Behind the Cover: Designing BEHOLD's Title Page

A few readers have asked about the cover of BEHOLD, so here's the quick version: nothing on it is just decoration. Every element is doing the same job the book itself is doing.

The four letters are the whole thesis

Front and center are the four Hebrew letters of the divine name, Yod, He, Vav, He, but they're not set in a normal Hebrew typeface. They're carved to show the ancient pictograph each letter actually descended from: a reaching hand for the Yod, a man standing with arms raised for the He, a tent peg for the Vav, the hand again for the final He. That's not artistic license. It's the same pictographic reading the book spends its first three chapters building a case for. If you get nothing else from the cover, I wanted that much of the argument visible before anyone opens to page one.

Stone, not paper

The background texture is deliberately carved stone rather than a page or a scroll, and if you look closely, it's covered in more Hebrew text, faint and half-legible, like an inscription that's been there a long time and is only now catching the light. That's the feeling I wanted: not a new idea, but an old one, cut into the text since before anyone was reading it closely enough to notice.

The light

The single beam cutting across the letters from the upper corner was the last piece to fall into place, and it's the one doing the most quiet work. Everything else on that cover has been sitting in the dark for three thousand years. The light is the only thing on the cover that's new.