Category Archives: Scribal technicalities

Stretching letters

February 19, 2012 Jen

Torah columns are fully justified – that is, the text extends tidily to each side of the column.

The tidiest way to do this is by making letters and spaces ever so slightly bigger or smaller, so that the change in size isn’t even noticeable. However, sometimes that isn’t an option. The image here to the right is part of the Song of the Sea, where the text is constrained by a very specific layout (more on that some other time). There is simply no way to do this line subtly; one has to stretch. So, what can one stretch?

Some letters are obviously not stretchable. (For images of all the letters, you may refer to the Mishnat Soferim.) It’s fairly clear that one can’t stretch vav, for instance; it would turn into reish. So would khaf peshuta. Conversely, one can’t squash reish or khaf peshuta too much, because they’ll turn into vav.

Some letters, in contrast and by convention, are highly stretchable. Dalet, hey, reish and tav are all good candidates for stretching; the form of the letter isn’t deemed changed by the stretch. For instance, we (essentially) conceive of dalet as having a flat roof, a corner on its top right, and a leg rather shorter than the roof. The leg height is limited by the line height, but the roof length isn’t limited. You can see how our perception of the letter form makes a difference here (images, right). If we thought of dalet as having a roof of about the same length as its leg, we wouldn’t be able to stretch it.

Indeed, this is one reason we don’t stretch things like zayin; we conceive of zayin as having a head approximately one-third the length of its height. If we thought of zayin as being essentially T-shaped, with the crucial feature being symmetrical extension of the head beyond the leg, we’d be able to extend zayin. But that’s not how we think of zayin, so we don’t extend it. Nun peshuta is similar, just longer vertically, so we don’t extend nun peshuta either. Usually, that is. The image to the left shows a nun which has been desperately stretched; compare its head size to the head of the nun on the bottom line. It’s not invalid, but it’s not really an effect to aim for.

Het is conceived of being formed from two zayins, and as such, one may not extend het any more than one may extend zayin, either by making the zayins too long, or by putting them very far apart and making a very long peaked roof between them (since if one stretches a peaked roof too far it doesn’t really look peaked any more). The het shown is really pushing the limits of stretching.

The image above also shows a stretched khaf and mem stuma. By convention, these aren’t deemed invalid if stretched, they just don’t look very nice if you stretch them too much. The weight of the horizontals is too much if you extend them in parallel too far. You see a similar effect if you extend beit (right).

The form of lamed is the subject of mild disagreement. Lamed is described as being more or less like a khaf with a vav on top. The question regarding stretching is: does the base part have to come forward as far as the top part, like a proper khaf? Or is it sufficient that it be bent round behind? If the former, stretching it would be like stretching khaf – rather uncomfortably heavy. If the latter, stretching lamed would be more like stretching reish. The lameds pictured (left and right) are tending towards the latter opinion, keeping enough of a base that they don’t look completely unbalanced.

So far this post has looked at extending horizontals and double horizontals, which is by far the easiest way to stretch a letter. One can, theoretically, stretch out diagonal strokes, but it really looks awfully weird. For some reason alef is often stretched – perhaps because it has a reasonably thick diagonal, so it doesn’t mess with the black/white balance too much. It still looks rather odd, but not as odd as tzaddi, or ayin, or shin, or peh.

Further reading: Stretchy letters in print.

Materials

eBay Torah

January 31, 2012 Jen

Today’s parchment: a bit smooth and slippy, so I want to treat it with gum sanderac before writing. It’s a resin that you grind finely and rub into the parchment.

Grinding gum sandarac in a cereal bowl with a spoon is annoying, because so much of the gum sandarac sticks to the surface of the bowl that you end up with not very much left for yourself. It’s also not great for the bowl or the spoon.

So I have finally got around to buying a small lab-type pestle and mortar on ebay. It is rather amusing how I can get ALL THE SUPPLIES on eBay except for parchment and ink.

In a spirit of procrastination, I searched for “gallnuts” on ebay, to see if one could at least get the ingredients for ink. It altered the search to “walnuts,” which is not quite the same thing. “Gall nuts” it changed to “gill nets” (something to do with basketball).

“Oak galls” actually scored a result: OAK GALL INK 100% HAND MADE ECWS* WICCA. The description says it “darkens to a lovely, rich black/brown colour,” which doesn’t sound too good for us, since we can’t use brown ink.

The “Wicca” bit is viscerally more disturbing, although actually ink doesn’t HAVE to be made for the specific purpose of holy scrolls, and you CAN technically use idolatrous wine in it, so you COULD use Wicca-specific ink…but it looks like “Wicca” is just there to boost his search results, seems the maker is a historical re-enactment nerd.

