Into the desert

The root Hebrew letters dalet bet resh rcs form a consummate alephtavian sign, a not-yet-word waiting to be interpreted. With one set of vowels, they signify dahber (to speak).

Since the bet c can be soft (this is taught to school children as a different letter, the vet) in the middle of a word, it can be pronounced as dever (thing).

With a change in vowels, it produces devar (word). So the same not-yet-word in Hebrew means both "word" and "thing," leading us to wonder what sort of thing this Hebrew "word" is - and we always use these scare quotes to warn the unsuspecting English/Greek reader against assuming s/he is wandering in a field of the same sort of literacy with which s/he is familiar.

Another change in vowels in this plague-like game generates, magically, the transformation of word to dever (plague), intrinsically capturing, and asking us to re-enact by our interpretation, the drama of Moses in the court of Pharaoh, waving Aaron's pen to write the letters that produce the plagues.

Finally, wander a bit and you find yourself in the desert, specifically the wilderness that the Children of Israel wander for forty years after the exodus from Egypt: add a mem to get medahber - the prefix mem n means "from" so the four consonants can produce "from the word" or "from the thing" or "from the plague" or "wilderness-wandering."

The Ten Commandments in the Torah are called the ten devarim. The rabbis suggest that they are not words or things but parallel to the plagues, corrections if you will or, better, whole categories of moral ways of being, anti-plagues.

In all its potential manifestations, the dalet-bet-resh, in alephtavian fashion, contains the drama of the Exodus story: the transformation of words to things to plagues and then redemptive categories of moral order, made possible by the invention of the phonetic representation of speech in compact alphabetic form. The delivery of the first letterature, the Torah, is inscribed in this fantastic new communications technology, and the wandering in the wilderness, or not so much wilderness but wildness of interpretation opened up by the alephtav, a territory in exile from the monumental architecture and hierarchies of the Egyptian hieroglyph and pictographic writing and idolatry.