The Alphabet, Part 1

Revelation begins with a church under pressure. John is on the island of Patmos 'because of the word of God and my testimony about Jesus' (Revelation 1:9), and the seven churches he writes to in the province of Asia face hostility from outside and false teaching within. Into that situation the Lord God speaks: 'I am the Alpha and the Omega.' The SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT) prints τὸ Ἄλφα καὶ τὸ Ὦ (to Alpha kai to Ō, the Alpha and the O). The first and last letters stand for everything from beginning to end. Nothing comes before God, nothing outlasts him, and nothing in between lies outside his reach. It is the same claim Isaiah heard, 'I am the first and I am the last' (Isaiah 44:6), spoken in the alphabet of John's readers.

The title tells you something about John's readers, too. He could assume that every one of them knew the order of the Greek letters, the way every child who has been to school knows that A comes first and Z last. Some commentators compare a way of speaking found in later rabbinic writings, where doing something from aleph to tav, the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, means doing all of it. Whatever the background, the image is one a child can grasp and a theologian cannot exhaust. That is a good encouragement for this lesson. The alphabet you are about to learn is the alphabet of the children of Ephesus and Smyrna, and of the market traders of Thessalonica. It is not hard. It only looks hard because it is unfamiliar.

Look at the rest of the verse. The Lord God is the one 'who is and was and is to come,' which in Greek is ὁ ὢν καὶ ὁ ἦν καὶ ὁ ἐρχόμενος (ho ōn kai ho ēn kai ho erchomenos). The first phrase, ὁ ὤν (ho ōn, the one who is), is the Septuagint's rendering of God's name at the burning bush, where Exodus 3:14 in Greek reads Ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν (Egō eimi ho ōn, I am the one who is). The middle phrase is stranger: John puts the article ὁ (ho, the) in front of a finite verb, ἦν (ēn, he was), which ordinary Greek does not do, as if 'the One Who Was' were a name. Grammarians have long noticed that Revelation's Greek bends the rules in places like this, and many think John does it deliberately to keep God's name unchanged. The verse closes with ὁ παντοκράτωρ (ho pantokratōr, the Almighty), the ruler of all. You cannot read most of these words yet. By the end of the next lesson, you will be able to read every one.

The Greek alphabet has twenty-four letters. The Greeks borrowed it from the Phoenicians, a Semitic people of the coast of what is now Lebanon, probably in the ninth or eighth century BC, which is why several Greek letter names echo the Hebrew and Phoenician ones: alpha and aleph, beta and beth, gamma and gimel, delta and daleth. The Greeks made one change that mattered more than any other. The Semitic alphabets wrote only consonants. The Greeks took some of the consonant signs they did not need and used them for vowels, so that the aleph, a consonant in Hebrew, became alpha, the vowel a. A Greek reader can sound out any word on the page without already knowing it, which is exactly what you will be doing by the end of this lesson.

You already know more of these letters than you think. If you have done any mathematics or science you have met α, β, γ, δ, θ, λ and others. Many capital letters look exactly like English capitals. The danger is not the strange letters, which you will learn because they are strange, but the familiar-looking ones that stand for a different sound. This lesson marks each of those with a warning.

The method is simple and it works. For each letter, do three things. Write it by hand, in your notebook, ten times, saying its name and sound aloud each time. Read it in a real word. And come back to it the next day before you learn anything new. Fifteen minutes a day for ten to fourteen days will give you the whole alphabet. Do not try to learn it by looking at a chart; your hand and your mouth remember what your eyes forget.

A word about sound before the letters. Nobody alive knows exactly how the apostles pronounced Greek, and there are two main systems in use today, with a third growing. Most seminaries and grammars in the English-speaking world teach a classroom pronunciation descended from the sixteenth-century scholar Erasmus, which gives each letter its own distinct sound so that you can spell what you hear. Greek churches and Greek speakers read the New Testament in modern Greek pronunciation. Lesson 4 sets out both, fairly, with their strengths. This lesson and the next give the classroom sound first, because it makes the letters easiest to tell apart, and note the modern Greek sound where it differs. Choose one system and keep to it.

