Aramaic Letters: Beet

The second letter of the Aramaic Alphabet is called Beet, pronounced beat, to rhyme with words like meet, seat or feet. It corresponds to the Hebrew letter Bet in the Hebrew Alphabet. The letters in the Aramaic Alphabet are almost identical to those in Hebrew, but have slightly different names and sometimes slightly different sounds.

  Aramaic audio: Listen to the sound of Beet.

Here is what the Aramaic letter Beet looks like:

Here is how to write Beet with an ordinary pen:



Beet is one of the Aramaic letters that take a dot, called a Dagesh, which changes its pronunciation. With the dot, Beet is pronounced b as in words like Benjamin, Baal or Bathsheba. Without the dot, it is pronounced v as in the words valley or vineyard.

Here are the two versions of Beet:

  with the dot, pronounced b

  without the dot, pronounced v

Since Beet is the second letter of the Aramaic Alphabet, it has the Gematria (numerical value) of 2.

Incidentally, the English word Alphabet comes from the names of the two letters that we have just met - Alap and Beet. Can you hear how similar they sound - Alap/Beet, Alphabet? This is just one example to show that, thousands of years later, Hebrew and Aramaic have influenced the world’s languages so much that English has adopted the original names of the Hebrew and Aramaic letters! In fact, the names of the first few letters of the Greek alphabet (Alpha, Beeta, Gamma, Delta) come from the names of the first few letters in the Hebrew and Aramaic alphabets, Alef, Bet, Gimel, Dalet!

As you are introduced to the other Aramaic letters, you will see that there is a great deal of similarity between the order of the letters in the Aramaic Alphabet, and the order of the letters in the English alphabet. This is no coincidence!

Practise writing Beet in the grid lines below:










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