About the Mystery of the Letters divine creation in the biblical Creation according to Genesis, and of 22 corresponding works of salvation by Christ, elaborating this theory through descriptions of the various letters and interpretations of their shapes. This is followed by an account of the history of the alphabet, which weaves together elements of Greek mythology and the Hebrew Bible as well as several Jewish and pagan texts: according to this account, the Hebrew alphabet was first handed down to mankind by divine inspiration during the generation of Enoch, but was lost during the Confusion of Tongues. God subsequently revealed the Greek alphabet on a
Hebrew alphabet always represented by pe in its regular, not final, form "פ", even when in final word position, which occurs with loanwords (e.g. שׁוֹפּ ""shop""), foreign names (e.g. פִילִיפּ ""Philip"") and some slang (e.g. חָרַפּ ""slept deeply""). The letters of the Hebrew alphabet have played varied roles in Jewish religious literature over the centuries, primarily in mystical texts. Some sources in classical rabbinical literature seem to acknowledge the historical provenance of the currently used Hebrew alphabet and deal with them as a mundane subject (the Jerusalem Talmud, for example, records that "the Israelites took for themselves square calligraphy", and that the