Scribal Secrets

Extraordinary Texts in the Torah and Their Implications

James S. Diamond, Robert Goldenberg

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781532647994, 9781532648007
• eBook ISBN: 9781532648014
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The text of the Torah includes not only its words, but also various atypical scribal features. Prime among these are the dots over certain letters, various letters written either large or small, and the exceedingly odd placement of two inverted Hebrew letters surrounding one passage. What are these features doing there? How old are they? Do they carry meaning? How have they been interpreted over the years? James Diamond brings the reader on the journey through the Torah text in search of a response to these questions.

Chapter I

The Scribal Tradition in Israel

The Torah, i.e., the Pentateuch or five books of Moses, as well as the whole Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, consists only of consonants. To our forebears, the text of the Torah was not of this world. To them it was—and to some Jews today it literally still is—effusions of the divine mind concretized into the letters and words of Hebrew consonants.

The text of the Hebrew Bible, and that of the various books it includes, was handed down over a very long period, in the single form of a consonantal text without addition of vowels or punctuation marks of any kind.8

That is the fundamental fact from which the itinerary of concerns of this book proceeds.

Marc-Alain Ouaknin elaborates:

The scriptural handing-down of the sacred texts, in their original form, was carried out—and is still carried out in our day . . . —in the form of . . . scrolls made of tanned leather or of parchmented leather. On these scrolls, made up of strips of skin sewn one to another and ruled horizontally and vertically with an awl, the sacred texts are copied with the use of a reed calamus in the East and a goose quill in the West. These copies are scrupulously executed according to the traditional rules and without any particular signs being added to the consonantal text that might have suggested to the reader a particular way of vocalizing and so of interpreting the text or of dividing the text into logical or semantic units, to make it perceptible to the reader. Any sign added to the body of a scroll would have expressed a particular exegetical choice that could be accepted as a possible exegesis of the text, but could not be considered as representative of rabbinical exegesis par excellence. As a result, traditional scribal rules have always prohibited the adding of any graphical signs other than those reserved for the copying of the consonantal text, and that alone. The oral knowledge of traditional exegesis passed on from the masters to their pupils has, alone, for a long time made up for the absence of a more elaborate graphical system.9

So when writing or copying a Torah scroll, no vowels, no periods, no commas, or anything else is added. Just the unpointed consonantal letters. Yet the fact is that there are certain signs in the text of every Torah scroll (visible in many printed Hebrew versions of the Pentateuch) that are not consonants. Nor are they vowels, for they are not pronounced.

These various signs, as I noted in the introduction, are not anomalies but part and parcel of the Torah’s text even though they are not read. The traditional rules for writing Torah scrolls referred to the mandate that these signs have to be written. So, too, do other occasional irregularities, such as certain letters that have to be made larger than the others and some smaller. These rules, like the markings themselves, are the product of a scribal tradition that goes back to the earliest stages of Israel’s history and spans not only centuries but millennia. As we’ve seen, linguists call the various signs we are considering graphemes; textual critics of the Bible call them “para-textual elements.”10 If we want to know what we can of their origins and history, in particular how they became integral parts of the Torah’s text, we need to tell the story of the scribal tradition as it developed in Israel and in the Judaism that grew out of biblical tradition.

It is a story not easily told, and its details are known mostly to specialists in the history of the biblical text. In its widest sense, the scribal tradition I am talking about is called “the Masorah,” a word I shall explain more fully in the course of this discussion. One of its foremost students, Israel Yeivin, has written:

The Masorah consists of a mass of data collected over a long period by many scholars. It includes the work of different schools and individuals, with different opinions, but in general only the information itself was considered important, and its origin is not recorded. Despite recent discoveries of very ancient biblical texts and masoretic fragments, we still do not have information which shows clearly who produced the Masorah and how it was done. The outline of its development can only be sketched on the basis of vague hints, and with much speculation.11

What follows is a piecing together of bits and pieces of textual evidence about this scribal tradition that we find in the Bible, the Talmud, and other sources into a coherent picture that may appear more historically sequential than it is—or was.

1. The Scribes of the First Temple Period

When we think of scribes, we think of a culture in which the primary mode of literary expression is writing. But, as folklorists have known for a long time and contemporary biblical scholars have only recently begun to understand, scribes functioned in an oral culture too, where the primary mode of religious and artistic creation (there often was little difference between these) was oral.12

In his important study of the origins of the biblical text, David Carr cautions against thinking that these two modalities of literary expression, oral and written, were mutually exclusive or developed in strict chronological sequence. For a long time, the conventional view was that epics were first sung or declaimed orally to be received aurally, and only later written down to be read. Carr and others believe that the two modalities co-existed and overlapped. In fact the difference between them was smaller than modern students may suppose. Texts were written, to be sure, but they were not written to be read silently and privately by individual readers. They were written to be read aloud by the bard-teacher to an audience or to a group of students. They functioned, as Carr nicely puts it, “more the way a musical score does for a musician who already knows the piece than like a book the reader has never encountered before.”13 Only in the latter centuries of the biblical period (approximately 300–165 bce) were texts written to be read and explicated by individual readers. The period of the First Temple (ca. 960–586 bce) was a transitional era. This was the time when parts of the Torah—think of the stories in Genesis—that had existed as orally performed narratives, or as crib-sheets for the bards who declaimed them, began to assume more polished written form through the work of scribes.

Let us note here, for it will be important for our later discussion, that the word Scripture uses for “scribe,” sofer, has a convoluted history. Nowadays the word refers to someone who is trained to write out the Pentateuchal text onto Torah scrolls or onto the smaller pieces of parchment that go into tefillin or mezuzot. Ernst Würthwein, however, reminds us that: “During the Israelite kingdom the word sopher indicated the incumbent of a high political office.”14 With a different function in mind, the Talmud notes that “the ancients were called sofrim because they counted every letter in the Torah.”15 Counting the letters might have served as a way of ensuring that they had missed nothing in their copying and had produced a text that was not only accurate but complete.

Etymology confirms this double function. The Hebrew word sofer derives from the verb stem s-f-r, which means both to “count” and to “tell” or “recount” in the sense of “narrate.” (Similarly in English a “teller” is someone who count...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Editors’ Preface
• Editors’ Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Scribal Tradition in Israel
• Chapter 2: The Extraordinary Texts in the Torah
• Chapter 3: Reading the Torah Today
• Bibliography