Reflecting on Judaism

         And this is the Torah which Moses set before the People of Israel.  I was in conversation with one of our religious leaders and mentioned in passing the fact that Ezra had transliterated the Torah from its original script to the script we use today. He expressed surprise and asked where I had obtained such information. I referred him to the discussion which is to be found in the Talmud, Sanhedrin 21b.

Now this fact creates a dilemma for our religious leaders.. On the one hand they cannot deny the transliteration for it is confirmed by the Talmud. On the other hand they are reluctant to accept it for it runs counter to a fundamental dogma in Judaism, namely, that the entire Torah which we now possess is the same that was given to Moses. In order to reconcile the difference they suggest various theories around a theme.

The theories suggest that Moses originally wrote the Torah in the square script we use today but that God did not want the Jews to have this script at that time, various reasons are given, and so it was immediately transliterated into a different script, then in common use. These theories raise several problems.

*Scholarly experts in this field are certain that our square script did not evolve till some 500/600 years after the giving of the Torah. Why should we not believe  them?

*If the square script was not in common use at the time of the giving of the Torah what was the purpose in writing it, as the religious leaders are suggesting, in a script that was neither used or understood at the time.

*If the square script was initially used, as the rabbi suggest, and then immediately abandoned, how could Ezra have known about it, and reverted to it, several hundred years later? 

However, to follow up the matter for my own satisfaction I referred to the Encyclopaedia Judaica. I realise that this is a secondary source and that I am no expert. If I have misunderstood what was written there I would be pleased to be corrected.

I set out three short extracts, written by Professors Joseph Navey of the Hebrew University and Solomon Asher Birnbaum of the London University, which briefly describe the development of the Hebrew Alphabet and which explains how the transliteration came about.

Here are the extracts:-

“The Hebrew Script"

The Hebrews adopted the alphabetic script together with other cultural values from the canaanites in the 12th or 11th century B.C.E. They followed the current Phoenician script until the ninth century, when they began to develop their own national script.

"The Jewish Script"

The talmudic tradition (Sanh. 21b) ascribes the adoption of the Aramaic ("Assyrian") script to Ezra, who brought it from the Babylonian captivity. However Aramaic arrived in
Judea also through the Babylonian and mainly through the Persian administrations.

"SQUARE SCRIPT"

Sixth Century B.C.E. to Second Century C.E.

The square script belongs to the Aramaic branch of Semitic writing. In the Babylonian-Assyrian and Persian empires the Aramaic language and its alphabet became the official language and script of the administration, They were also adopted by the Jews in Babylonia and elsewhere, and later penetrated Palestine. When the new script was officially adopted for the writing of Torah scrolls the change-over from the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet was complete although the old script was twice revived, centuries later, for legends on the coins under the Hasmoneans and under Bar Kokhba.”

If you refer to the actual encyclopaedia, book 2 page 683, it compares the Square Script and the Phoenician Scrip from which the square script derives. From this comparison we see that the square script has three letters more than its predecessor. By what authority did Ezra transliterate the Torah and by what authority could Ezra have introduced these three new letters? By his so doing what does it show? What precedent does it set and what lessons can we learn?

A related question refers to the Tagin and I set out an extract from the encyclopaedia explaining this subject.

TAGIN Aram. (NygG; sing., tag), special designs resembling crowns placed by a scribe on the upper left-hand corner of seven of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet in a Torah, tefillin, or mezuzah scroll. A tag is generally composed of three flourishes or strokes, each of which resembles a small "zayin"—thick on top with a thin line extending downward to the letter. The center stroke is slightly higher than the two end ones. The letters which receive the tagin are xgzntAS (Men. 29b), including the final N and X (Rashi ad loc.).

This extract mentions the seven letters of our Square Script which take the Tagin. If you again refer to, and compare, the Square and Phoenician scripts I believe that you will see that at least three letters of the latter script could not possibly have had Tagin attached for they have quite inappropriate shapes or the letter did not exist.

The Jewish mystics among us attach great significance to these Tagin but, if we accept the above explanation, it now seems unlikely that they were present in the original script, I prefer the explanation that I read elsewhere; namely, that Ezra included them when he was uncertain about something, such as a spelling.

If the Encyclopaedia has got it right it makes nonsense of the Codex and other theories by which people try to find hidden messages in the Torah by counting letters and words.

Another reason for not accepting a ‘hidden message’ theory is found in Hertz’s Chumash where he discusses why the last letter, of the first word of Sedrah Vayikra, has a small letter ‘aleph’.  Quoting Luzzato he writes, “The sacred text was in ancient times written in a continuous row of letters, without any division between the words. When the last letter of a word was the same as the first letter of the next, one character would often serve for both”. 

Each time we finish reading the Torah during the course of a statutory service we hold it up and say, “This is the Torah which Moses set before the people of
Israel”

From the above quoted reliable sources we see that: -

*The lettering now used for writing the Torah is different to that originally used.

*The Torah now has paragraphs whereas it was originally written continuously.

*When the last letter of a word was the same as the first letter of the next, one character would often serve for both”. 

“This is the Torah which Moses set before the people of
Israel”.  This verse appears in Deuteronomy Chapter IV sentence 44. In discussing it, Chief Rabbi Hertz (page 764 of his Chumash) quotes Rashi as saying that the sentence refers only to Deut. chapters XII-XXVI.  By implication Rashi is saying that it does not refer to the whole Torah.  

There are other verses in Deut. Chapter 27, verses 2&3 and Chapter 31 verse 9, which cloud the issue. I discuss these verses below.

It is stated in Chapter 27 verses 2&3. "And it shall be on the day when you shall pass over the Jordan unto the land which the Lord thy God has given you, that you shall set up great stones, and plaster them with plaster." "And you shall write upon them all the words of this Torah when thou art passed over."

From Chapter 31 we learn that after forty years of wandering in the wilderness Moses tells the People that he is about to die, age 120, but that God will not allow him to enter into the promised land. The Chapter continues, verse 9, "And Moses wrote this Torah and delivered it unto the priests the sons of Levi, that bore the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord and unto all the elders of Israel.

A number of questions arise: -

1) How long would it take to write the Torah on stone, presumably using chisel and hammer, when we know that today it takes a scribe approximately a year to write a Sefer Torah using special ink on the skin of a kosher animal? A clue is given in the book of Joshua Chapter 8 Verse 32, "And Joshua wrote there upon the stones, a copy of the Law of Moses which he wrote before the children of Israel". By this description it would appear that Joshua could not have written at length.

2) How many stones would have been required to accommodate the writing of the complete Torah, as we know it today?

3) How much Torah could Moses have written when his death was imminent? It is doubtful whether he could have written at length.

Our sages have discussed these quandaries and most agree that the writings referred to would not have been of the whole of the Torah but part of it only. They do not agree on which part but many suggest that it may have been the Ten Commandments.

We can see from the above that not only did the Torah undergo a number of physical changes but that ‘Torah’ also has a number of different meanings. So what do we mean, precisely, when we all say, regularly: -

"This is the Torah which Moses set before the people of Israel?

January 2006