30 The Fundamentals Here is testimony confirmed by an oath, for “verily” on the lips of the Son of Man carries such force. He affirms the indestructibility of the law, not its substance merely but its form, not the thought but the word. “One jot or tittle shall in no wise pass from the law.” The “jot” means the yod, the smallest letter in the Hebrew alpha bet, while the “tittle” means the horn, a short projection in certain letters extending the base line beyond the upright one which rests upon it. A reader unaccustomed to the Hebrew needs a strong eye to see the tittle, but Christ guarantees that as a part of the sacred text neither the tittle nor the yod shall perish. The elder Lightfoot, the Hebraist and rabbinical scholar of the Westminster Assembly time, has called attention to an interesting story of a certain letter yod found in the text of Deut. 32:18. I t is in the word teshi, to forsake, translated in the King James as “unmindful.” Originally it seems to have been written smaller even than usual, i. e., undersized, and yet notwithstanding the almost infinite number of times in which copies have been made, that little yod stands there today just as it ever did. Lightfoot spoke of it in the middle of the seventeenth century, and although two more centuries and a half have passed since then with all their additional copies of the book, yet it still retains its place in the sacred text. Its diminutive size is referred to in the margin, “but no hand has dared to add a hair’s breadth to its length,” so that we can still employ his words, and say that it is likely to remain there forever. The same scholar speaks of the effect a slight change in the form of a Hebrew letter might produce in the substance of the thought for which it stands. He takes as an example two words, “Chalal” and “Halal,” which differ from each other simply in their first radicals. The “Ch” in Hebrew is expressed by one letter the same as “H,” the only distinction being a slight break or opening in the left limb of the latter. It
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