Hebrew Letters: Shin

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The next Hebrew letter, the second last one in the Hebrew Alphabet, has two different forms called Sin and Shin. These are pronounced seen and sheen, respectively.

  Hebrew audio: Listen to the sound of Shin.

Here is what these Hebrew letters look like:  

 
The Hebrew letter Sin is the one with the dot at the left of the letter. It is pronounced with a s sound, like the words Sarah, slave or saviour. You will remember that Samech is also pronounced as s. At one time, they would have sounded different (Arabic still differentiates between them), but now they have become the same sound.

The other form of the letter, Shin, has the dot on the right. This form of the Hebrew letter is pronounced sh, like the words shalom, shake or sheep.

Here are the two versions of Shin:

  with the dot on the left, pronounced s

  with the dot on the right, pronounced sh

Here is how to write these Hebrew letters:



Sin and Shin both have the Gematria (numerical value) of 300.
 
The sounds of Sin and Shin, s and sh, are known as sibilants. In many languages, especially Semitic languages such as Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, these sounds become interchanged over time as they are passed between the languages and spoken by many different peoples of different ethnic backgrounds.

This process is illustrated very clearly by comparing words which have passed from one language to another. In English, for example, we are all familiar with Biblical names starting with s, such as Solomon, Saul, and Samuel. But in Hebrew, these names all start with sh, not s, because the sounds of s and sh are so similar that they have become blurred over the centuries. (These names in Hebrew are Shlomo, Shaul, and Shmuel!)

Arabic and Hebrew have many similar examples. For instance, honey in Hebrew is davash () but in Arabic it is debes, where the final s and sh have been interchanged. This example also illustrates that b and v have become interchanged in this particular word, and as you already know from the letter Bet, Bet has two forms (pronounced b or v), depending on whether there is a dot inside the Hebrew letter.
 
These examples clearly illustrate how the sounds of individual letters become confused when a word gets transferred from one language to another. This is just one small example of how God confused (mixed up) the languages of men at the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11!

If we go back to Biblical times, we find something even more interesting - around the time of the Judges of Israel, some groups of people had great difficulty even pronouncing s and sh correctly! Just as English speakers today often have problems pronouncing some of the Hebrew letters, it seems that people in past centuries also had this problem!

The following verse from the Tanakh illustrates this:

Judges 12:5-6; “...and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.” (KJV)

Here was a simple test - the Ephraimites had to pronounce  (Shibboleth, meaning ears of corn) correctly. In this case, failure led to the death of the unfortunate Ephraimite!

Shin is one of the four Hebrew letters on the Dreidel, which is a spinning top used for playing games during the festival of Hannukah.

Practise writing Shin in the grid lines below:










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