So it is proper to speak of different Jewish
traditions rather than of the one single tradition preserved by the Jews
through generations without alteration or flaw which Orthodox defenders proudly
proclaim. I have already written that the tradition of present-day Judaism
concerning the Exodus and the Sinai Revelation is based solely on the
Scriptural narrative. In the light of this, it is interesting to note that
nowadays there is considerable evidence and largely a consensus among scholars
that the text of the Scripture itself has undergone significant changes. And
though the changes, of which we are now aware, did not affect the main details
of the Exodus--Sinai--Land-of-Israel narrative, the findings dealing with the
text of the Pentateuch as it looked through ages seem sufficient to undermine a
belief in the Divine origin and immutability of each and every word of the
Torah -- a belief which is presented as basic to Orthodox Judaism in its
present-day form.
To begin with, to this very day there are
different versions of the Torah text. The Torah scrolls of Ashkenazic and
Sephardic Jews, though based on the same Masoretic formula (following the
Mesorah of the 10th-century scholar Aaron Ben Asher; the most famous printed
text based on this formula is the Koren edition of the Scripture), still differ
by one letter -- in Deuteronomy 23:2 Ashkenazic scrolls have the
word daka with an aleph, and Sephardic with a hey. The
Torah scrolls of Yemenite communities are nine letters (all vowelizing
letters: aleph, hey, vav and yud) different from the
Ashkenazic scrolls. The books of the Holy Writ distributed to Israeli Army
soldiers, published by Adi Ltd., proofread by Aharon Dotan, and approved by the
Chief Army Rabbinate, are based on a Masoretic manuscript written in Egypt in
the 11th century CE (the manuscript is kept in the Public Library of St.
Petersburg under the number B19A and is called the Leningrad Manuscript), and
there are many differences from the Koren edition: in four places where the Adi
edition spells the word hi [she] as hey-yud-aleph Koren
spells it as hey-vav-aleph, and in two places where the Adi edition spells
the word vehi [and she] as vav-hey-yud-aleph Koren spells
it as vav-hey-vav-aleph. In Leviticus 19:4 Koren spells the
word elilim [idols] as aleph-lamed-yud-lamed-mem sofit, while
the Adi edition spells it as aleph-lamed-yud-lamed-yud-mem sofit (that
is, with an extra yud). Even the Rama -- Rabbi Moses Isserles -- admits
that we are not expert on defective and plene spellings in the Torah:
"Because of plene and defective spelling one should not bring another
[Torah scroll, when reading the Torah in public], for our Torah scrolls are not
so accurate that we can say the other scroll will be more kosher" (Orach Chayim,
paragraph 143, section 4). Though the differences in plene and defective
spelling listed above do not change the words' meaning, there are more
significant differences.
Thus what is written in the 20th chapter of
Exodus, "I am the Lord your G-d, who has brought you out of the land of
Egypt, of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me,"
is presented in the Adi edition as one verse (Exodus 20:2), while the Koren
edition separates it into two verses (Exodus 20:2-3). This issue raises a
Halachic problem: when reading the Torah in public, one should pause at the end
of each verse. The partition of text into verses is said to originate from
Moses himself (Taanit 27b, Megillah 22a). So how should we read these sentences
-- as one verse or two? And which version matches the original partition into
verses: Koren, or the Adi edition? Both of these versions are, by the way,
based on the Masoretic school of Ben Asher, adopted by the Rishonim as the most
trustworthy of the Masoretic schools, despite serious suspicions that Ben Asher
was a Karaite (see Encyclopedia Hebraica, Ben Asher, v. IX, pp. 40-41). In
the scrolls of the school of Ben Naftali (a contemporary of Ben Asher) there
were yet more differences, both in defective and plene spelling and in
punctuation.
In addition to the above, the words "I am
the Lord your G-d" and "You shall have no other gods before Me"
are considered the first two of the Ten Commandments by virtually all the
commentators on the Scripture, but Ibn Ezra on Deuteronomy 5:16 considers the
former an introductory statement by G-d and the latter the first commandment.
