Final Kaph: The Final Form of Kaph (Value 500)

Final Kaph (kaf sofit) is the word-final form of the letter Kaph. Five Hebrew letters (Kaph, Mem, Nun, Peh and Tzaddi) take a distinct shape when they fall at the end of a word; these are the 'sofit' or final forms. Final Kaph descends below the line where the ordinary Kaph does not. In standard gematria a final letter counts the same as its base letter (Kaph = 20), but in the extended reckoning known as mispar gadol the five finals continue the number series beyond 400, giving Final Kaph the value 500. As a variant of the double letter Kaph it inherits Kaph's Sefer Yetzirah associations (the planet Jupiter in the Golden Dawn overlay) rather than carrying an independent one.

The five final forms are a detail the Sefer Yetzirah itself is silent on: the text as it survives knows twenty-two letters, three mothers, seven doubles and twelve simples, and says nothing about separate word-final shapes, so Final Kaph's classification is inherited wholesale from Kaph rather than being the text's own assignment. That base text is itself hard to date: Gershom Scholem placed its composition somewhere between the second and sixth century CE, and it survives in three recensions that disagree with each other in detail. The Hebrew script carrying these letterforms is not the script of the earliest Hebrew inscriptions either; it develops the Aramaic chancery hand of the Achaemenid Persian empire, adopted after the Babylonian exile and standard by the Hasmonean period, displacing the older palaeo-Hebrew script, which survives afterward mainly on coins. The letter names are Northwest Semitic words inherited from that older script; their familiar pictographic glosses are modern reconstructions, and the names travelled into Greek unchanged in sound but empty of meaning.