All posts by Jen

Vowels

Sefer Shemot and the Semitic Scripts

The start of Sefer Shemot finds us in Egypt and returning to the story of the alef-bet.

Hieroglyphic for "scribe"In Egypt, as everyone knows, they wrote with hieroglyphs, an intensely complex system of writing based on pictograms. Literacy in hieroglyphs is relatively hard to attain; literacy also endows power, such that an Egyptian scribe occupied an elite position in society and had a god devoted to his efforts.

At the other end of the social scale in Egypt, we have people like the Israelites–migrant workers, slaves, people with no power. Also monotheistic, and if you need a god to keep track of your writing system, you need a simpler writing system if you’re going to stay monotheistic.* An alphabet, a system of representing constituent sounds of a language, is a good solution, because you can make phonetic represnations by memorising only a couple of dozen symbols rather than a couple of thousand.

At the end of last time, I had just introduced the idea of acrophonic writing, in which a (stylised, abstracted version of a) picture comes to represent the first sound of the associated word. Hieroglyphics developed in this direction, to a degree, so from about the seventeenth century BCE you find alphabetic hieroglyphs.

No-one quite knows how our particular alphabet came into being, but there’s a theory cautiously advanced that possibly Semitic workers in Egypt had something to do with it. There isn’t really enough data, and we also run into scholarly tangles concerning the definition of an alphabet. What concerns us now is that sometime around 1500 BCE symbols now known as Proto-Canaanite or Proto-Sinaitic script were in use, assigning sounds to symbols based on what the symbols represent.

Henceforth I’m going to be using five letters for examples; alef, vav, khaf, ayin, and tav. Remember that alef used to be a guttural consonant and not just the silent vowel-carrier it’s become. Here’s the Proto-Canaanite symbols:

Proto-Canaanite symbols, c. 1500 BCE (Ada Yardeni)

Reading left to right (since our base language right now is English), these are pictures of an ox, a hook, a hand, an eye, and a (tally-type) mark. In Hebrew the words are ‘alef, vav, khaf, ayin, tav; the people who used these systems were not speaking Hebrew, but a remote ancestor thereof, but my impression is that those particular words didn’t change much.

Five hundred years later, around 1000 BCE, the Proto-Canaanite symbol set has become a true alphabet, the Phoenician alphabet. You can see how the symbols have become somewhat more abstract. (The right-to-left text direction has also been established by this point, interestingly.) Again: alef, vav (or waw), khaf, ayin, tav.

Phoenician letters c 1000 bce

The Phoenicians were a widely-spread culture with a powerful and pervasive economic and cultural system. As such, their writing system got spread all over the ancient world; the Phoenicians’ influence declined after about the eighth century, and the script ceased to exist in any form after about the third century. The cultures which replaced them, and the descendants of their script, however, kept right on going. Israelite tribes settled in Canaan around the 12th century BCE, adopted the local script, and it came to look something like this:

hebrew letters c. 1100 bce

This is the period of the monarchy (united and divided); Israelite national identity is an independent thing, so language and script and culture are all somewhat distinctive. Tangentially, Phoenician used 22 consonants, so their alphabet had 22 letters; the Israelite dialect had more than 22 consonants, so some letters had to do double duty, and this is why shin and sin are both represented by the same symbol.

By about 600 BCE (the period where Assyria and Babylon are vying for supremacy and the children of Israel are getting repeatedly squashed in the struggle), Hebrew letters look something like this:

Hebrew 600 BCE

For those thinking “This looks nothing at all like the alef-bet”: yes, you’re correct, it looks nothing at all like the alef-bet. After Babylon absorbed the Israelites and exiled them, national culture was rather hampered, and use of this Hebrew alphabet began to decline. The Hebrew script (or Paleo-Hebrew, to aid disambiguation) was preserved in religious writings, a last pocket of national identity. Thus it is that we have examples of the Paleo-Hebrew script from about 100 BCE, from Qumran:

hebrew 100 bce

Paleo-Hebrew was revived as a national Jewish script by Bar-Kokhba, but the script ultimately fell out of use with the failure of the rebellion. Jewish textual identity had long since taken a different direction, which we will follow next time.

Further reading:
Paleo-Hebrew
Phoenician alphabet
History of the alphabet

* That was a joke.

Torah Portion

Vayehi–a bit of a chat

Well, this has been a busy week. As well as working on your Torah, I’ve been apprentice-master-ing–my sometimes-apprentice has winter break from her yeshiva, so she’s back being my apprentice, which means I’m spending a good deal of time supervising her.

