Hebrew Voices #162 – Writing the Name of God in Torah Scrolls

Transcript

Hebrew Voices #162 – Writing the Name of God in Torah Scrolls

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Nehemia: And here you can see something’s different about God’s name. It looks like, to me, that it’s even in a different hand. It’s certainly smaller in the second instance; in the first instance it’s big. So, it started to seem to me that these were filled into blank spaces.

Nehemia: What I’m going to present today is actually a chapter in my PhD dissertation that I did under Professor Yosef Ofer. It was published as an article in the Journal of Jewish Studies, and I’m only going to get to a small amount of what’s in that article, because it’s 9,000 words or something.

I started to notice when I was looking at the Torah scrolls… and let me back up. I was looking at the name of God for my PhD dissertation. It has all kinds of special halakhot around it, some of them very ancient, and I noticed that I had gone through all the photographs of the Russian National Library, something like 90,000 pages, looking for anything with God’s name. And I realized I had hundreds, actually thousands, of shelf marks of codices, and I only had two Torah scrolls. So, I started scouring the world, before the pandemic, looking for Torah scrolls.

Here is a fragment from the Cairo Genizah, from the Lewis-Gibson Collection, 10th-11th century, Oriental, unless Judith tells me otherwise, and here you can see something’s different about God’s name. It looks like, to me, that it’s even in a different hand. It’s certainly smaller in the second instance; in the first instance it’s big. So, it started to seem to me that these were filled into blank spaces. That was my hypothesis.

Here’s another example, and here I think it’s definitely… could be a different hand. It’s always difficult to know, because we have three letters… it’s four, but there’s two Heys, so that doesn’t help you. So, you have three letter forms; one of them is Yud, one of them is Vav, which is pretty generic. How do you know if it’s different handwriting or the same handwriting? And that’s where my interaction with Ira, and Zina, and Greg with the BAM was so important, because we could actually look and see, “Wait a minute, is this ink the same as this ink?” And it’s not just speculation; we can actually get scientific answers.

So, this is an Ashkenazi Torah scroll, the other ones were Oriental. This is 14th century, Rotolo duo at the Vatican, and here you can see… you actually can’t see in the photo that there’s a slightly… and I have to be careful not to use the word color because color has a technical meaning in science, but this is actually a different hue when you see it in person. Hue, that’s more safe! But clearly, God’s name was squeezed into a blank space. I say clearly, but I don’t know, maybe not. Maybe when it came to God’s name, he said, “I have two more words left in the line. I’m going to squeeze it in and then write Elohim afterwards.” It’s possible. This isn’t the only instance, though.

Here, clearly this is, I think… Judith, by the way, discovered this, if I’m not mistaken, in Krakow, am I right? Another Ashkenazi Torah scroll. Here, I’m quite certain, it’s a different hand. Meaning, it wasn’t the main scribe who wrote it. Certainly, he used what appears… appears is an important word as well, what appears to be a different ink. I can’t say it’s a different ink without, as I say, “zapping it with X-rays”, or “Zina zapping with X-rays”. To me it looks like a different ink, based on visual observations. That’s the safe phrase.