Language Appreciation — Unit 6: Greek Alphabet Part 1 (Alpha through Mu)

In February of 1859, a German biblical scholar named Constantin von Tischendorf was making his third visit to the ancient monastery of Saint Catherine, perched at the foot of Mount Sinai in the Egyptian desert. He was forty-four years old, fluent in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and a half-dozen other languages, and famous in European scholarly circles for hunting down ancient New Testament manuscripts in the libraries of remote monasteries. Fifteen years earlier, on his first visit to Saint Catherine's, he had found something startling. In a wicker basket of old parchments destined to be burned for fuel, he had discovered forty-three leaves of a Greek Bible older than anything he had ever seen. The monks had let him take those forty-three pages. He had published them. But he was convinced more existed somewhere in the monastery, and twice he had returned and found nothing.

On the last evening of his third visit — February 4, 1859, his bags packed, his caravan ready to leave the next morning — the steward of the monastery casually mentioned to him over an evening cup of coffee that he too had a Greek manuscript in his cell. He fetched it. It was wrapped in a red cloth. Tischendorf unfolded the cloth and saw three hundred and forty-six parchment leaves, written in beautiful Greek uncial script. He held in his hands most of the Greek Old Testament, the entire Greek New Testament, and two early Christian writings besides — a single manuscript from about AD 350, one of the two oldest complete copies of the Bible on earth.

Tischendorf later wrote that he did not sleep that night. "It seemed sacrilege even to sleep." He sat up reading by candlelight, copying out passages, looking for differences from later manuscripts, finding almost none. He had in his hands the New Testament as the early church read it — the very Greek words written down only three hundred years after the apostles. Eventually he persuaded the monks to lend the manuscript to the Tsar of Russia for safe transport and publication. The manuscript became known as Codex Sinaiticus — the Sinai Book. In 1933 the Soviet government sold it to the British Museum for one hundred thousand pounds, an astronomical sum. Today it sits in the British Library in London, the most-studied biblical manuscript in the world.

"It seemed sacrilege even to sleep." — Constantin Tischendorf at Saint Catherine's, February 4, 1859

Why does this open Unit 6? For the same reason Unit 3 opened with a Bedouin boy discovering Hebrew scrolls in a cave. The Dead Sea Scrolls proved that the Hebrew Old Testament had been preserved across one thousand years almost unchanged. The Codex Sinaiticus proves the same thing for the Greek New Testament. When scholars compared the fourth-century text of Codex Sinaiticus to the medieval Greek manuscripts our printed Bibles are based on, they were almost identical. Twelve hundred years between them, and the Greek words still match. The Greek letters you are about to learn — the same letters Tischendorf saw glowing under his candle that night at Sinai — have been faithfully preserved for nearly two thousand years.

Where we are

You finished Unit 5 with thirteen Hebrew words and a working acquaintance with the Old Testament. You cross the bridge now. Unit 6 teaches the first twelve letters of the Greek alphabet: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta, Iota, Kappa, Lambda, Mu. Unit 7 teaches the last twelve and reads John 1:1. Units 8 and 9 give you the great Greek word treasures of the New Testament. Unit 10 teaches you how to use Strong's numbers in all three ways — paper, phone, full internet — and Unit 11 is your first real word study. From here it is downhill in the best possible sense: the climbing is done, and you start to see what the climbing was for.

Before we look at letters, let us look at the language. You learned in Unit 1 that God prepared Greek for the gospel. Around 330 BC, Alexander the Great conquered most of the known world from Greece to India, and wherever his armies went, his common Greek — Koiné — became the language of trade, government, and conversation. By the time Jesus was born three hundred years later, every literate person from Rome to Babylon could read or speak some Greek. The Roman Empire that conquered the Greeks could not displace the Greek language; instead it became Greek-speaking itself. A fisherman in Galilee, a soldier in Capernaum, a Pharisee in Jerusalem, and a Stoic philosopher in Athens could all hold the same letter and read it. God built His superhighway before He drove His gospel down it.

