the blood on the lintel and doorposts of a Hebrew home in Egypt. In Ezekiel's vision, the Lord has his angels separate the demographic wheat from the chaff by going through Jerusalem, the capital city of ancient Israel, and inscribing a mark, a tav, "upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof." In Ezekiel's vision, then, the Lord is counting tav-marked Israelites as worthwhile to spare, but counts the people worthy of annihilation who lack the tav and the critical attitude it signifies. In other words, looking askance at a culture marked by dire moral decline is a kind of shibboleth for loyalty and zeal for God. Sayings with taf "From aleph to taf" describes something from beginning to end, the Hebrew equivalent of the English "From A to Z." Syriac taw In the Syriac alphabet, as in the Hebrew and Phoenician alphabets, taw () or tăw ( or ) is the final letter in the alphabet, most commonly representing the voiceless dental stop and fricative consonant pair, differentiated phonemically by hard and soft markings. When left as unmarked or marked with a qūššāyā dot above the letter indicating 'hard' pronunciation, it is realized as a plosive . When the phoneme is marked with a rūkkāḵā dot below the letter indicating 'soft' pronunciation, the phone is spirantized to a fricative . Hard taw (taw qšīṯā) is Romanized as a plain t, while the soft form of the letter (taw rakkīḵtā) is transliterated as or . Character encodings See also Tav (number) Footnotes External links Phoenician alphabet Arabic letters Hebrew letters Cross symbols