I’ve got a number of other women I’m invested in in this way. It’s something to do with how, when I was trying to learn, I didn’t have much company–once I got knowledge and skills, I wanted to share them, so that I’d have company. (Also noble ideas about making the world a better place, etc, but that sounds kind of pretentious so we’ll put that bit in parentheses.) Three of them are working on Torah scrolls of their own now, and various others are engaged in repair and other projects.

So I didn’t get time to write the history of the alef-bet post I wanted to write, but the world is an incrementally better place because of my apprentice. Good trade?

Instead, I’m going to share some thoughts that came into my head as I was writing the parsha, Vayechi.

When I’m writing, I’m paying some attention to the content as it goes through my fingers. If I’m studying Torah, I’m thinking about it in an intellectual way; when I’m writing, it’s more of a musy kind of thinking.

The exception to this is when it’s poetry. There you are, scribing along, and suddenly you don’t understand more than half the words. This is how you know you’re in a poem. The translations and the printed chumashim use layout to denote poetry–that and the sudden slew of footnotes “Meaning of Hebrew uncertain”, so it’s not just me that gets confused.

Since I want to understand what I’m writing, poetical bits usually go slower because every few words I’m referring to a translation or a dictionary.

This bit in particular struck me, this time round:

Dan shall govern his people,
As one of the tribes of Israel.
Dan shall be a serpent by the road,
A viper by the path,
That bites the horse’s heels
So that his rider is thrown backward.

I wait for your deliverance, O Lord! (Genesis 49:16-18)

Check out Rashi there, if you’re wondering what on earth that’s all about. Lots of stuff about Samson.

Just made me chuckle, though–here’s Jacob saying semi-prophetical things to his sons, and the basic meaning of this part is “Dan will be a judge. Of sorts. God help us all.”

Torah Portion

Vayigash and writing

So, that was part 1 of a history of the alef-bet. More to follow on that shortly.

In the meantime, consider this week’s parsha, when Yosef is reunited with his father after twenty years’ absence. His father has thought him dead all this while.

Check out Genesis 46:29 in Hebrew for me. Yosef has sent his brothers to bring his father Yaakov to Egypt, where there is food. When Yaakov is approaching, Yosef rides out to meet him, and this is what it says:

וַיֵּרָא אֵלָיו וַיִּפֹּל עַל צַוָּארָיו וַיֵּבְךְּ עַל צַוָּארָיו עוֹד

If you don’t know any Hebrew, take this as another nudge to go get started on learning.

Once you know a bit of Hebrew, you might be struck by the weirdness of the word “od” there. Translation’s roughly “He appeared to him [Yosef to Yaakov, probably] and he fell on his neck, and he wept on his neck od.” עוד usually means “again” or “more” or something like that, but how is that possible here when they’ve not seen each other in twenty years?

Well, I asked Rashi, and Rashi thought it was odd too, so to speak. But Rashi says “od” sometimes carries connotations of great profusion, which is why we get translations like “he wept on his neck for a long time”. (You can find Rashi’s commentary translated online here.)

Then Rashi adds that while Yosef was weeping on Yaakov, Yaakov was not weeping on Yosef.

Rashi says that Yaakov was reciting the Shema (rabbinically, this is what you do when you’re convinced you’re about to die, and Yaakov does say “If I die right this second I’ll be happy now I’ve seen you,” or words to that effect), but I don’t know. While writing this story, I’ve been thinking, really Yosef? Would it have killed you to write home, let them know how you’re doing?

And I sort of think maybe that’s what Yaakov’s thinking. Okay, maybe you couldn’t have written because maybe all you know is hieroglyphs and maybe Yaakov’s an illiterate shepherd or maybe he doesn’t know hieroglyphs, but all this time you were rich and successful and you couldn’t send a messenger?

I better go call my parents…shabbat shalom.

Just Cool, Scribal technicalities, Torah Portion, Vowels

Why there are no vowels in the Torah, part 1

I wanted to do you a post about why there aren’t any vowels or musical notation-marks in a sefer Torah, but when I came to study the subject, I realised it’s a good deal more complicated than can fit into one post. It seemed to require a brief history of vowel-marks, which in turn required a brief history of the alef-bet, which in turn required a brief history of writing in general.

So we’re going to start with a brief history of writing, and then we’ll do the alef-bet, and then we’ll do vowel-marks, and then we’ll be sorted.

Let’s get into it by way of Yosef. This week’s parsha and last week’s, Vayigash and Miketz, tell us about Yosef, employed in a high administrative position tracking and controlling food supplies for an enormous region through fourteen years of plenty and famine.