This had four happy consequences. First, the apostles wrote the New Testament in Koiné Greek, not in their native Aramaic. They wanted the world to read it, and Greek was the world's language. Second, the Old Testament had already been translated into Greek about two hundred and fifty years before Jesus — the famous Septuagint (often abbreviated LXX, the Roman numeral for 70, because tradition says seventy or seventy-two scholars translated it in Alexandria). When the apostles quoted the Old Testament, they usually quoted the Septuagint, which means the Hebrew Old Testament reached the Gentile world through Greek. Third, Greek became the universal Christian language for the first five hundred years of the church. Fourth, when scholars want to recover the most accurate possible text of the New Testament, they go to Greek manuscripts like Codex Sinaiticus. No translation is allowed to substitute.

Greek versus Hebrew: a side-by-side

Feature	Hebrew	Greek
Letters	22 consonants (vowels added as marks)	24 letters (vowels built in)
Direction	Right to left	Left to right, like English and Spanish
Word structure	Three-letter consonant roots	Stems with prefixes and endings
Familiarity	Looks alien at first sight	Many letters already look like English (A, B, E, Z, I, K, M, N, O, T, X, Y)
Mathematical use	Each letter has a number value	Greek letters used in math/science (alpha, beta, gamma, pi, sigma, omega)
Reading difficulty	Hardest part: unfamiliar shapes	Hardest part: looks like English but isn't (ρ is r, not p; ν is n, not v)

The single most important fact about Greek for a Western reader: the Greek alphabet is the parent of the Latin alphabet, and the Latin alphabet is the parent of English and Spanish. Many Greek letters are direct ancestors of letters you already write every day. Alpha became A. Beta became B. Gamma became C and G. Iota became I and J. Kappa became K. Lambda became L. Mu became M. You are not learning a foreign alphabet from scratch; you are meeting the grandparents of your own.

Read each name aloud. Notice the capital and lowercase forms. Look at the English heir. Then write each lowercase letter three times in your notebook. The hand teaches the eye.

Capital	Lowercase	Name	Sound	English heir
Α	α	Alpha	"a" as in "father"	A
Β	β	Beta	"b" (in modern Greek, "v")	B
Γ	γ	Gamma	"g" as in "go"	C, G
Δ	δ	Delta	"d"	D
Ε	ε	Epsilon	short "e" as in "bet"	E

Notes on these five letters

Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. Like the Hebrew Aleph from which it descends, it represents an "ah" vowel. The English word "alphabet" itself comes from alpha + beta, the first two letters of this script. Mathematics uses alpha for "angle." The Greek capital Alpha looks identical to English A; the lowercase looks like a curled stomach.

Beta is the second letter and the source of our B. Curious fact: in ancient Greek (the Greek of the New Testament) beta is pronounced "b" as in English; in modern Greek (the Greek spoken in Athens today) the same letter is pronounced "v." We will follow the ancient pronunciation in this course. Capital Beta looks like English B; lowercase looks like a B drawn quickly, leaning over.

Gamma is the third letter and the source of both English C and English G. The Greek word for "earth" is gê (γῆ) — from which English gets "geography" (writing about the earth) and "geology" (study of the earth) and so on. Capital Gamma looks like an upside-down L. Lowercase gamma looks like a "y" with a hook.

Delta is the fourth letter and the source of our D. The capital Delta looks like a triangle — from which mathematicians get the symbol for "change" or "difference." Geographers got the word "river delta" from the same triangular shape (the mouth of the Nile resembled this letter). Lowercase delta looks like a stylized "d."

Epsilon is the fifth letter, a short "e" sound. The name literally means "simple e" (e psilon) — to distinguish it from the long "e" of Eta which we will meet in a moment. Capital Epsilon looks like an English E; lowercase looks like a backwards 3 or like our own "e" mirrored.

