Hebrew is an ancient language, dating back at least 6000 years. It is in a completely different "family" to English. English is part of a family of languages called "Indo-European", which includes not only English but languages as diverse as French, German, Celtic languages like Gaelic and Welsh, several Indian languages like Hindi and Urdu, Russian and most Eastern European languages, Greek, Latin and most Mediterranean languages, and most Scandinavian languages. Indo-European is the largest family of languages in the world.

Hebrew is part of the Haimo-Semitic family, which also includes Arabic.

Like English, Hebrew has an alphabet. In fact, our word "alphabet" comes from the names of the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph and Beth. The Hebrew alphabet was almost certainly used as the basis for the ancient Greek alphabet, which in turn became the basis for the alphabet used by the Romans, and now by most languages in Europe.

Unlike English, the Hebrew alphabet has no vowels, and words are written from right to left. This is why there can be confusion over how Hebrew words are pronounced. In modern Hebrew, vowels are usually missed out altogether in the written language. However, the Bible is considered such a sacred work that it is necessary to know how each word is pronounced. For this reason, Biblical Hebrew does indicate vowels by placing marks under or alongside each letter. These dots have names in their own right, but are not strictly speaking part of the alphabet, which consists of 22 letters.

As an example, here is the first verse of Genesis, written without the vowel signs:

and with the vowel signs:

We tend to take written language for granted. To the ancient Israelites, Hebrew was far more than just a language - it was a means by which they could interact with God. According to Jewish legend, the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) was written before the Universe was created, and by implication, the letters themselves predated the Universe. The Torah is supposed to contain all possible truth; since the Torah is a relatively small book, it is believed that the Torah contains not just the "obvious" reading, but many, many different hidden meanings as well.

For example, in Genesis, it is written that "the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." Later on in Genesis, "Adam" is referred to, but nowhere is Adam introduced - it's taken for granted that the reader understands that "Adam" must be the man in question. Now, in Hebrew, Adam is written like this:

This consists of three letters (right to left): Aleph, Daleth and Mem. The word for "blood" in Hebrew is "Dam" - Daleth and Mem. Aleph by itself not only represents the "Ah" sound, but also the element of air, or breath - so "Adam" is seen as blood with the breath of life - the man created by God. There are many other such hidden meanings in the Bible - using letters as numbers, using a "cypher" so that the last letter of the alphabet corresponds to the first, the penultimate letter corresponding to the second, and so on, and hidden abbreviations. Scholars have spent many years finding meaning in these, and the Talmud is a body of writing which largely consists of commentaries - the "hidden meanings" - on the Torah. Even today, Jewish scholars are researching such hidden meanings. In recent years, the "Bible Code" has received a lot of publicity; this is a system where supposed hidden messages are teased out of the bible by picking, say, every 31st letter in a sequence, or every 42nd letter, to reveal new words. Unfortunately, a number of people have brought discredit to this idea by jumping on the Bible Code bandwagon and finding all sorts of apparent links which simply don't stand up to statistical analysis. However, the original idea was discovered by a statistician and quantum physicist, Eliyahu Rips, and his original paper on the Bible Code, though now generally dismissed, was sufficiently impressive to be included in an academic journal on statistics.

One word in the Bible which is never pronounced "correctly" is the name of God - YHVH. There are several words used for God in the Bible - "Adon", meaning "Lord", and "Elohim", which is a curious word based on "El" (God) and the plural ending "im". However, God's name is often given as YHVH, which we know as "Jehovah". According to legend, if the name of God is ever pronounced correctly, the Universe will come to an end. For this reason, the "real" pronounciation is - sensibly - never given in the Bible. Instead, the vowel signs used for "Adon" are used for the middle H and V instead, giving us a pronounciation of "Ye-Hah-Vo". Some scholars maintain that the "correct" pronounciation is closer to "Yahweh" - but please don't practice this at home; we don't want the Universe to end just yet!

The Tree of Life has 22 paths on it, each path corresponding to a Hebrew letter. There are 22 major arcana cards in the Tarot, so there is a direct correspondence between the Tree of Life and the Tarot. This is, I realise, a very controversial statement. Devout Jews may strongly disagree with this, particularly if they view Tarot as a form of fortune telling, which is prohibited in the Torah. I personally see the Tarot as a tool for personal growth, rather than a predictive device, and for me, the mapping between the Tarot and the Tree of Life works.