This kind of activity is how writing was invented, we think. People wanted to keep track of how many things they had (or were owed), so they used tallies, with one-to-one correspondence between the number of marks and the number of things; tally marks have been in use since the Stone Age, a matter of some forty thousand years.

Writing seems to have evolved independently in various areas. We’re ultimately interested in the alef-bet, so we’re going to take that route, but it’s worth remembering that this isn’t the only history of writing out there.

Between 8000 and 4000 BCE people used a token-based kind of abstraction for record-keeping: pebbles or clay tokens representing quantities. One pebble in a jar means one goat in the field; two pebbles in a different jar represents two baskets of grain, and you’d better remember which is which. During these four millennia, the level of abstraction expanded somewhat, such that instead of sixty-three pebbles in a jar meaning sixty-three I-think-it-was-goats-or-is-that-the-grain-jar-damn, you had one sixty-goat token and three one-goat tokens in your jar, and maybe some grain-tokens too, if you had any grain.

Keeping your goat record in a jar leaves you a bit open to your accountant hooking some of your goats, though, so people developed the habit of sealing their tokens in clay containers. Very nice and secure, right?

But a bit tiresome when you want to check up on how many goats you’ve got, that being the whole point of this record-keeping business anyway. Rather than keep on breaking open and resealing the clay containers, around 3500 BCE people started marking the containers while the clay was still wet, using a stylus to carve representations of the contents’ type and quantity.

The next step was to realise that once you have those marks in the clay, the tokens inside the jars are obsolete. The marks are now fully representing real-life objects, without the intermediary stage of tokens; they are no longer mnemonic but pictographic.

Once you’re writing things like “60 goats,” you might also want to convey “Belonging to me” or “When I counted them in the springtime”. Marks come to convey not just objects but ideas and situations.

The next step in the history of writing is using marks to represent sounds. You’ve read the Just So Stories, I take it? If not, go read the one under the link, and then come back.

Say a culture has a symbol 🙂 okay? It starts out representing someone with a smiley face, so when you see it, you think of someone smiling. How do you speak it? 🙂 also stands for the sound which comes out of your mouth when you say “smileyface.” Eventually, we might abbreviate 🙂 to be the sound “sm”.

This is how alphabetic writing systems are born. More about that next week.

Just Cool

Chag urim sameach

I was going to write you a post this week about why there aren’t any vowels in a sefer Torah, but it got all long and complicated and it seems that first we need to do a brief history of the alphabet. So I’m working on that, and in the meantime, here’s a picture of a sheet of Torah reflected in the light of a hanukiah.

The most alert will realise that the fourth night of Hanukah is tomorrow and Shabbat into the bargain. The Soferet doesn’t take photographs of the future, nor on Shabbat, so yes, this is a picture from a previous Torah. Still quite lovely though, and the only difference is that I’m using green oil this year.

Check the progress bar…

Erasing, Scribal technicalities, Tools and Accessories

Erasing mistakes

Well, this week’s post is a bit late, isn’t it? When I got back from CBH on Monday, my little sister and her fiance were visiting NYC, and they only left yesterday. I don’t get to see them all that often, so I prioritised.

I promised you a post about erasing, and here it is. A few weeks ago I wrote this in the Torah:
Ad yashovet hamayimעד ישבת המים, the nonsensical phrase until the feminine singular water sat [thanks Heloise for pointing that out]. The passage in question is וישלח את הערב ויצא יצוא ושוב עד יבשת המים מעל הארץ, He sent forth the raven, and it went out repeatedly and returned, until the waters had dried up from the earth.

יבשת vs ישבת, you see. Both versions make sense, but one of them is wrong, and so it has to be fixed.

Tools for fixing, left to right: electric eraser, scalpel, burnishing tool, rose thorn, eraser.

As discussed last week, you first remove the ink. Some like to use electric erasers for this; with the right grade of abrasive tip, the electric eraser makes short work of the ink. At present I’m in a phase of preferring a scalpel; what you lose on speed, you gain in finesse.
Eventually it’s all gone. At this point, you use the eraser to clear any bits of ink that didn’t brush off. Then you burnish the surface so that it’s good to write on. You use the rose thorn to re-score the line (it’s hard and about the right thickness to match the existing lines, plus extensive biblical/poetic symbolism of roses).
Rewrite properly. They stand out a bit while they’re still wet…
…but once they’ve dried you can’t really tell the difference.
Erasing, Scribal technicalities

A single mistake invalidates the entire sefer Torah

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Many people are under the impression that if a scribe makes a mistake, they have to toss out the whole sefer and start over. This isn’t true. A mistake does invalidate the whole Torah – but not permanently. If there’s a mistake in a Torah, you can’t use it until it’s fixed – but you can almost always fix it.