Capital	Lowercase	Name	Sound	English heir
Ζ	ζ	Zeta	"z" (or "dz")	Z
Η	η	Eta	long "e" as in "they"	H (visually only)
Θ	θ	Theta	"th" as in "thin" (voiceless)	(no direct heir)
Ι	ι	Iota	"i" as in "machine"	I, J

Notes on these four letters

Zeta is the sixth letter and the source of our Z. Capital Zeta looks like English Z; lowercase looks like a wiggly Z with a flourish.

Eta is the seventh letter. Important: the capital Eta looks like English H, but it makes a long "e" sound, not an "h" sound. This is one of the most common pitfalls for new readers of Greek. When you see Η or η in Greek, do not say "h"; say a long "ay" or "ee" sound. The Greek word for "the" (feminine, singular) is hê (ἡ), and the Greek word for "or" is ê (ἤ). Both are spelled with Eta but pronounced like a long "e." Lowercase eta looks like a lowercase English n with the right leg extended below the line.

Theta is the eighth letter, and one of the most important in Christian theology. It is the first letter of theos (θεός), the Greek word for "God." Sometimes you will see early Christian inscriptions in which a single letter Θ stands for the entire word "God" — the way we might write "G" as a stand-in. Capital Theta looks like an O with a horizontal bar inside; lowercase looks like a tall thin oval bisected by a line. The sound is the soft English "th" of "thin" or "think," not the harder "th" of "this."

Iota is the ninth letter and the smallest. You met it already in Unit 2 — this is the Greek descendant of the Hebrew Yod, and it is the very letter Jesus referred to in Matthew 5:18 when He said "not one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law." Greek iota = Hebrew Yod = the smallest letter. From iota descend both English I and English J. It is also the root of the English idiom "not one iota" meaning "not the smallest bit."

Capital	Lowercase	Name	Sound	English heir
Κ	κ	Kappa	"k"	K, C (hard)
Λ	λ	Lambda	"l"	L
Μ	μ	Mu	"m"	M

Notes on these three letters

Kappa is the tenth letter, the Greek source of our K. It is a clean, hard "k" sound. Capital Kappa looks identical to English K; lowercase looks like a smaller version of the capital. Many Greek words that came into English with a hard "c" sound (cardiac, cosmic, character) originally began with Kappa.

Lambda is the eleventh letter, the source of our L. Capital Lambda looks like an upside-down V or a peaked roof; lowercase lambda looks like an "l" with a forked top. The Greek word logos (λόγος), "word," begins with Lambda — the same word that opens the Gospel of John ("In the beginning was the Word"). We will study logos in detail in Unit 8.

Mu is the twelfth letter, the source of our M. Capital Mu looks identical to English M; lowercase looks almost like an English "u" with a tail that hangs below the line. Mu opens many important Greek words: mathetes (μαθητής, disciple), megas (μέγας, great), Messias (Μεσσίας, Messiah, transliterated from Hebrew). Scientists know lowercase mu as the symbol for "micro-" (one millionth).

Twelve down, twelve to go

You have just learned half the Greek alphabet. The capital letters you already know look like A, B, Γ (new), Δ (new), E, Z, H, Θ (new), I, K, Λ (new), M. Of those twelve, eight already look identical to English/Spanish letters and only four (Gamma, Delta, Theta, Lambda) have visibly different shapes. Greek is gentler on Western eyes than Hebrew. The hard part with Greek is not the strangeness of the shapes; the hard part is remembering that some shapes that look like English letters actually mean something different (Eta is not H, Rho will not be P, Nu will not be V). You have already cleared the first of those traps tonight.

You now know enough Greek to read several real New Testament words. Greek reads left to right, like English and Spanish. Read each word out loud. Strong's number is given for each so you can look it up tonight.

