Taw Sheepmark Means “Sheep”

Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East, by Amanda Podany, is full of illuminating comments on the cultures and technologies of the ancient Near East, mostly Mesopotamia.

The ancient form of the Hebrew letter “taw” is an equal-armed cross in a circle (which is used as an angelic “sheepmark” for faithful human members of God’s flock, in the Book of Ezekiel).

The ancient business representation of a sheep was used on proto-cuneiform tablets for accounting; and before that, in the small clay tokens representing the individual pieces of a delivery which were enclosed in clay “bulla” balls sealed all over with a cylinder seal, and then presented and opened to confirm delivery of everything that had been sent.

And what was the shape of a sheep token?

An equal-armed cross enclosed in a circle.

God’s sheepmark, the Tau cross, was literally present and known in the world from the beginning of human writing… and even before human writing, when it was just an accounting convenience. His Providence was preparing us in the deeps of time.

And the Taw shape probably represents a slain sheep being roasted over a fire on a cross-shaped frame, with each sheep leg bound to an arm of the cross. It is a foreshadowing of Passover, and hence of the Paschal Lamb Who was slain.

“In the beginning was the Word.”

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(Pretty early on, btw, Uruk developed fifteen different pictograms for different kinds of sheep, so it is really interesting that the basic sheep sign survived so long, and was incorporated into the Phoenician and Hebrew and Greek alphabets, and hence into the Latin one as T.)

(Taw could also be a stylized picture of a sheep sprawled out on the ground, or on its butt and being sheared, if you like that idea better. I don’t think anybody could tell you differently, at this point.)