Peh is the seventeenth letter and its value is eighty. Its name is also the word peh, the mouth, and that is how Rabbi Akiva reads it. Like mem, nun, tzadi and kaf, it has a final form: bent, kefufah, at the beginning and in the middle of a word, it becomes straight, peshutah, at the end. The Talmud attributes these forms to the Seers, then specifies that they already existed: it had been forgotten which goes in the middle and which at the end, and the Seers restored the rule, "open in the middle of a word, closed at the end."
In Sefer Yetzirah, peh is one of the seven double letters, bet, gimel, dalet, kaf, peh, reish, tav, which are pronounced in two ways, soft and hard: feh and peh. Their foundations are life, peace, wisdom, wealth, grace, seed and dominion, each with its opposite. For peh the book writes: "He made the letter peh king, He bound a crown to it," and formed through it Nogah, Venus, in the world, the fifth day in the year and the right nostril in the soul. The seven doubles are also the seven gates of the face: two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and the mouth. In the classification of sounds, peh belongs to the letters of the lips, bet, vav, mem, peh.
The Talmud reports the reading of the alphabet that children once gave in the study hall, which the Sages came to relate to Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi. For peh they said: "bent peh, straight peh: open mouth, closed mouth." One understands that there is a time to open the mouth and speak, and a time to close it.
The Alphabet of Rabbi Akiva gives two texts. In the account of the letters presenting themselves before the Holy One, blessed be He, before creation, peh pleads: through me they say before You "the precepts of the L-rd are upright, rejoicing the heart," and the beginning of Your name, Podeh, Redeemer, is in me. The answer is no: through you Israel will give itself over to the disorder of idolatry, as it is written that Moses saw that the people were "let loose," parua. In the other version, Rabbi Akiva reads: "do not read pi, but peh," the mouth, and the mouth is Moses, who said "I am heavy of mouth." Moses lists before G-d each limb of the human being, created for His glory, and asks for speech; and the Holy One, blessed be He, answers him: "who gave man a mouth?"
The sources make peh the letter of speech and of its measure. The mouth can speak the upright precepts or open itself to disorder; it can be heavy, like that of Moses, and still receive speech. The bent peh and the straight peh recall that a faithful mouth knows how to open and how to close.