According to the Adi edition, "I am the
Lord your G-d, who has brought you out of the land of Egypt, of the house of
bondage, you shall have no other gods before Me" is a single
sentence, without any separation mark in the middle (not like the verse
"You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal.
You shall not bear false witness against your fellow," which, though it is
one verse, has the signs of "parashah stumah" separating one
commandment from another). In this case, "I am the Lord your G-d, who has
brought you out of the land of Egypt, of the house of bondage, you shall have
no other gods before Me," must be a single commandment, and both
opinions on which verses formed each of the Ten Commandments run into
difficulty. So, what were the Ten Commandments according to the Adi
edition? It is not surprising, then, that we have no definite tradition on this
matter.
Yet a greater amount of discrepancy exists
between our Torah scrolls (by "our scrolls" I mean those represented
in print by the Koren edition) and those of the Sages of Talmudic and
pre-Talmudic generations, as found in their descriptions in the Gemara. In Tractate
Kiddushin 30a we are told: "Therefore the sages of previous
generations were called soferim ["scribes," also
"those who count"], for they counted all the letters of the Torah.
Thus they said: vav of the word gachon (Leviticus 11:42) is the
middle of the Torah's letters; the words darosh darash (Leviticus
11:16) are the middle of the words; the verse 'Vahitgalach...' (Leviticus
13:33) is the middle of the verses."
But if one takes our Torah scroll and starts
counting, he will find that:
1. The middle letter of the Torah
is aleph of the word hu in Leviticus 8:28. Leviticus 8:28
is 93 verses distant from Leviticus 11:42, where the
word gachon makes its sole appearance in our Torah scroll
spelled gimel-chet-vav-nun sofit, as brought by the Gemara. The
distance between these two letters is 4829 letters --that is, there is a
difference of 4829 letters between the ancient Sages' Torah scrolls and ours.
This may be still ascribed to plene/defective spelling variations, but the huge
number of differences makes such an explanation highly problematic.
2. The middle verse of the Torah is
"Vayasem alav et hachoshen..." (Leviticus 8:8). Its distance from
"Vahitgalach..." is 164 verses. Must we therefore conclude that
there are 164 verses by which our Torah is different the Torah the ancient
Sages had? Might they have contained a lot of important laws and details
which could completely change the meaning of the Torah text? This difference
may still be ascribed to the confusion of separating the text into verses --
such as we saw above -- yet changes in punctuation and the separation of
sentences may also affect the text's meaning, as we have seen concerning the
Ten Commandments and as we see throughout Talmudic and Midrashic literature.
3. One more point deserving mentioning on this matter
is that even in the Torah texts of Tannaim and Amoraim the number of verses
changed from one text to another. It is clear that to make
"Vahitgalach..." (or any other verse) the middle verse of the Torah,
one must have an odd number of verses. When the Gemara considered a number of
certain units (namely, words) in the Torah text even, it did not hesitate to
mention two such units (namely, darosh darash) as the middle ones. Yet, on
the same page (30a) of Kiddushin the Gemara brings a Tannaitic statement that
there are 5888 verses in the Torah -- an even number in which no single verse
could be called "the middle of the verses" of the Torah. The text of
5888 verses obviously could not be the text in which "Vahitgalach..."
is the middle verse. (In present Torah texts there are about 5845 verses -- the
precise number depends on the version.)
4. It is also interesting to note that in
Tractate Soferim 9:2 it is written that the verse "Vayishchat..." is
the middle verse of the Torah. Though in our Torah text there are five verses
beginning with "Vayishchat" -- Leviticus 8:15, 8:19, 8:23, 9:12 and
9:18 -- none of them is the middle verse of our Torah text, and all of them are
quite distant from the verse "Vahitgalach..." which the Talmud in
Kiddushin 30a stated was the middle verse of the Torah.
5. And the most noteworthy -- the real middle
word of the Torah is achat of "...vechalat lechem shemen achat..."