No raw oak galls though, at least not today. I’ll do you a post sometime soon about how oak galls work in ink; it’s extremely interesting.

* English Civil War Society, apparently.

Materials, Torah Portion

Bo and parchment

January 27, 2012 Jen

workspace This week’s parsha contains the phrase “The Torah of God shall be in your mouth.”

Rabbinic tradition expands this concept: if we are to put the Torah in our mouths, it obviously cannot be made of things that we may not eat. So all animal products used on Torahs are made from the kosher species.

Quills – swan or goose feathers, turkey or duck, but no peacock or ostrich, eagle or crow. Glue – before synthetic glues, sticky stuff was mostly made from animal products, did you know that? – fish glue or cow-hoof glue, but not rabbit-skin glue or horse-hoof glue. Thread, which is made from tendons and glue – cow tendons, but not horse tendons. And parchment.

Torahs are written on parchment, in Hebrew klaf, קלף, (with a kuf). Proper parchment is really a type of leather – here’s a site which talks about how klaf is made. Nowadays most Torah parchment is made from cows, because the meat industry mostly deals with cows; older Torahs are often goat, one also sees deer and occasionally sheep; you could use bison, or chicken or turkey (but that would make very small pieces, and probably not be worth it). You could even use a giraffe, if you could find one.

And yes, I have this dream that one day someone will give me a dead giraffe and I will be able to write a Megillah on it, because you could fit the whole Megillah on one giraffe skin* and that would be unbelievably amazing so if you do know anyone with giraffes that are looking a bit tottery, do introduce me, or if you know a parchment-maker who’s up for an adventure, likewise.

I digress.

The one kosher animal you may not use is a fish. Klaf can be made out of fishskin, but the rabbinic sources say that it smells truly terrible, and for that reason you can’t use it for sacred scrolls – you don’t want your holy books to be stinky. This I like very much.

Goat parchment retains a distinctive goaty tang for a Very Long Time – goats are like that, very assertive – and you can usually identify a goat Torah because it smells like a goat. I like this too, it is a pleasing reminder that the scroll is not just a text, it is a physical object as well.

The picture at right is a piece of klaf held up against a window. You can see very clearly where the cow’s backbone was. Sometimes you can also see where the kidneys were, and if it had a fat bottom, sometimes you see that as well.

workspace The two images at left are close-ups of the surface of klaf. The top picture is the front side, and the bottom picture is the back side. A word about that, first: if you’re processing parchment for a book, you make both sides the same, because you want to write on both sides of the page. But we only write on one side for our scrolls, so we only bother processing one side. That means that the front side is beautifully smooth and silky, almost like very very fine suede, but the back side is rougher and generally less “finished.”

You can see that the front side has lines on it. All Torahs have to be written with lines – it’s both a scribal aid, to keep the lines straight, and an halakhic (legal) requirement – i.e. even if you’re really good at keeping your lines straight, you still have to have lines. You probably didn’t notice them last time you read Torah, but they’re almost certainly there – you just don’t notice them because you’re looking at the letters.

The lines are scored in. One can score one’s own lines, with a ruler and some kind of scoring tool, such as an awl, or one can have the lines put in by the klafmachers (people who make the parchment). That’s very clever – they have a grid of wires, and they set the wires to the appropriate positions, and then they press it hard into the klaf, bang, and that makes lines. Sort of like when your socks leave a line pattern in your ankle, only the klaf is dead so they don’t fade away quickly like they do on ankles. Sometimes they will fade with extreme age, hence that “almost” above.

So anyway, on the front side of this particular piece you can also see the veins. The front side is generally bleached quite white and nice, but sometimes hints of animal-ness remain.

On the back side of this piece, you can see the hair pattern quite distinctly. The back will often keep some of the colour of the cow – greyish, brownish, whatever. Sometimes it’s splotchy. I think that’s rather lovely.

On most older scrolls, you won’t see the splotching, because for a long time it was the fashion to paint the backs with a substance called log, to make them uniformly white. This undoubtedly makes the backs of the scrolls attractively white and shiny, but unfortunately it also makes the scrolls extremely heavy. Log is some variety of sticky substance mixed with some variety of white powder, for instance boiled klaf and powdered chalk, so when coating, you’re effectively adding a layer of stone to the Torah, and of course that’s going to be heavy.

So these days we don’t coat the backs, we whiten the parchment by bleaching it, and any remaining discolouration serves to remind us of the complex relationship between animals and Jewish ritual worship. We generally get one sheet of parchment per cow, which works out to about sixty-five cows per Torah; that’s a lot of cows.