Here are the first five letters. Each entry gives the capital and the small letter, the name, the transliteration (the English letter or letters scholars use to spell it), the classroom sound, and a warning where you need one.

Alpha, Α α, transliterated a. Sounded like the a in father, or a little shorter, like the a in the British pronunciation of cat. The capital is identical to the English A. Write the small letter in one stroke, like a small fish facing left with its tail on the right; do not write it like a printed English a with a hook on top, or you will later confuse it with other letters. Modern Greek sounds it the same way.

Beta, Β β, transliterated b. Sounded like the b in bat. The capital looks like English B. The small letter is the first of several that reach below the line: start the stroke well below the line, go up into a tall loop and close it with a second, smaller loop. Warning: in modern Greek pronunciation beta is sounded v, which is why a modern Greek says vee-ta, and why Greek words borrowed recently into other languages sometimes have a v where you expect a b.

Gamma, Γ γ, transliterated g. Sounded like the hard g in go, never like the g in gentle. The capital looks like an upside-down L. Warning: the small letter γ looks like an English y, and beginners read it as y for weeks. It is a g. Write it with its tail dropping below the line. A second warning: when gamma stands before another gamma, or before kappa, xi or chi, it is sounded and transliterated as n, the ng sound in finger. So ἄγγελος, a word you will be able to read after the next lesson, is angelos (messenger, angel), not aggelos, and that is where the English word angel comes from. Modern Greek sounds gamma like a y before the e and i sounds, and elsewhere as a soft gh made at the back of the throat.

Delta, Δ δ, transliterated d. Sounded like the d in dog. The capital is a triangle, which is why a river mouth shaped like one is called a delta. The small letter is a circle with a curl rising from its top. Modern Greek sounds delta like the th in this.

Epsilon, Ε ε, transliterated e. Sounded like the short e in get. The capital looks like English E. Write the small letter like a backward three, or like a small c with a bar. The name means bare e, a name the Byzantine grammarians gave it to tell it apart from the pair αι, which had come to sound the same; in classical times it was called simply ei. Warning: epsilon is the short e. There is a second e in Greek, the long one, eta, which comes in the next section and is the most deceptive letter in the alphabet.

Zeta, Ζ ζ, transliterated z. Sounded in the classroom like the dz in adze, and in modern Greek like the z in zoo. The capital looks like English Z. The small letter is a z whose bottom stroke curls down below the line. Do not let it run into the letter xi, which you will meet in Lesson 3 and which looks like a zeta with an extra stroke on top.

Eta, Η η, transliterated ē, with a line over the e to show that it is long. Sounded in the classroom like the ey in they or the e in obey, held a little longer than epsilon. This is the letter to watch. Warning one: the capital Η looks exactly like an English H, but it is a vowel, not the h sound. Warning two, which matters even more: the small letter η looks like an English n. It is not an n. It is a long e. Write it with the right-hand stroke dropping clearly below the line, so that in your own handwriting it can never be mistaken for n; Greek has its own n, which looks like an English v and comes in the next lesson. In modern Greek eta is sounded ee, like the i in machine.

Theta, Θ θ, transliterated th. Sounded like the th in thing, never like the th in this. It is one letter, not two, which beginners forget when they count letters or try to look up a word. The capital is an O with a bar across the middle; the small letter is a tall oval with a bar, rather like an egg cut in half. Theology, from θεός (theos, God), begins with it.

Iota, Ι ι, transliterated i. Sounded short like the i in sit, or long like the i in machine, depending on the word. It has no dot; do not add one. It is the smallest letter in the alphabet, and that is the reason it appears in the Sermon on the Mount. When Jesus says that 'not a single jot' will pass from the Law (Matthew 5:18), the Greek text reads ἰῶτα ἓν (iōta hen, one iota), very probably standing for the yod, the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet. English 'not one iota' comes straight from this verse. Lesson 3 will show you iota doing another job, sitting silently under other vowels.

Kappa, Κ κ, transliterated k. Sounded like the k in kite. Capital and small letter both look like English K, the small one simply smaller; write it so that its arms meet the upright in the middle, not at the top. The Romans wrote kappa as c, and many Greek names reached English through Latin, which is why we write Corinth and not Korinth. Modern scholarly transliteration uses k.

