Alphabet Letter

Samekh ס

SAH-mekh

Hebrew Letters

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

Samekh is the fifteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, its name meaning prop or support and its gematria value sixty. It is one of the twelve Simple letters, attributed to the twelve zodiac signs, and is given to Sagittarius. In the Hermetic scheme it corresponds to the tarot trump Temperance and to the twenty-fifth path of the Tree of Life, joining Tiphareth to Yesod along the Middle Pillar. As the prop or support, it symbolizes that which upholds, sustains, and steadies; its closed, round shape is seen as an image of endless support and protection, and fittingly it belongs to Sagittarius, whose arrow of aspiration is upheld on its flight toward the higher self, and to the card of tempering and balance.

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

prop or support 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

Fifteenth of twenty-two in the Hebrew alphabet 1

Attributions

Associated Sound

Voiceless alveolar fricative s, as in English sun 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

Samekh: The Hebrew Letter of Prop or Support

Samekh is the fifteenth Hebrew letter and a simple letter; its name means 'prop' or 'support' and its value is 60. Its closed circular form is read as an image of the encircling, sustaining presence of God. 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 Samekh is assigned to the sign Sagittarius and the month of Kislev.

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 Samekh to Temperance (trump XIV), whose arrow-like tempering of opposites suits the archer of Sagittarius.

Samekh: Scribal Tradition

Samekh is written as a fully closed circle, one of only a small number of Hebrew letters, alongside final Mem, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, with no break anywhere in its outline. That closed shape sits behind one of the more striking miracle traditions attached to any Hebrew letter: the Talmud, at both Shabbat 104a and Megillah 2b to 3a, records that the two tablets of the Ten Commandments were engraved all the way through the stone, so that every closed letter, samekh and final mem included, should logically have left its enclosed centre as a loose, unsupported plug of stone; tradition holds that these letters nonetheless stood miraculously in place rather than falling out, a wonder some sources count among the ten things created at twilight on the sixth day of creation, just before the first Sabbath.

Because Samekh's closed form cannot be produced by a single continuous stroke without lifting the pen, a sofer writing it must join the curve carefully at one point so that the seam is invisible, a technical demand distinct from, but often mentioned alongside, the tablets tradition in discussions of the letter's scribal difficulty. Samekh is one of the Sefer Yetzirah's twelve simple letters, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, and its name, meaning a prop or support, sits oddly beside the tablets story, in which the letter is remembered specifically for needing no support at all.

Connections

Associated With

Temperance

In the Golden Dawn Kabbalistic attribution, Temperance corresponds to the Hebrew letter Samekh 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 25

Source Liber 777Aleister Crowley

Derived from This

Samekh S

Celestial Samekh stands for the Hebrew letter Samekh, and carries its value of 60. 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

Samekh S

Malachim Samekh stands for the Hebrew letter Samekh, and carries its value of 60. 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

Samekh S

Passing the River Samekh stands for the Hebrew letter Samekh, and carries its value of 60. 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

As ࡎ

Mandaic As and Hebrew Samekh occupy the same place in the twenty-two letter Aramaic sequence. Hebrew keeps the inherited noun as the letter name and the numeral value 60; 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.)

Samekh

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.)

Samekh S

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

Samekh S

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

Samekh S

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

Sat (Sa) ሰ

Why this is disputed. Sat and the Hebrew samekh cover the plain s of the family, but the reduction that produced each letter was not the same reduction. Both descend from the same Proto Sinaitic sign, but comparative Semitists differ on whether the Ge'ez and Hebrew forms split before or after the broader Semitic sibilant mergers, so the letters' shared function does not settle how closely related their actual histories are.

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

Semkath ܣ

Syriac Semkath and Hebrew Samekh stand at the same place in the twenty-two letter Aramaic sequence and carry the same letter-numeral value, 60. 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.)

Sin س

Cognate letters. Arabic sin and Hebrew samekh both continue the twenty-two letter Northwest Semitic alphabet, and they hold the same place in the inherited order and the same numeral value, 60. Neither is derived from the other.

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

Singaat ࠎ

Samaritan Singaat and Hebrew Samekh are cognates at the value 60. The names have drifted further apart here than anywhere else in the sequence, which is a reminder that letter names travelled with the script and were reshaped by the people using it, while the position and the numeral value did not move.

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

Xi ξ

Greek Xi and Hebrew Samekh are cognates. Both continue the same Phoenician sign, which is why both carry the numeral value 60 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.)

Xi ξ

Hebrew Samekh and Greek Xi continue the same Phoenician sign; both carry the numeral value 60 in their letter-number systems.

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 Samekh as a simple letter and the sign SagittariusView 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 (Sagittarius, Temperance)View the Source

Liber 777

Aleister Crowley, Walter Scott, 1909Corresponds To: Path 25View the Source

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Samekh ס

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