The dreidel, in Hebrew called a
sevivon, is a four sided top with a letter on each side. The top is spun in turn by each player of the Hanukkah game, the resulting letter shown by the dreidel deciding how many gold chocolate coins the player wins or loses. A fun gamble, this game is traditionally said to have been developed by Jews as an activity used to conceal the illegal study of the Torah,
being hurried out when officials were approaching while the studies were hidden away, so that all that was seen would be a simple gambling game. This would have been during the time of the Seleucids under Antiochus IV, when study of religious texts was illegal. This tradition is documented in 1890 and later.
According to many scholars,
today's dreidels find their origin in an Irish or English type of top called a teetotum which was introduced into Germany where it was called a trendel, and dates to ancient Greek and Rome. This teetotum became a Christmas tradition and had letters denoting the Latin words for “nothing,” “half,” “everything” and “put in,” the game's options. When Jews adopted the tradition, the Hebrew letters shin (for shtel arayn, which means put in), nun (nisht, meaning nothing), gimmel (gants, meaning everything), and hei (halb, translating to half) were used to symbolize the rules. When the tradition reached places that didn't speak Yiddish, the Hebrew letters were given new meanings: "nes gadol haya sham" (a great miracle happened there), or in Israel, "nes gadol haya po" with the letter shin replaced with a pei.
In gematria, the practice of giving words numerical meaning by adding together the numbers each letter of the alphabet represents and then connecting it with others of the same number, the dreidel letters yield the number 358, which is the same number as the gimatria for the word "Moshiach" (Messiah).
