Hebrew Voices #149 – Looking Under the Hood of a Torah Scroll: Part 2

Transcript

Hebrew Voices #149 – Looking Under the Hood of a Torah Scroll: Part 2

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: And that could be really important; you're reading a biblical passage and you think, “Oh, verse 2 is related to verse 3 because they're in the same chapter.” And you find out verse 2 is the continuation of the last four chapters and the space is after verse 2, and that whole section going back several chapters, in the modern chapter system, is all one continuous text, and then verse 3 is the beginning of a new thought. And those spaces tell you that.

Nehemia: I was really inspired by Professor Penkower’s research as well as his students, Yossi Peretz and Orly Kolodny, and their approach to dealing with the text. And so, I chose some sample chapters, as they did, not the same sample chapters. I actually chose these sample chapters because I was going to compare the two scrolls, including the second one that I'm not going to talk about, where I only had seven sheets from the beginning, and then a few other sheets here and there.

So, I looked at Genesis 18 to 22 and I found no variants when compared with MgKeter and Breuer, which represents to the best of my understanding the Aleppo Codex, or what we think is in the Aleppo Codex. I also referred to Professor Penkower’s book, The New Evidence on the Aleppo Codex. In Exodus 14 to 15 we have one variant, and Deuteronomy 31:1-9 we have one variant; why did I stop at verse 9? Because after that it's a replacement sheet, so I couldn't do the rest of 31 and 32.

So, the Aleppo Codex is the most accurate manuscript of the Tanakh that exists, but unfortunately most of it is missing, so we can't directly compare this manuscript to the Aleppo Codex, which is what we want to do. However, what we have are witnesses to the Aleppo Codex. And what do I mean by witnesses? There were people who went and examined the Aleppo Codex before the pieces went missing, the pieces of the Torah, and they gave us various types of information. They would say, “We compared this section to this other section,” this other version. And so, there are scholars who have reconstructed what is in the Aleppo Codex down to the very letter, in the case of the Torah.

One of those is Menachem Cohen, who created the MgKeter database, which is available online. We’ll throw up a link to it here. And then Rabbi Mordechai Breuer, he also reconstructed it. And then Professor Jordan Penkower, he then found more evidence. That’s the New Evidence book I referred to that got down to some really fine details.

So, we don't have the Aleppo Codex in the Torah, but we have a pretty good reconstruction of at least what the consonants were, maybe not the vowels and accents, but when it comes to the consonants we have a pretty good idea of what the exact letters were. And when I say here “variant”, I mean… well, we'll show an example here. But basically “variant” means what I found in “PS3”, in this Torah Scroll from around the year 1000, is different from the Aleppo Codex, but it's incredible to go through five chapters and there's not a single difference even in a single letter. And in these other chapters, there were two minor differences. Let’s look at those.

Nelson: Nehemia, if I may ask a question real quick.