Yod (יוֹד) is the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the smallest of them all, a single suspended stroke that the other letters are built from. Its size is the point. When Yeshua said in Matthew 5:18, "until heaven and earth pass away, not one yod and not one stroke of a letter will pass from the Torah until all is accomplished," the King James rendered yod as "jot," the least mark on the page. He did not anchor the Torah's permanence to its weighty commands or its famous chapters. He anchored it to its smallest letter.

That is a deliberate teaching. The measure of how seriously the text is to be guarded is not the headline but the yod. If the smallest letter cannot fall away, then the command Scripture gives about itself, "you shall add nothing to it and take nothing from it" (Deuteronomy 4:2; 12:32), is not a mood or a posture. It is exact down to the least stroke. Add nothing means not even a yod. Take nothing away means not even a yod.

The "tittle" beside it (Greek keraia) is the small projecting stroke, the crownlet or serif that separates one letter from another, the difference for instance between a bet and a kaf. Together, yod and tittle name the finest details of the written text and declare them untouchable. For a people who answer to the text and to no structure standing over it, the yod is a quiet manifesto: the institution may not edit what the smallest letter will not surrender.