I have explored the ethical implications of this in two related blog posts, here and here, but the intertwined ethics of the contemporary meat industry and the Jewish community’s response have only just started to develop, so that particular aspect of Torah-making is one which will evolve in the direction we choose to take it.

* Technically you would have to cut it into sheets because you mayn’t have more than eight columns on a sheet, but that’s okay, I’m very good at tiny neat seams, so the pattern wouldn’t be too obviously disrupted.

Tools and Accessories

Tools and travelling

January 22, 2012 Jen

I generally write at home in Manhattan, on a sloping table (good for your back), but sometimes I feel like getting out of the apartment.

As many of you will have seen by now, a Torah scroll starts out as individual sheets of parchment upon which I write. The sewing together of the sheets into a scroll comes later. Single sheets are much more portable creatures than large Torah scrolls, so it often happens that I will take a single sheet and go and write somewhere different.

This week, actually, I had to go to England on family business, but most weeks I’ll maybe go down to my yeshiva, hang out at the Jewish Theological Seminary, maybe take in the Drisha Institute or the Yeshiva University Library. There’s something very delicious about writing Torah in a place of Torah surrounded by the sounds of Torah learning, and more prosaically, if one has to go to England on short notice (all is well, don’t worry), it’s good to be able to stay on schedule.

For these excursions, I have a fabulously professional-looking Torah transport bag. It’s actually a chess championship bag, of all things. I had no idea such things even existed until I got a student who’d done chess championships; she used her old chess bag to bring her parchment to lessons. Me, I know a good idea when I see it, so I got online and got a chess bag (sans contents).

Chess tournament players use a roll-up chessboard, which is about the same size as a piece of parchment. So you roll your parchment up and secure it in the straps for the chessboard. There are handy little slots for chess-players’ pens and a drink (or quills, knives, and ink); a nice zipper compartment designed for a tournament clock which is just the right size for holding my lunch; another compartment for chess pieces which holds miscellaneous things like my camera,* bits of tile, gum sanderac, teabags, erasers, and so forth; even a dear little windowed pocket for business cards. And a document flap which holds my sketchbook and Kindle for keeping busy on the subway. Really, it’s perfect. I used to use a yoga-mat bag, but this is just so much classier. Lends a certain gravitas to tooling around the city with my bits of Torah.

A journalist was interviewing me the other week (this, thankfully, does not happen as often as it used to; not that I mind exactly but certain story angles got very old very fast) and asking how I avoided making mistakes whilst writing Torah. I left the interview with the uncomfortable feeling that we’d been talking at cross-purposes; from my perspective, your job is to write the words and you do that as best you can in every aspect, and the mistakes you take in your stride. She seemed to think that the main thing is to avoid mistakes, and then maybe you can focus on doing a good job of the rest of it, which is not really how I see it at all.**

This is, perhaps, illustrated in the matter of accessories. To take a sheet of Torah to the yeshiva, you can roll it up and stick it in a cardboard tube and wrap that in a garbage bag and fill your purse with your writing kit. This keeps the parchment from getting battered and gets all your stuff there, certainly. But it’s just nicer if you can leave in the morning knowing you’ve got everything you need neatly stashed in your bag. No scrambling, no forgetting things, just being prepared and confident.

There’s a profound conclusion (or several) lurking here, I feel sure, among the miscellaneous vignettes of soferet life and musings on the difference between tools and accessories. But the jetlag is catching up with me, and the conclusion by the same distance escaping me. You’ll have to put it together yourself. This is called “empowering the student to create their own custom learning experience” in modern pedagogical-speak, so you can rest assured you have the very latest in educational blogging experiences. Shavua tov.

* It’s always good to have a camera with you. You never know when someone is going to show you something interesting in a sefer Torah, and you’ll kick yourself if you can’t take a picture.

** Yes, if you can’t convey what you’re thinking, you didn’t interview very well. I know. Not her fault.

Vowels

Sefer Shemot and the Semitic Scripts

January 13, 2012 Jen

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

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:

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.

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:

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:

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:

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.

Just Cool, Scribal technicalities, Torah Portion, Vowels

Why there are no vowels in the Torah, part 1

December 30, 2011 Jen

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.

Erasing, Scribal technicalities, Tools and Accessories

Erasing mistakes

December 16, 2011 Jen

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:
עד 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

December 4, 2011 Jen 1 Comment

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

November 29, 2011 Jen

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

November 21, 2011 Jen

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.

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