Building on the Foundation

  When we discussed the numbers 1, 2, and 3, we finished up each one with a brief discussion of the Hebrew letters used to express these numbers. This time, let’s start there instead, because it helps lay the foundation for what’s to come. In Hebrew, you remember, each numeral is expressed by letters of the alphabet. The numeral 4 corresponds to the fourth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, dalet ד. In the ancient Hebrew pictograph writing, though, dalet was a picture of a door or tent flap: . The word dalet itself likewise means “door.” As an aside, you may notice that the dalet pictograph resembles our English letter D. In fact, the English alphabet traces its roots from Latin back to Greek, from Greek to paleo-Hebrew, and from paleo-Hebrew to the early Hebrew pictographs. But that’s a topic for another day. Returning to the main topic now, we see that the number 4 bears association to a door or the entrance to a dwelling. As we’ll see momentarily, it even pertains to the dwelling it...