Nun: Bent, Straight, Suspended, Missing
Nun is the fourteenth letter and its value is fifty. It is also the only letter the tradition hands over in four distinct postures, and each posture is argued somewhere.
Bent and straight
The Gemara runs through the alphabet asking what the letter-pairs teach, and when it reaches this one it gives two forms with two readings.
נוּן כְּפוּפָה נוּן פְּשׁוּטָה, נֶאֱמָן כָּפוּף נֶאֱמָן פָּשׁוּט
A bent nun and a straight nun: a faithful one bent, a faithful one straight. Shabbat 104a
The same letter stands upright in the middle of a word and drops below the line at the end of one. Faithfulness that bows and faithfulness that stands, written with one sign in two positions.
Missing
Ashrei runs through the alphabet verse by verse, and skips nun entirely. The Gemara asks why and answers by what the letter would have opened: the word for falling (Berachot 4b). The psalm declines to begin a line with it, and the gap is audible to anyone who counts.
A letter can carry a meaning by not being there.
Suspended
In Shoftim 18:30 a nun sits raised above the line inside a name, written neither in nor out. The scribal tradition preserves the suspension rather than resolving it, so the letter hangs there in every kosher scroll, a decision held permanently open.
Fifty
The number is why the postures matter. The Gemara counts the gates of understanding and stops one short.
חֲמִשִּׁים שַׁעֲרֵי בִינָה נִבְרְאוּ בָּעוֹלָם, וְכֻלָּן נִתְּנוּ לְמֹשֶׁה חָסֵר אֶחָד
Fifty gates of understanding were created in the world, and all were given to Moshe except one. Rosh Hashanah 21b
Forty-nine given to the greatest prophet who ever lived, and the fiftieth withheld. Fifty is the number counted toward and not entered, which is also the structure of the Omer, seven weeks counted to arrive at a day nobody counts.
A letter that bends, stands, hangs and vanishes is the right carrier for a gate that is reached by counting and never opened from this side.
Where it goes
Yehoshua carries it as a patronymic, bin Nun, and he is the one who finishes the crossing Moshe was not permitted to finish. The letter’s position shifts across the volumes of this series rather than staying put, and the third volume is the one that belongs to it.
Volume One is free to read, in English and in Hebrew.
Keep reading
- Tohu not emptiness, a place already settled
- Tzion the place the world came out of
- Yosef the redeemer who inherited on a technicality
The map shows how all of it connects.
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