A Puzzle
Jean's friend, Nahum, has given her a Torah (Bible) based puzzle to solve. Matt (who usually hates puzzles) and I (who love them) have decided that since this is such a fun puzzle we both get to help her solve it.
Nahum started the puzzle by telling Jean that somewhere in the Torah there is a dagesh-aleph combination. The goal of the puzzle is to figure out where it is, why it is there, and what it means. Nahum gave her six weeks to solve the puzzle.
(For those of you who want to try this puzzle yourselves, don't read the rest of this entry.)
Challenged, Jean, Matt, and I sat down and started to lay out what we knew. We started with "dagesh." Since "dagesh" is not one of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, we decided to assume it must be a special letter or some sort of extra mark in a letter. "Aleph" is the first word of the Hebrew alphabet, so this combination might be part of a word. But there are thousands of words in the Torah; where should we start looking?
I'm not sure I like admitting this, but Matt started with Google. (Is that cheating?) The dagesh, apparently, is the little dot that is often found in a few Hebrew letters, such as bet and kaf. Would that mean that a dagesh-aleph is an aleph with a dot? Unheard of!
So where can it be found and what does it mean? After some more thorough Internet searching, we found that the dagesh-aleph combination can be found only in Parshat Emor (Leviticus 23:17). Apparently, a dagesh in an uncommon letter can mean that the letter is sounded twice.
So we've found where it is and what to do with it. Yet we have no idea what it means. Although the puzzle remains incomplete, we all feel exhilarated at the challenge. How can we find out what it means? Who can we ask? Where shall we look? I'm sure we'll come up with something.
Nahum started the puzzle by telling Jean that somewhere in the Torah there is a dagesh-aleph combination. The goal of the puzzle is to figure out where it is, why it is there, and what it means. Nahum gave her six weeks to solve the puzzle.
(For those of you who want to try this puzzle yourselves, don't read the rest of this entry.)
Challenged, Jean, Matt, and I sat down and started to lay out what we knew. We started with "dagesh." Since "dagesh" is not one of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, we decided to assume it must be a special letter or some sort of extra mark in a letter. "Aleph" is the first word of the Hebrew alphabet, so this combination might be part of a word. But there are thousands of words in the Torah; where should we start looking?
I'm not sure I like admitting this, but Matt started with Google. (Is that cheating?) The dagesh, apparently, is the little dot that is often found in a few Hebrew letters, such as bet and kaf. Would that mean that a dagesh-aleph is an aleph with a dot? Unheard of!
So where can it be found and what does it mean? After some more thorough Internet searching, we found that the dagesh-aleph combination can be found only in Parshat Emor (Leviticus 23:17). Apparently, a dagesh in an uncommon letter can mean that the letter is sounded twice.
So we've found where it is and what to do with it. Yet we have no idea what it means. Although the puzzle remains incomplete, we all feel exhilarated at the challenge. How can we find out what it means? Who can we ask? Where shall we look? I'm sure we'll come up with something.
posted by Jen at 8:43 AM
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