These blogs on the Hebrew alphabet are to be read in conjunction with the bite-sized teachings available via video on this website.
The second letter of the Hebrew alphabet is the letter bet or vet.
The ancient Hebrew pictograph for bet or vet is an open tent door. This was believed to represent a house, dwelling, household, family, shelter, temple or palace.

The classical or modern Hebrew letter consists of three vavs. If the letter has a dot in the middle then it is a bet (b) and without the dot it is a vet (v). Below, on the left, is an example of manual print and, on the right, an example of book print.


Phonetically speaking, the letter bet sounds like a b for boy.
Numerically, bet is associated with the number 2. Two represents agreement and, in addition three vav’s add up to 18 which is the number of life.
Bet is the very first letter used in the Torah. Genesis is called Bereshit in Hebrew and that is also the first word in the Torah as Bereshit means “in the beginning”.

The Bible continues with “in the beginning God created”. Now the Hebrew word for create is “bara” and the Aramaic word for son is “bar” therefore, if you divide the word up, you have “bar a” or “bar aleph”. In the video on aleph we learned that aleph represents the Father so “bar a” could be interpreted as “the Son of the Father”. Thus we can also look at those first words in the Bible as reading “in the beginning was the Son of Aleph” which then makes sense of John 1:1 which says “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God”.