Kai is the most common word in the entire Greek New Testament. It appears about nine thousand times. It is the workhorse conjunction — "and" — that strings the Gospel narratives together like beads on a string. Open any chapter of Mark or any chapter of John and you will see kai begin almost every other sentence. The three letters are Kappa-Alpha-Iota: k-a-i. The little mark over the iota is a Greek accent — do not let it distract you. The word is just kai, and it means "and."

Thelêma is the Greek word for "will" or "desire" — what a person wants. The six letters are Theta-Epsilon-Lambda-Eta-Mu-Alpha: th-e-l-ê-m-a. Notice the Theta at the start (the soft "th" of "thin"), and the Eta as the fourth letter (long "e"). This is the word Jesus used in the Lord's Prayer: "Genêthêtô to thelêma sou" — "Thy will be done" (Matthew 6:10). It is the word in Romans 12:2 when Paul calls believers to discern "the good and acceptable and perfect will of God." The next time you pray "Thy will be done," you will be praying with thelêma in your ear.

The Greek transliteration of the Hebrew place-name Bet-lechem ("house of bread"). The seven letters spread across most of our new alphabet: Beta-Eta-Theta-Lambda-Epsilon-Epsilon-Mu. Read them in order, left to right: B-ê-th-l-e-e-m. The word appears in Matthew 2:1 (the Magi seeking the child born "in Bêthleem of Judea") and again in Luke 2:4 (Joseph going up to "the city of David which is called Bêthleem"). Strong's number G965 in any Greek concordance.

In just twelve Greek letters, you have read the word Jesus prayed in Gethsemane, the conjunction that strings the Gospels together, and the town where He was born.

One more, just because

The Greek name for the region where Jesus grew up and ministered. Eight letters: Gamma-Alpha-Lambda-Iota-Lambda-Alpha-Iota-Alpha. Read them out: G-a-l-i-l-a-i-a. The accent mark above the second iota is a stress mark — the word is pronounced "Ga-li-LAI-a." Matthew 4:23: "Kai periêgen ho Iêsous holen tên Galilaian" — "And Jesus went throughout all Galilee." Two units ago you could not have read this. Now you can.

Open your Bible to Revelation 22:13. Christ is speaking: "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last." You have read these words your whole Christian life. Until tonight you knew them as a metaphor: Christ as first and last. Now you can read them as a Greek alphabet lesson coming directly from the lips of the risen Lord. Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet — the letter you learned ten minutes ago. Omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet — the letter you will learn in Unit 7. Christ is claiming the Greek alphabet itself as His title. He is everything from A to Z. He is what the alphabet begins with and what the alphabet ends with. The whole language — and by extension the whole written New Testament — is His.

Stop and notice something further. In Unit 3 we saw that the little Hebrew word et in Genesis 1:1 is spelled Aleph-Tav — the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the Hebrew Alpha and Omega built into the very first sentence of the Bible. Hebrew Aleph-Tav, Greek Alpha-Omega. The same idea, in both languages, framing both Testaments. Christ in the Hebrew. Christ in the Greek. The first sentence of Genesis quietly contains the title that the last book of the Bible will speak openly.

"I am the Alpha and the Omega — the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, the title Christ chose for Himself."

You have now learned the first letter of His title. By the end of Unit 7 you will know the last. By the end of Unit 8 you will know the Word He was called when He took on flesh: Logos. The road ahead is bright.

Notebook Activity (paper and pen)

Open your notebook to a fresh page. Title it "Unit 6 — The First Half of the Greek Alphabet." Make a table with five columns: Capital, Lowercase, Name, Sound, English/Spanish heir. Fill in all twelve letters in order: Alpha through Mu. Below the table, write three lines: (1) "I am the Alpha and the Omega" — Revelation 22:13. (2) Thelêma = the will of God. (3) Kai = "and." Below the lines, write each of the twelve Greek lowercase letters five more times slowly. Greek is friendlier to your hand than Hebrew was: it sits flat on the line, it goes left to right, and many letters are direct ancestors of letters you have been writing since childhood. Welcome to the second alphabet of the Bible.