Think about it. A Torah is a huge thing to write; it takes a whole year to write a Torah, working normal office hours for a normal working year. No-one can work that many hours and not make any mistakes at all, so during that time, most scribes will miss out an occasional word or letter. If we couldn’t fix those, we probably wouldn’t have any Torahs at all.

Perhaps you know the word palimpsest. A palimpsest is a piece of parchment from which the words have been removed, so that the parchment can be re-used. When we fix a mistake in a Torah, we make a localised palimpsest. We take a knife, and scrape away the ink.

Let’s compare paper and parchment.

Here’s a letter tet written with marker pen on regular paper.

When you flip it over, it looks like this. The ink soaks all the way through the paper. If you scraped away the ink, you’d scrape away the paper.

So we’re used to thinking of ink as something it’s impossible to erase.

But Torah parchment is thicker than paper, and Torah ink doesn’t soak in. This is a letter bet written on parchment (magnified quite a lot–notice the texture of the parchment).
Here’s that same bet, cut sideways. See the three-dimensional nature of the letter, and the way it sits on top of the parchment (there’ll be more about how that works when I make a post about ink). By no means is the ink soaking all the way through. Not even close.
So erasing Torah ink from parchment is a totally different proposition from erasing marker ink from paper.

When we fix a mistake, we use a knife to remove a thin layer of the parchment and the ink with it:

And there is still plenty left for us to write on. In the next post, we’ll see that happen.

Scribal technicalities, Tools and Accessories

How a scribe knows what to write

The question you all want answered, of course, is What happens if you make a mistake????, but before we get to that, I’m going to explain how I know what to write.

A Torah has to be copied from another Torah – which was copied from another Torah, which was copied from another Torah, all the way back to the first Torah. Even if someone knows the whole Torah by heart, they still have to copy from something.

This helps to make sure the text is transmitted accurately. If someone has memorised a text, they risk rendering it a little bit differently when they come to write it down. For most texts, that wouldn’t matter an awful lot provided the sense was preserved, but we want the Torah to be rather more accurate than that.

And symbolically – if we’re going to base our lives around a book, we want it to be the actual book, not someone’s memory of a book. Copying from an actual scroll reminds us of the chain of transmitted Jewish tradition which has been handed down since misty antiquity, all the way back to the divine revelation. It reminds us that all the links in the chain were real – real scrolls and real people. It keeps Judaism rooted in the physical world.

Most scribes today copy from a book called a tikkun soferim, which has been put together by expert scribes and has been carefully checked.

The recto page of a tikkun soferim looks like this:

It is printed with vowels and notation, chapters and verse numbers, and directions for the weekly reading in synagogue.

The verso page has the same letters, but with Torah script, as it would appear in the Torah – and with no vowels or other markings. Instead of a verse number, there is a line number. For a copyist, knowing which line you are in is much more useful than knowing which verse you are in.

The two letters in grey on the right-hand side are the most helpful “extra” information for the scribe. Since not all words are the same length, it’s not possible to make each line have exactly the same number of letters in it – but we want each line to form neat columns. The scribe needs to adjust the spacing of the letters to achieve this, and the little grey letters tell them how.

Letters are measured in yuds, because yud is the smallest letter. Yud counts as one, obviously. So do the narrow letters (gimel, vav, zayin, and nun), and a space between words. All the other letters count as two yuds when written in the normal way, except shin, which counts as three.

The person who put the tikkun together looked at this Torah that someone with a lot of experience wrote once, and counted the number of yuds to a line. The standard length is taken as 62 yuds, and sometimes a line will have the exact equivalent of 62 yuds; in that case it will be labelled ש”ת, shin-tav, which stands for “shita temima,” or “complete line.”

Otherwise, it will be labelled by the number of yuds it has gained or is lacking. The line above is labelled yud-hey. Yud stands for yoter, which means “extra,” and hey has the numerical value of 5, so we know that the line is over by 5 – it would measure 67 yuds if you wrote each letter its usual size. So you have to squish everything up a little bit to make it all fit in nicely. The alternative, when there are fewer letters, will be labelled chet-something, the chet standing for chaser, which means “lacking.” So chet-gimel would mean lacking-three, or 59 yuds.

When you see me writing, you’ll see my tikkun in front of me. Drop by and check it out on one of my CBH visits.

So. If something doesn’t match the tikkun, we’ve got a problem. Next post: what we do about that.

Dots, Scribal technicalities

More about dots

I said I’d talk about dots this week. For no particular reason, I just feel like talking about dots. So here goes.

