Final Nun ן

Final Nun (nun sofit) is the word-final form of the simple letter Nun, extending in a long straight descender below the line where the medial nun is short. In standard gematria it equals Nun (50); in the extended mispar gadol reckoning it takes the value 700. As a variant of Nun it inherits that letter's Sefer Yetzirah sign (Scorpio in the classical scheme, and the trump Death in the later Golden Dawn overlay) rather than an independent one. The five final forms are a detail the Sefer Yetzirah itself is silent on: the text as it survives knows twenty-two letters, three mothers, seven doubles and twelve simples, and says nothing about separate word-final shapes, so Final Nun's classification is inherited wholesale from Nun rather than being the text's own assignment. That base text is itself hard to date: Gershom Scholem placed its composition somewhere between the second and sixth century CE, and it survives in three recensions that disagree with each other in detail.

The Hebrew script carrying these letterforms is not the script of the earliest Hebrew inscriptions either; it develops the Aramaic chancery hand of the Achaemenid Persian empire, adopted after the Babylonian exile and standard by the Hasmonean period, displacing the older palaeo-Hebrew script, which survives afterward mainly on coins. The letter names are Northwest Semitic words inherited from that older script; their familiar pictographic glosses are modern reconstructions, and the names travelled into Greek unchanged in sound but empty of meaning.

Final Nun shares in the same Talmudic debate, recorded at Shabbat 104a, over whether the five sofit letters were fixed by the early prophets or only later confirmed by the men of the Great Assembly, a question the text leaves unresolved. Paleographers studying the wider history of the Aramaic-derived square script, the ancestor of the Hebrew alphabet discussed elsewhere in this atlas, have noted a separate, more general pattern behind why final forms exist at all: cursive handwriting tends to simplify and reshape a letter under the pressure of joining it smoothly to the letters before and after it, a pressure that does not apply to a letter sitting alone at the end of a word, so a word-final letter can preserve an older, less simplified shape even while its medial counterpart drifts further from that common ancestor over time.

Final Nun's own shape, a plain, unhooked vertical stroke descending below the line, fits that pattern: it is visually simpler than the medial Nun's small hooked head, and some paleographers read it as sitting closer to the letter's ancient, unadorned form than the busier medial shape most Hebrew readers see far more often. In the extended gematria system known as mispar gadol, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, Final Nun carries the value 700, part of the same extended sequence that gives the other four sofit letters values beyond 400.