Lambda, Λ λ, transliterated l. Sounded like the l in lamp. The capital is an upside-down V, like a tent; do not confuse it with Δ, which has a floor, or with Α, which has a crossbar. The small letter looks like an upside-down y: a long stroke from top left to bottom right, with a short leg kicking out to the left from its middle. It is one of the commonest letters in the New Testament, because it begins λόγος (logos, word) and λαλέω (laleō, I speak).

Here, then, are the eleven, in order, small letters only: α β γ δ ε ζ η θ ι κ λ. Say them aloud as names: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta, iota, kappa, lambda. Then say them as sounds: a, b, g, d, e, dz, ey, th, i, k, l. Do both every day this week.

You can now read Greek. Every word below is a real New Testament word, made only of the eleven letters you have learned, and each comes with a verse where you can find it. You will notice small marks above some letters, little hooks and slanting strokes. They are breathings and accents, which Lesson 4 explains; for now, ignore them, except to know that a backward hook at the start of a word, like the one on ἁγία, means you should put an h sound before the first vowel. Read each word aloud, letter by letter, before you look at the transliteration. Cover the answers with your hand or a piece of paper if it helps.

καί, the commonest word in the New Testament after the article: kappa, alpha, iota. Read it kai, rhyming with eye. It means and, and it occurs about nine thousand times. δέ: delta, epsilon. Read it de. It means but, or and, or now, joining a sentence to the one before it, and it usually stands second in its clause. Between them these two little words will appear in almost every verse you study.

γάλα: gamma, alpha, lambda, alpha. Read it gala. It means milk, as in 'I gave you milk, not solid food' (1 Corinthians 3:2) and 'crave pure spiritual milk' (1 Peter 2:2). The English word galaxy comes from the Greek for the Milky Way, which is built on this word. Did you read the first letter as y? If you did, go back to section 2.

ἀλήθεια: alpha, lambda, eta, theta, epsilon, iota, alpha. Read it a-lē-thei-a. It means truth, as in 'I am the way and the truth and the life' (John 14:6). Check yourself on the two traps: the third letter is eta, a long e, not an n, and the fourth is theta, one letter, sounded th. In the classroom pronunciation the pair ει is sounded like the ei in eight, as the next lesson explains. With the feminine article in front of it, ἡ ἀλήθεια (hē alētheia), it means the truth. ἡ is a single eta with a rough breathing, read hē; it is the word the.

Γαλιλαία: capital gamma, alpha, lambda, iota, lambda, alpha, iota, alpha. Read it Ga-li-lai-a. It is Galilee. Notice the capital letter: modern printed editions of the Greek New Testament capitalise proper names, the first word of a paragraph, and the first word of a direct quotation, and almost nothing else. Ancient manuscripts did something quite different, which section 5 describes.

ἀγγελία: alpha, gamma, gamma, epsilon, lambda, iota, alpha. Read it an-ge-li-a, not ag-ge-li-a, because a gamma before a gamma is sounded n. It means message, as in 1 John 1:5, 'this is the message we have heard from Him,' where the Greek has ἡ ἀγγελία (hē angelia, the message). The word for an angel is a messenger, built on the same stem.

Now a whole phrase. In Romans 7:12 Paul says that the commandment is holy, righteous and good, and the SBLGNT prints ἁγία καὶ δικαία καὶ ἀγαθή. Take it slowly. ἁγία: rough breathing, so an h, then alpha, gamma, iota, alpha, read ha-gi-a, holy. καί you know; here it is written καὶ with a slanting accent the other way, for a reason Lesson 4 gives, but it is the same word. δικαία: delta, iota, kappa, alpha, iota, alpha, read di-kai-a, righteous or just. ἀγαθή: alpha, gamma, alpha, theta, eta, read a-ga-thē, good. hagia kai dikaia kai agathē, holy and righteous and good. You have just read a clause of Paul's letter to the Romans in the language he wrote it in.

