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Sacred Correspondences
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Alphabet Letter

Qoph ק

KOFE
Also Known As Qoph
Hebrew Letters
ק
Origin Develops the Achaemenid Aramaic chancery hand, adopted after the exile

Qoph is the nineteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, its name meaning back of the head and its gematria value one hundred. It is one of the twelve Simple letters, attributed to the twelve zodiac signs, and is given to Pisces. In the Hermetic scheme it corresponds to the tarot trump The Moon and to the twenty-ninth path of the Tree of Life, joining Netzach to Malkuth. As the back of the head, it symbolizes the hindbrain, the seat of instinct, dream, and the unconscious animal mind; fittingly it belongs to Pisces, the deep and dreaming water, and to the card of illusion, night, and the dim testing passage through which the soul begins its ascent from the material world.

Facts
Disputed
Origin Period
Scholem places Sefer Yetzirah between the second and sixth century CE 5Tradition: Sefer 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 5Tradition: Sefer 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.
Origins
Origin Period
Develops the Achaemenid Aramaic chancery hand, adopted after the exile 1Tradition: The Hebrew square script
Origin Period
Not the script of the earliest Hebrew inscriptions 1Tradition: The Hebrew square script
Origin Period
Standard by the Hasmonean period; palaeo-Hebrew survives only on coins 1Tradition: The Hebrew square script
Place of Origin
The Levant, by way of the Aramaic administrative script of the Persian empire. 1Tradition: The Hebrew square script
Origin of the Name
Names travelled into Greek unchanged and meaningless 1Tradition: The Hebrew square script
Origin of the Name
Northwest Semitic words inherited from the older linear script 1Tradition: The Hebrew square script
Origin of the Name
Pictographic meanings (ox head, house, water) are modern reconstructions 1Tradition: The Hebrew square script
Sense of the Name
back of the head 1Tradition: The 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. 1Tradition: The Hebrew square script
Position
Nineteenth of twenty-two in the Hebrew alphabet 1
Attributions
Associated Sound
Voiceless uvular stop in ancient pronunciation; merged with the k of Kaph in modern Hebrew 1
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Hebrew letter mysticism is a continuous, living Jewish tradition 2Tradition: Sefer 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 3Tradition: Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Runs through medieval commentary, golem lore, Abulafia, hasidic teaching 2Tradition: Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Still studied and practised today 2Tradition: Sefer 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 3Tradition: Sefer 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 3Tradition: Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters
Alphabet (class)
Hebrew 1
Script type (class)
Abjad 1
Learn More
Qoph: The Hebrew Letter of Back of the Head

Qoph is the nineteenth Hebrew letter and a simple letter; its name is traditionally glossed 'back of the head' and its value is 100. Its descender, dropping below the line, is read as a letter reaching into the depths. 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 Qoph is assigned to the sign Pisces and the month of Adar.

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 Qoph to The Moon (trump XVIII), the card of dream, depth and illusion matching watery Pisces.

Qoph: Scribal Tradition

Qoph's Hebrew name means the back of the head, and a homiletic tradition, echoed in various forms across popular Jewish teaching on the alphabet, pairs the letter directly with its near look-alike Resh, meaning head, discussed elsewhere in this atlas: where Resh is read as a head held upright, Qoph is read as a head turned away or bowed, and commentators in this tradition have used the pair to contrast the uprightness of the righteous with the turned-away posture of the wicked.

Graphically, Qoph is also one of the few Hebrew letters whose stroke drops below the writing line in its ordinary form, a feature it otherwise shares only with the five sofit final letters discussed elsewhere in this atlas; unlike those five, however, Qoph keeps the identical shape whether it falls in the middle or at the end of a word, one of only a small number of letters, alongside Lamed and Resh, that regularly close a word without ever taking on a distinct final form of their own. Because Qoph is one of the Sefer Yetzirah's twelve simple letters, a classification covered separately elsewhere in this atlas, its shape-based homiletic pairing with Resh sits alongside, rather than inside, that older mystical classification.

Connections

Associated With

The Moon, Tarot

In the Golden Dawn Kabbalistic attribution, The Moon corresponds to the Hebrew letter Qoph 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, Scripts & Magical Alphabets

Corresponds To

Path 29, Tree of Life Paths
Source Liber 777Aleister Crowley

Derived from This

Qoph Q, Alphabet Letters

Celestial Qoph stands for the Hebrew letter Qoph, and carries its value of 100. 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
Qoph Q, Alphabet Letters

Malachim Qoph stands for the Hebrew letter Qoph, and carries its value of 100. 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
Qoph Q, Alphabet Letters

Passing the River Qoph stands for the Hebrew letter Qoph, and carries its value of 100. 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

Aq ࡒ, Alphabet Letters

Mandaic Aq and Hebrew Qoph occupy the same place in the twenty-two letter Aramaic sequence. Hebrew keeps the inherited noun as the letter name and the numeral value 100; 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.)
Qaf (Qa) ቀ, Alphabet Letters

Qaf and the Hebrew qoph continue the same Semitic consonant and carry the same name. Ge'ez makes it an ejective; the Hebrew reading tradition no longer distinguishes it from a plain k.

Source Comparative Dictionary of Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic)Wolf Leslau
Qaf ق, Alphabet Letters

Cognate letters. Arabic qaf and Hebrew qoph both continue the twenty-two letter Northwest Semitic alphabet, and they hold the same place in the inherited order and the same numeral value, 100. Neither is derived from the other.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)
Qaph ܩ, Alphabet Letters

Syriac Qaph and Hebrew Qoph stand at the same place in the twenty-two letter Aramaic sequence and carry the same letter-numeral value, 100. 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.)
Qoph, Alphabet Letters

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.)
Qoph Q, Alphabet Letters

Celestial Qoph is a cipher glyph standing for the Hebrew letter Qoph; 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
Qoph Q, Alphabet Letters

Malachim Qoph is a cipher glyph standing for the Hebrew letter Qoph; 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
Qoph Q, Alphabet Letters

Passing the River Qoph is a cipher glyph standing for the Hebrew letter Qoph; 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
Quf ࠒ, Alphabet Letters

Samaritan Quf and Hebrew Qoph are cognates. Both continue the same Paleo-Hebrew sign, both stand for a back consonant the older language kept distinct from plain k, and both carry the value 100. The Samaritan form continues Paleo-Hebrew directly; the Hebrew one came through Aramaic.

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 Qoph as a simple letter and the sign PiscesView 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 (Pisces, The Moon)View the Source
Liber 777
Aleister Crowley, Walter Scott, 1909Corresponds To: Path 29View the Source
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