Jot and Tittle
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This odd expression of Jesus has received much attention but could use a bit more.

Matthew 5:18, "For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." (King James Version, 1611)

The word translated into English by the King James Version as "jot" is "iota" in Greek which is simply the "smallest" letter in the Greek alphabet which is the letter we call "i".

OK, so what's a tittle?

The Greek word, keraiða means "little horn" (from "karas"=horn) and is extremely rare. It is used only twice in the New Testament--in Matthew and Luke, which are parallel quotes of the same speech of Jesus. That may mean that it comes from something the scholars call the "Q" source. The Q source may have been a written or oral document which was shared by both Matthew and Luke and about which scholars know very little. We can only guess its content by looking at the material that Matthew and Luke have in common but is not in the Gospel of Mark. No form of the Q document survives.

The expression Jesus uses "Jot and Tittle," seems to be a Hebrew phrase moved into Greek to mean the diacritical marks in Hebrew. The "tittle" above the iota in Greek looks for all the world like a "little horn" rather than a "dot" as in our alphabet.

So, the phrase might be marvelously circular. As in "I wouldn't change even an iota of the law. In fact, I wouldn't even change the mark above the iota."

But, since Greek was not Jesus' first language (the Gospels make clear that he spoke a dialect of Hebrew called "Aramaic), what expression might he have used that was later recorded by the Greek speaking disciples like Matthew and Luke?

It seems that there was this commandment in Deuteronomy 17:17 that prohibited the taking of many wives. King Solomon (the Third King of Israel and David's son, however, took many, many wives. There is a marvelous story in the Talmud that says that Solomon was accused by a prophet of trying to remove the "yod" (smallest of the Hebrew letters, similar to our letter "y") from the Hebrew word "many" (yerabah) thereby reversing the meaning of the commandment against taking many wives.

The Talmudic saying, written about the time of Jesus, is, "Solomon and a thousand like him shall perish, but not one letter [not even one as small as yod] of the Torah shall be destroyed." (Lev. R. xix)

Did Jesus have this saying in mind? We don't know. But it's an interesting possibility, isn't it?