Vav is one of the plainest Hebrew letters to write, a single vertical stroke, which makes one particular scribal tradition stand out by contrast: in Numbers 25:12, where God grants Pinchas a brit shalom, a covenant of peace, some manuscript lineages and printed Torah texts render the vav in shalom with a visible break partway down its stroke, a form generally called a vav ketuah, a severed vav. The custom is not reproduced in every Torah scroll or codex, and Jewish legal authorities have disagreed over the centuries about whether it is required, a variance the tradition itself openly acknowledges rather than resolving; where it does appear, commentators including the medieval Baal HaTurim have read the break as a sign that peace won through violence, even when granted by God, remains an incomplete or fragile peace.
Vav's ordinary shape, by contrast, is one of the more graphically stable letters in the alphabet across the palaeo-Hebrew-to-square-script transition that Jewish tradition attributes to the return from Babylonian exile, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, since a plain single stroke offers little room for a script reform to alter. The disagreement over the vav ketuah is a useful reminder that not every scribal tradition attached to the Hebrew letters carries equal authority: some, like the seven crowned letters discussed elsewhere in this atlas, are fixed by explicit Talmudic ruling, while others, like this one, remain optional local custom that varies from scroll to scroll and community to community.