End letters

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End letters

Dividing Bible into verses


There are no capital letters in Hebrew,
but some letters have variant
spellings at the end of a word (final):
ך ם ן ף ץ

The fact is that initially there were no punctuation marks or spaces in the text. Just one letter was a continuous stream.
By the way, in Russian every word ended with a soft or hard sign and the division into words was obvious.
Hebrew is more difficult. There is no vowel and the vast majority of words consist of 3 letters.

For example, the Ramban (Moshe ben Nachman) writes that if we separate the letters of the first words of the Torah בראשית ברא (“In the beginning Gd created”), then we can read it as בראש יתברא (“It is created in the head”).
This adds a new dimension to the understanding of the Torah.
An entire book has been written about the possible combinations of the first word of the Torah "בראשית", which has 720 possible letter combinations!
For example, ראש בית — “beginning (head) is beit”, “head of the house”, תאב שיר — “thirst for song”, אשרי בת - "blessed is the daughter", etc.

Here the final letters somehow help to divide words more correctly.

Acrostic

A number of psalms (Psalms 9, 10, 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 119, 145) are written in acrostic, that is, each verse begins with the next letter of the alphabet.
Such things also help the correct division into verses.