and limited to certain forms. The sound of yodh is made with the mouth held
tight and the tongue pushed up. With the waw the interior of the mouth is
more open, but the lips are compressed into a small circle.
But the He is the sound of the vocal apparatus wide open; it is just the
breath itself without limits. So the nature of the sound, and the way that it is
produced, reflect the correspondence and meaning of He: “infinity.”
Although the sound is not quite identical to the Hebrew, the name of one
of the gods of ancient Egypt is quite similar: Heh. The hieroglyphic depiction
of this god is a figure with upraised arms: This can stand for the number one
million, and the god represents infinity and eternity.
Furthermore, although the Heavenly Doctrine never really addresses
the origin of the forms of the Hebrew letters, a popular theory is that
they take their shapes from certain Egyptian hieroglyphs. According to
those who have studied this, an early form of the Hebrew letter he is
thought to have resembled the Egyptian symbol for someone calling out.
These, obviously, also resemble the hieroglyph for the god Heh.
or
When the Greeks borrowed the shape of the letter for their alphabet,
they didn’t need it for “H” so they used it for a vowel (as the Hebrew had
no letters for those). So the Hebrew He became the Greek epsilon and
the Latin (and thus English) “E.” Somewhere along the line the letters were
rotated 90 degrees, and if the E is rotated back, Ш, the resemblance to the
hieroglyph is even more obvious.
Since the Egyptian hieroglyphics were “nothing else than correspondences”
(True Christian Religion 201), and “images of natural things that represented
spiritual things” (Arcana Coelestia 7926), it would stand to reason that these
connections and similarities would reflect the ancient knowledge of the science
of correspondences.
The open, free, unqualified breath that creates the “H” sound expressed
the infinity of the Lord. It occurs twice in the most ancient Divine name, and is
the only sound in the name which is wholly Divine. In addition to being added
to the names of Abram and Sarai, the He is also used as a special pronominal
suffix referring to the Lord.
In Psalm 132:6, most translations read something like this: “Lo, we heard of
it as being in Ephrata; we found it in the field of the wood.” But in the Heavenly
Doctrine this passage reads: “Lo we heard of Him in Ephrata, we found Him
in the fields of the forest.” The difference arises from the assumption on the
part of the translators that the suffixes on the verbs refer to the ark of the
covenant, whereas the Arcana explains, “In the original language the pronoun
‘Him’ in ‘we have heard of Him’ and in ‘we have found Him’ is expressed by a
letter added to the end of the verb – namely, the letter H, taken from the name
Jehovah.” (Arcana Coelestia 4594:3)
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