Alphabet Letter

Nun נ

NOON

Hebrew Letters

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

Nun is the fourteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, its name meaning fish and its gematria value fifty. It is one of the twelve Simple letters, attributed to the twelve zodiac signs, and is given to Scorpio. In the Hermetic scheme it corresponds to the tarot trump Death and to the twenty-fourth path of the Tree of Life, joining Tiphareth to Netzach. As the fish, it symbolizes life moving in the hidden depths, fertility, and the mystery of regeneration in the waters; fittingly it belongs to Scorpio, the sign of death and transformation, and to the card of endings that renew. In Aramaic Nun means fish, and the letter carries strong associations with continuity and rebirth. Nun also takes a final form (Final Nun) when it ends a word.

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

fish 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

Fourteenth of twenty-two in the Hebrew alphabet 1

Attributions

Associated Sound

Alveolar nasal n, as in English net 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

Nun: The Hebrew Letter of Fish

Nun is the fourteenth Hebrew letter and a simple letter; its name means 'fish' and its value is 50. Like Mem it has a distinct final form. In Aramaic 'nun' means fish, an image of fertile life hidden in the deep. 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 Nun is assigned to the sign Scorpio and the month of Cheshvan.

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 assigns Nun to Death (trump XIII), a card of transformation matching Scorpio's themes of dissolution and renewal.

Nun: Scribal Tradition

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.

Connections

Associated With

Death

In the Golden Dawn Kabbalistic attribution, Death corresponds to the Hebrew letter Nun 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 24

Source Liber 777Aleister Crowley

Derived from This

Nun N

Malachim Nun stands for the Hebrew letter Nun, and carries its value of 50. 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

Nun N

Passing the River Nun stands for the Hebrew letter Nun, and carries its value of 50. 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

Nun N

Celestial Nun stands for the Hebrew letter Nun, and carries its value of 50. 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

An ࡍ

Mandaic An and Hebrew Nun occupy the same place in the twenty-two letter Aramaic sequence. Hebrew keeps the inherited noun as the letter name and the numeral value 50; 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.)

Final Nun ן

The word-final form of Nun rather than a separate letter. Hebrew writes five of its consonants differently at the end of a word, and the two shapes stand for one and the same letter. The value 700 recorded here is the extended mispar gadol reckoning; in standard gematria the final form counts 50, exactly as Nun does.

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

Nahas (Na) ነ

Nahas and the Hebrew nun continue the Semitic n. The Hebrew name is glossed as a fish. The Ge'ez name is not glossed in the tradition, and the resemblance it bears to the Semitic word for a serpent is a resemblance only.

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

Nu ν

Greek Nu and Hebrew Nun are cognates. Both continue the same Phoenician sign, which is why both carry the numeral value 50 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.)

Nu ν

Hebrew Nun and Greek Nu continue the same Phoenician nun; both carry the numeral value 50 in their letter-number systems.

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

Nun ܢ

Syriac Nun and Hebrew Nun stand at the same place in the twenty-two letter Aramaic sequence and carry the same letter-numeral value, 50. 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.)

Nun ࠍ

Samaritan Nun and Hebrew Nun are cognates at the value 50, both continuing the same Paleo-Hebrew sign, and the two scripts even keep the same letter name. Hebrew has a final form of this letter and Samaritan does not, because the finals are an Aramaic square script development.

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

Nun

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.)

Nun N

Celestial Nun is a cipher glyph standing for the Hebrew letter Nun; 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

Nun N

Malachim Nun is a cipher glyph standing for the Hebrew letter Nun; 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

Nun N

Passing the River Nun is a cipher glyph standing for the Hebrew letter Nun; 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

Nun ن

Cognate letters. Arabic nun and Hebrew nun both continue the twenty-two letter Northwest Semitic alphabet, and they hold the same place in the inherited order and the same numeral value, 50. Neither is derived from the other.

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 Nun as a simple letter and the sign ScorpioView 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

Sepher Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, and the Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom

William Wynn Westcott, Theosophical Publishing Society / Internet Sacred Text Archive, 1887On 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 (Scorpio, Death)View the Source

Liber 777

Aleister Crowley, Walter Scott, 1909Corresponds To: Path 24View the Source

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Nun נ

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