Two more for practice, without help: βάθη (1 Corinthians 2:10, where the Spirit searches even the deep things of God), and δέκα (a number; think of decade and decalogue). The answers are bathē, depths, and deka, ten. If you read the first as bafē or the second as dexa, go back to the entries for theta and kappa.

The Greek of your tools is printed in the small letters, with capitals only at the start of names, paragraphs and quotations. The New Testament was not written that way. The earliest manuscripts, papyri from the second and third centuries and the great parchment codices of the fourth and fifth, were written entirely in capitals, in a rounded style scholars call majuscule or uncial, with no spaces between words and almost no breathings, accents or punctuation. A line of John 1:1 in such a manuscript would look something like ΕΝΑΡΧΗΗΝΟΛΟΓΟΣ, which you will be able to divide and read by the end of this module. The small letters you are learning developed from a faster handwriting that became the normal book hand in the ninth century, and the spaces, accents and punctuation of a modern edition are the work of later scribes and modern editors. That fact will matter in Lesson 4, when you meet places where editors have had to decide where a sentence ends.

Here are the eleven capitals you have learned: Α Β Γ Δ Ε Ζ Η Θ Ι Κ Λ. Seven of them look like English capitals, Α Β Ε Ζ Η Ι Κ, and one of those is a trap: Η is not H but a long e. The other four, Γ, Δ, Θ and Λ, are distinctive enough that you will learn them quickly. Write the row of capitals once in your notebook under the row of small letters.

Transliteration is the habit of writing Greek in English letters, and you will see it everywhere: in commentaries, in Strong's dictionaries, in the tools, and in this course. There is more than one system, but the one used here, which is close to the one the Society of Biblical Literature recommends, is easy to learn. Each Greek letter has one English equivalent: α a, β b, γ g, δ d, ε e, ζ z, η ē, θ th, ι i, κ k, λ l. Gamma before gamma, kappa, xi or chi is written n. A rough breathing is written h. The long vowels are marked with a line, so eta is ē, which keeps it apart from epsilon. Blue Letter Bible, STEP Bible and older books each use their own system, which can differ from this course in small ways, such as how they show the iota subscript you will meet in Lesson 3, or how they write upsilon and the vowel pairs, so you will sometimes see the same word spelled two ways. That is not an error. It is a reason to learn the Greek letters themselves and not to rely on anybody's transliteration.

One last caution. A transliteration is a crutch, and you should expect to put it down. When this track quotes a Greek word it gives the transliteration the first time in each lesson, so that you can always check your reading. Get into the habit of reading the Greek first, covering the transliteration, and checking only afterwards. In a month you will not need it.

Turn to the second page of your Greek notebook, which you left blank in Lesson 1. Head it The alphabet. Down the left side, write the eleven letters you learned in this lesson, capital and small, one line each. Beside each, write its name, its transliteration and its sound in a word you know: alpha, a, as in father, and so on to lambda. Leave room under lambda for thirteen more lines, which you will fill next lesson.

Then make flashcards. Cut a sheet of paper into small pieces, or use the backs of old envelopes. On one side of each card write a small Greek letter; on the other side its name and sound. Carry the cards in your pocket. Each time you wait, for a bus, a meeting, a pot to boil, go through them, saying the sound aloud if you can. Put the cards you get wrong at the front. Make separate cards for the three traps: γ is not y, η is not n, and Η is not h.

Next, open the first verse of the passage you chose in Lesson 1 in the Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible interlinear. Copy the Greek of that verse onto your My passage page, as carefully as you can, leaving a blank line under it. Then go through it letter by letter and circle every letter from alpha to lambda that you can now recognise. Under each circled letter, write its English sound. You will not be able to read whole words yet, and that is fine. Count how many letters you circled out of the total; you will do this again next week and the number will go up.

Finally, take the sentence you wrote in the last inquiry question, about what it would mean to know that God is the first and the last. Copy it into your notebook under the words of Revelation 1:8, written in Greek as far as you can: τὸ Ἄλφα καὶ τὸ Ὦ. You can already write the first letter and the last, and every letter of καί. Say the phrase aloud. You are reading the same letters John's first hearers read, and confessing the same God.