X marks the spot

Brett said he’d write about the Hebrew letter tav if he was writing today’s blog. And I told him he could. And he emphatically said, “NO.” So there you have it. (He says it was more deep than emphatic.) Except then he changed his mind. You’ll get what I had thought of later.

Guest poster Brett here.  This blog title caught my attention for several reasons, and I insisted that Lisa let me contribute.  I have been learning Hebrew and Greek this year, and the three words “X,” “mark,” and “spot” all struck three related notes with me.  We’ll say it struck a chord.  The letter X is descended from the Greek letter chi, which in turn comes from the Phoenician/Hebrew letter tav.  In Ezekiel 9:4, 6, the Lord is speaking to his messenger: “And the Lord said unto him, Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark.”  The “mark” that saved the righteous was the tav, or the X.  The shape was (and still is, in the Roman alphabet) indicative of a cross.  It seems to be one way in which it was made known to the ancient Israelites that the cross, or the events that would some day happen in relation to Jesus Christ at the cross, would save them from destruction.  Jacob in the Book of Mormon had an understanding of this.  He admonished us in Jacob 1:8 “Wherefore, we would to God that we could persuade all men not to rebel against God, to provoke him to anger, but that all men would believe in Christ, and view his death, and suffer his cross and bear the shame of the world.”  Later in the same book, in Jacob 4:14 he appears to refer back to this passage when he is talking about the wickedness of the Jews and says that their “blindness came by looking beyond the mark,” or the cross, the X, the tav.  It was by failing to keep the mark of the cross in front of their eyes as the focus of their attention, by failing to “view his death,” that they stumbled and fell away.

The Greek word for “mark” as mentioned in Philippians 3:14 is skopos (related to the English word “scope”). It means “a distant object on which the eye is kept fixed.”  I think it is likely that Paul had the mark of the cross in mind when he wrote that verse.  Interestingly, one of the meanings for “spot'” is to see, to look at, to scope out.  When the Jews looked beyond the mark, they stumbled.  As long as we keep our eyes fixed on the mark, we will be led in an undeviating course back to the Savior.  And what is the mark that we are to spot?  Clearly, “x marks the spot.”