A Door and a Nail

Smaller than words, with their meanings, their forms and what those forms say about time and about who acts, are the letters themselves. Two Hebrew letters carry a picture, and that picture stands inside two names: Judah, the tribe of the scepter, and David, the king who came from it.

The picture is not a hidden code, and nothing in this book rests on it as proof. The scepter, the price, the name and the waw stand on the words of Scripture. But the picture fits what those words say.

Letters That Began as Pictures

Hebrew letters came out of pictures. In the letter shapes older than the square script used in Hebrew Bibles today, each letter copied the shape of a thing, and the name of the letter is the name of that thing. Two of them matter here.

The older shape of dalet copied the door of a tent. The older shape of waw copied the peg that fastens a tent to the ground. The names of the letters say the same: dalet is close to delet, the ordinary Hebrew word for a door, and waw is itself a Hebrew word, used for the hooks on which the hangings of the tabernacle were fastened.

Exodus 26:32 And you shall put it upon four pillars of acacia overlaid with gold, their hooks of gold, upon four sockets of silver.

The word for “hooks” in that verse is waw, the name of the letter. So the text itself shows that the letter’s name was a word for a fastening, a hook or peg that holds something in place. The same word comes back in the chapters that describe the court of the tabernacle, where the hangings were held on hooks of silver.

Judah: a Door in the Name of the LORD

Written from the right, as Hebrew is, the consonants of the two names stand like this.

The two differ by one letter. The name Judah is the four letters of the name the LORD with a dalet set inside them, before the last heh. As a picture, it is a door set inside the name of the LORD. Written in this bare five-letter form, without prefixed letters, the name Judah stands 682 times in the Hebrew text; with prefixed letters (and, in, to, from) it stands 819 times in all.

Leah gave Judah his name because she said, “This time I will praise the LORD” (Genesis 29:35). That is what the name means as a word. The letters add a picture of their own. And Judah is the tribe that holds the scepter in Jacob’s blessing, “The scepter shall not depart from Judah” (Genesis 49:10), and the tribe whose lion the elder announced in heaven.

Revelation 5:5 And one of the elders says to me, "Do not weep; behold, the lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has overcome — the One who opens the biblion βιβλίον bib-lee'-on(scroll) and its seven seals."

David: a Nail Between Two Doors

The name David (דָּוִד) has three consonants. Reading from the right, they are dalet, waw, dalet: door, nail, door. In this short form the name is a nail between two doors. Written in this bare three-letter form, the name stands 596 times across the Hebrew Bible, and written with one more letter, a yod, as דָּוִיד, it stands 251 times; with prefixed letters the two forms stand 1,075 times in all. Samuel and Kings use the short form; Chronicles and the later books mostly use the long one.

David’s life did not run smoothly. Scripture records his years of flight from Saul, his wars, and the trouble that came upon his own house, up to the end of his days. And when the New Testament begins, it names the One it is about as David’s son.

Matthew 1:1 The biblos βίβλος bib'-los(book) of the genesis γένεσις ghen'-es-is(origin, genealogy) of Yeshua Messiah, son of David, son of Abraham.

Matthew opens his whole account with that title. The One who would take up David’s throne is introduced first as his son.

The Imprint of the Nails

The New Testament leaves one mark on that Son that the disciples could see and touch. When the risen Lord appeared to the disciples and Thomas was not with them, they told him, and he answered with the condition on which he would believe.

John 20:25 So the other disciples were saying to him, "We have seen the Lord!" But he said to them, "Unless I see in His hands the imprint of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe."

The disciples had seen Him; Thomas asked for the marks. The mark by which the risen One was to be known was the imprint of the nails in His hands.

John wrote in Greek, and the word he uses for nails is a Greek word, not the Hebrew waw. The picture does not belong to John’s word. It belongs to the letters of the name David, which the Hebrew text wrote centuries before. What the letters show and what John records simply stand side by side: the name of the king is drawn as a nail between two doors, and the Son of David bore the imprint of the nails.

What the Picture Shows

The incarnation is His entering into the household of mankind, taking part in flesh and blood so that He might be our near kinsman. That entering had a door. Within the name of the LORD a door is set, and that name is Judah. From the tribe of Judah came the One who is called the son of David. And the name David is itself the shape of a nail driven between two doors. The King of kings came in through that door, and He was nailed.

That is the picture. It does not prove the gospel, and the gospel does not depend on it. The gospel stands on what the words of Scripture say: that He shared in flesh and blood, that He purchased a people by His blood, that His name says He saves. But when the reader of Hebrew looks at the letters of Judah and David, the picture is there to be seen, and it agrees with what the words have already said.

The picture also reminds us of what Revelation 5 showed. The lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, is the Lamb who was slaughtered. The line of rule and the line of the goel meet in one Person. Rule belongs to Him because He is of Judah and of David. Redemption belongs to Him because He paid the price. That leaves the question of what happens once the price is paid, and who rules over what has been bought back.