The First Letter

Before God is named. Before the creation begins. Before light is called.
The Torah opens with one picture. A house.

Document 1 of 10

 

Open the Torah to its first word. Bereshit (in-beginning). Six letters. And the first of those six letters, before any word is complete, before any declaration is finished, before the first sentence of the covenant text has arrived at its verb, is a picture.

In the Paleo-Hebrew script (the pictographic alphabet Moshe used when he wrote the Torah, the script where every letter was a drawn image, not an abstract stroke) the letter Bet was drawn as a house. Not a symbol representing the concept of a house. A house. The floor plan of a dwelling. The basic architectural shape of the structure that shelters a family, open on one side, enclosed on the other, the form of a place where someone lives.

And in every Torah scroll ever written, in every scribal tradition, in every geographic community, in every century from the time the Torah was first copied to the present day, that first letter is enlarged. The Bet of Bereshit is written visibly larger than every other letter in the entire scroll. A Torah scroll without the enlarged Bet is not a kosher scroll (a valid scroll fit for public reading). The enlargement is required. It has been maintained without interruption for three thousand years.

The first picture the Torah shows is a house. Not God. Not creation. Not light. A house. Enlarged. Required. Preserved without interruption across three thousand years of scribal tradition. Before anything else, a dwelling place.

 

The tradition has offered explanations for the enlargement. That the Bet signals the two-ness of creation. That its closed side faces backward, toward what is before the beginning, which is not for human inquiry, and its open side faces forward into the creation narrative. That it is an invitation to enter. These explanations are not wrong. They are partial. None of them asks the most direct question the enlarged letter invites.

Why is the first picture in the first word of the covenant text a house?

Not a throne. Not a crown. Not a flame or a sword or a pillar of cloud. A house. The most ordinary, most intimate, most relational structure in human experience. The place where family lives. The place where you come home to. The place where the one who dwells in it is known, not as sovereign or judge or distant power, but as the one who is present. Who is there. Who has moved in and is staying.

The enlarged Bet is YHWH’s first declaration to all of creation about what the covenant story is ultimately about. Before the creation of the heavens and the earth. Before the first act of making. Before the first word is even complete, the house. The picture that says: this entire covenant story, from its first letter to its last vision, is the story of a dwelling place being prepared for an inhabitation.

Not a throne. Not a crown. A house. The first declaration of the covenant testimony is the most intimate architectural statement possible. YHWH is not building toward sovereignty. YHWH is building toward home.

 

The Torah does not begin with the declaration of divine power or the announcement of divine law or the establishment of divine authority. It begins with a house. And the house is enlarged, given more visual weight than any other letter in the scroll, because it is not incidental to what follows. It is the declaration that everything which follows is in service of the house. The creation is made for the house. The covenant is sealed for the house. The cross is the nail that opens the house. The resurrection is the confirmation that the house is open. And the final vision of the covenant testimony, Revelation 21:3, behold the skene (dwelling place, tabernacle, the same concept as the mishkan, the portable dwelling YHWH built in the wilderness with Israel) of God is with man, he will dwell with them, is the Bet of Bereshit arrived at its destination.

The first letter and the last vision are the same declaration. A house. YHWH dwelling with all flesh. The story that began with the picture of a dwelling ends with the reality of the dwelling, because YHWH declared at the very beginning, in the very first picture, before the very first sentence was complete, what the whole story was always building toward. Not power. Home. Not sovereignty. Presence. Not law. Habitation.

The house that God built for his own habitation was declared in the first letter of the first word before anything was made. The Bet. Enlarged. A house. YHWH’s first word to creation is the picture of where he intends to live.

 

The first letter of the Torah is a house. Enlarged. Preserved. Declared before anything was made. The entire covenant story is the story of that house being built and filled.

 

 

Bet (ב) — a house, drawn as a house, in the script Moshe used.

 

First letter. First word. First picture.

 

Enlarged in every Torah scroll ever written.

 

Before God is named.

Before the creation begins.

Before the light is called.

 

A house. YHWH’s first word to creation is the picture of where he intends to live.

 

The Gospel Revolution  •  Mike Williams Ministries

William Ethan Massengill  •  Michael Lilborn Williams  •  Daniel Thomas Rouse

Published by Audrey Williams