Each Hebrew letter corresponds to a number; most Hebrew bibles actually use the letters to indicate chapter numbers and verse numbers. This means that every single Hebrew word has a numeric value, and scholars have long been fascinated by entirely different words that have the same numeric value as each other. A simple example: the word for love is Ahebah (Alef-Heh-Beth-Heh), which adds up to 13. The word for unity is Achad (Alef-Cheth-Daleth), which also adds up to 13. Thus there is a correspondence between love and unity. The art of finding words with the same numeric value is called gematria - the concept is vaguely similar to numerology (where a person's name is reduced to a number, to indicate their personality), except that gematria is usually conducted on biblical names and the names of angels.

In addition, each Hebrew letter has a meaning in its own right - for example, the letter representing the "Ts" sound is called "Tzaddi", which means "fish-hook", and the symbol actually looks like a fish hook. Some of the correspondences are not terribly obvious - the "N" sound is called "Nun", which means "fish", but the symbol for Nun doesn't honestly look much like a fish!

Finally, Hebrew letters are divided into three categories: three "mother" letters, which correspond to the three elements (Air, Water and Fire - Earth is considered to be a combination of all three elements, and not an element in its own right), seven "double" letters, which correspond to the seven planets known to the ancients (Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn). Double letters are so called because they historically had two different sounds; for example, the letter "Peh" can have a "P" sound or an "F" or "Ph" sound; some of these distinctions have now disappeared - for instance, the letter "Gimel" only has a single sound now (a hard "G"), but used to have two sounds ("G" or "J"). The remaining twelve letters correspond to the twelve zodiac signs:

For the Qabalist and devout Jew alike, the most sacred word is the four-letter name of God (Yod-Heh-Vau-Heh), known as the Tetragrammaton (from the Greek "Tetra", four, and "Gramma", word). Many types of meditation revolve around visualising the letters of the Tetragrammaton in various forms. Each letter has numerous correspondences - for example, the four suits of the Tarot. The four letters can also be combined to represent the human body:

The Tetragrammaton - the four-letter name of God - is considered very sacred in Judaism, and the power of the Tetragrammaton has carried through to the modern day not only among Jews, but in esoteric groups too. For example, the Golden Dawn - an esoteric group, set up in the 19th century, and devoted to the study of Tarot and the Qabalah - has people of many different beliefs among its adherents, and uses the "formula" of the four letters in many of its rituals.

And yet the first chapter of Genesis does not refer to this four-letter name at all - it simply refers to the creator of the Universe as "Elohim". Not until Chapter Two does Yahweh put in an appearance, and from that point onwards, Yahweh's relationship with humanity takes a turn for the worse. First, Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit (of the Tree of Knowledge) and were banished from Eden; then Yahweh regretted creating humanity in the first place (Genesis chapter 6) and decided to destroy everyone until he relented a little and saved Noah and his family. Following this, Yahweh became increasingly violent, slaying people at the slightest provocation. "I am a jealous God" he says in Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Johel, Nahum...

Not only jealous, but prepared to act on a whim too - and sometimes be talked out of it (either Yahweh, or one of his angels, was going to slay Moses at one point - Exodus 4:24 - until Moses' wife talked him out of it). On top of this, Yahweh also snuffed out a number of angels: according to Jewish tradition, Yahweh burned the angels of peace and truth, their hosts and an entire legion of angels for objecting to the creation of man (although Yahweh himself subsequently regretted creating humanity), annihilated the Song-Uttering Chorister angels for failing to chant at the appointed hour, and drowned the angel Rahab for espousing the cause of the Egyptians, even though that was in fact his designated role. And when the Israelites fought the Canaanites, they massacred tens of thousands of them with Yahweh's blessing.

So we have a jealous, violent God, who can sometimes be argued out of his tantrums. This does not sound like the loving, all-powerful creator of the Universe. There have been suggestions that Yahweh had his origins in Sumerian mythology. The Sumerians had a vast array of gods, and it has been suggested that Yahweh could have been a minor war god - not a very important figure, except at times of war. Yahweh was then adopted by the Israelites as the one and only true god. This is of course highly speculative, but would account for some of the anomalies in the Bible.