both continue the same Phoenician sign, which is why both carry the numeral value 5 in their letter-number systems. A shared ancestor, not a borrowing in either direction. The Greek alphabet was adapted from the Phoenician abjad in the early first millennium BC, and the Hebrew square script descends from the same abjad through Aramaic.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Epsilon ε

Hebrew Heh and Greek Epsilon continue the same Phoenician he; both carry the numeral value 5 in their letter-number systems.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Ha ه

Cognate letters. Arabic ha and Hebrew heh both continue the twenty-two letter Northwest Semitic alphabet, and they hold the same place in the inherited order and the same numeral value, 5. Neither is derived from the other.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

He ܗ

Syriac He and Hebrew Heh stand at the same place in the twenty-two letter Aramaic sequence and carry the same letter-numeral value, 5. The Syriac script grew out of the local Aramaic cursive of Edessa and the Hebrew square script out of the same Aramaic alphabet, so the two letters are inherited from one ancestor rather than borrowed from each other.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Both signs continue the same Northwest Semitic consonant inherited from a shared abjad ancestor; this is a cognate correspondence, not a borrowing in either direction. Ugaritic and Hebrew share the same twenty-two-consonant core, with Ugaritic adding six further signs Hebrew never developed separately.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Heh H

Celestial Heh is a cipher glyph standing for the Hebrew letter Heh; Agrippa's Book III prints Celestial, Malachim and Passing the River as tables of Hebrew equivalents, letter for letter.

Source Three Books of Occult PhilosophyHeinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Heh H

Malachim Heh is a cipher glyph standing for the Hebrew letter Heh; Agrippa's Book III prints Celestial, Malachim and Passing the River as tables of Hebrew equivalents, letter for letter.

Source Three Books of Occult PhilosophyHeinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Heh H

Passing the River Heh is a cipher glyph standing for the Hebrew letter Heh; Agrippa's Book III prints Celestial, Malachim and Passing the River as tables of Hebrew equivalents, letter for letter.

Source Three Books of Occult PhilosophyHeinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Hoy (Ha) ሀ

Hoy and the Hebrew heh continue the Semitic plain h. Neither script borrowed the letter from the other. Ge'ez descends from the Ancient South Arabian script and Hebrew from the Phoenician, and the shared ancestor lies further back than either.

Source Comparative Dictionary of Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic)Wolf Leslau

Iy ࠄ

Samaritan Iy and Hebrew Heh are cognates, both continuing the same Paleo-Hebrew sign at the value 5. The Samaritan name no longer begins with the sound the letter once wrote, because the throat consonants have weakened in the Samaritan reading tradition; the letter itself is written in full and stands in the same place in the sequence.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Sources

1. The World's Writing Systems

Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), Oxford University Press, 1996the chapter on the Aramaic scriptView the Source

2. Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid

Moshe Idel, State University of New York Press, 1990the chapters on the letter-combination traditions and their reception

3. Sepher Yetzirah (Book of Formation)

Anonymous (traditionally attributed to Abraham)On Heh as a simple letter and the sign AriesView the Source

4. Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought

Underwood Dudley, Mathematical Association of America (Spectrum series), 1997the chapters on the beast, on the law of small numbers and on biblical sevensView the Source

5. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism

Gershom Scholem, Schocken Books, 1961the chapter on early Jewish mysticism, on Sefer YetzirahView the Source

Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation in Theory and Practice

Aryeh Kaplan, Samuel Weiser, 1997On the twelve simple letters and the zodiacView the Source

The Encyclopedia of Tarot, Volume I

Stuart R. Kaplan, U.S. Games Systems, 1978For the Golden Dawn attribution (Aries, The Emperor) and Crowley's revisionView the Source

Liber 777

Aleister Crowley, Walter Scott, 1909Corresponds To: Path 15View the Source

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Heh ה

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