There are ten places in Torah where some letters have dots above them, variously styled puncta extraordinaria, nekudot, Extraordinary Points, or just “those dots in the Torah.” For reference, the verses are: in Genesis, 16:5; 18:9; 19:33; 33:4; 37:12. In Numbers, 3:39; 9:10; 21:30; 29:15; in Deuteronomy, 29:28.

principal

Dots here serve much the same function as lines like – do in Roman letters; to delete or to highlight. I might use an underline to point out something you wouldn’t necessarily have noticed, thus:

Found ermine, deer hides damaged (Wikipedia example of cryptic crossword clue)

and I might use a strikeout to indicate that a word doesn’t belong at all, but nonetheless it’s saying telling you something.

Dots are used similarly; here’s a manuscript of Ketubot 14b. The text should be תנא קמא סבר כל פסול דקרו ליה ושתיק, and you can see how the scribe has started to write איזוהי א, from the phrase תנו רבנן איזוהי אלמנת עיסה later in the text. Realising he was in the wrong place, he’s put dots over it (this is much quicker than erasing and redoing it), and continued in the right place:

Here’s an example where the scribe was supposed to write רב נחמן בר יצחק אמר ראשון דמעיקרא משמע, but left out the word ראשון – realising this later, he put a dot where it should be, and wrote the missing word in the margin:

I know I’ve seen a manuscript where dots were being used to highlight particular letters, but I can’t quite remember which one just now, so no picture of that one. These are mediaeval, not ancient, but mediaeval’s easier to get pictures of – similar sorts of things do appear in ancient manuscripts, see for e.g. Emanuel Tov’s Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, pp 56, 214.

pietistic

Underpinning much of rabbinic tradition is the idea that every single letter of the Torah was given by God to Moses, and that each and every letter is loaded with meaning, even to the very crowns on the letters. This gave rise to the great exegetical traditions, divining the divine will from the placement of a yud or a vav. Comprehending a confusing passage is a communion with the Creator.

Hence, we view the dotted letters as exegetical markers, indicators that the text contains more than simply the letters. Sometimes the dots tell you there’s something more to look for, sometimes they even show you what it is, like the examples above, thus:

Yerushalmi Pesahim, 9:2

The Sages say, when there are more [undotted] letters than dots [dotted letters], expound upon the letters and don’t read the dots, and when there are more dots than letters, expound the dots and don’t read the letters. Rabbi says, even when there is only one dot above them, expound the dot and don’t read the letters.

Bereshit Rabba 48 – 16, ויאמרו אליו, see also Rashi to Bereshit 18:9

Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar says, any place you find more letters than dots, you expound the letters; more dots than letters, you expound the dots

The dots tell you there’s something going on. There’s an example of this kind of mouseover Torah in last week’s post on Genesis 18:9, Vayomeru elav, ayei Sarah ishtekha? vayomer, hineh baohel – They [the angels] said to him [Avraham], where is Sarah your wife? And he said, see: in the tent.

practical

Interestingly, rabbinic culture retains the memory of a period during which the Torah was written down not under divine dictation, when significant errors may have crept in. This part of our narrative says that after the return from exile in 538BCE, Ezra the scribe pulled the fractured Jewish tradition together as best he could, redacting the Torah text, but not completely accurately:

Avot d’Rabbi Natan, v. 2, ch. 37, s.v. עשרה נקודות

Why are there dots over all these letters? This is what Ezra said: If Elijah comes and says to me, why did you write this? I shall say to him, I made marks over them. And if he says to me, You wrote it well, I shall take the marks off them.

So if you like, you can take what we know about dots in a text-critical frame of mind, and say the dotted letters appear to be the result of early fluidity in versions of the Torah meeting the emerging principle of the immutable text (see for instance Karel van der Toorn’s Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible, especially chapter 8). Basically, they’re scribal errors that never got corrected – a reminder that the Torah is, in a very real sense, a very human document.

perorational

The dots are interesting on their own, and it’s interesting that you can read them from two entirely different perspectives – human error versus divine signalling – and it’s also interesting that the two are compatible. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – it’s awfully easy to be terribly pragmatic and say “these indicate scribal errors, isn’t that interesting,” but if you stop there, you miss all the meta-layers that rabbinic tradition added, and that’s very silly. Coming from the other direction, it’s easy to say “These are flags from God,” and then you have to ignore history, and that’s not so sensible either. They work together, and the way they work together is also part of what the text means. If the dots are mouseover Torah, the context is mouseover-mouseover Torah. Watch out, you might get blown away.