(Leviticus 8:26). The real number of the Torah words is odd, not even, but not
only that: the distance between this word and darosh darash is 743
words. Clearly 743 words could not appear or disappear due to variations
in plene and defective spellings, nor as result of punctuation mix-ups. Either
the Sages were engaged in some form of extraordinary hyperbole or their text
was radically different from ours. (Actually, there are words in the Torah
that are written as one word but read as two [like mazeh of Exodus
4:2, which is read mah zeh, or eshdat of Deuteronomy 33:2, which
is read esh dat] -- and it is not clear how the soferim of the
Gemara counted them -- but there are only a few such words in the whole Torah,
and they could not add up to a difference of 743 words.)
You are correct that there is dispute about the
spelling of the word ‘daka’, if the accurate spelling is with an ‘aleph’, or with
a ‘hey’. This question is discussed at length by Rabbi Abraham Yaffo in his
Mishnat Avraham, section 32.
In contrast, with regard
to the nine differences between our Torah scrolls and the ones the Yemenite
Jews possess, I do not know that this was discussed by the European Acharonim,
as in their times they presumably did not have knowledge of this discrepancy.
But it is only fair to acknowledge, as you have pointed out, that the
differences are truly minor, and that they do not make much difference to the
meaning of the text.
As for the Leningrad Codex, on which the Adi
edition is based, there are a number of reasons to believe that the Aleppo
Codex is even more reliable.
Firstly, the Aleppo Codex
is internally consistent, with very few discrepancies between the text and the
mesoratic notes. As Rabbi
Mordechai Breuer writes in his introduction to his book,
The Aleppo Codex and the Accepted Text of the Bible: “In the codex known as the
Leningrad manuscript, there are more than 250 places in the Prophets where the
scribe erred regarding defective and plené spellings. In the Cairo manuscript
of the Prophets, there are about 130 errors of that kind. However, in the
Aleppo Codex, there are two places in the Prophets where there is no doubt that
the scribe erred in this matter.” And as he further writes in his work Da’at
Mikrah, published by the Rav Kook Institute, in the introduction to his Horev
edition of Torah: “Anyone who examines the Aleppo Codex and looks closely into
it, both generally and in its details, is astonished by the ability of its
vocalizer and Masorete to produce something accurate, without flaw or error,
with perfection almost beyond human ability. He was expert in defective and
plené spellings, in the ways of vocalization and the intricacies of
cantillation, and no secret of the Masora resisted him. He was the only one
among all the scribes, vocalizers, Masoretes, and proofreaders who managed to
write an entire manuscript of the Bible without deviating from the rules and
instructions of the Masora.”
Secondly, Shmuel ben Yaakov, the compiler of the Leningrad
Codex, writes near the end of his book: “Shmuel Ben Yaakov wrote and vocalized
and transmitted this codex of the Bible (machzor hazeh shel mikrah) from the books
corrected and annotated, that were done by the learned (or the teacher) Aharon
Ben Moshe Ben Asher, may he rest in Gan Eden. And it (i.e. the Leningrad Codex)
is corrected very well.” Obviously, it is hard to bring the work of the
Leningrad Codex as proof against the work of the Aleppo Codex, if the Leningrad
Codex was meant to be based on the Aleppo codex.
Thirdly, we clearly know that Ben Asher spent many years
correcting and perfecting his work. As also Maimonides writes in his Laws of
the Torah Scroll 8:4: “Since I have seen great confusion about these matters in
all the scrolls I have seen, and similarly, the masters of the tradition who
have written down and composed [texts] to make it known [which passages] are p'tuchot and
which are s'tumot are divided with regard to the scrolls on
which to rely, I saw fit to write down the entire list of all the passages in
the Torah that are s'tumot and p'tuchot, and
also the form of the songs. In this manner, all the scrolls can be corrected
and checked against these [principles]. The scroll on which I relied on for
[clarification of] these matters was a scroll renowned in Egypt, which includes
all the 24 books [of the Bible]. It was kept in Jerusalem for many
years so that scrolls could be checked from it. Everyone relies upon it because
it was corrected by Ben Asher, who spent many years writing it
precisely, and [afterward] checked it many times. I relied [on this scroll] when I wrote a
Torah scroll according to law.” To the best of my knowledge, we do not have a
similar tradition with regard to the work of Shmuel ben Yaakov.
I should note that it is very hard to be critical
of the fact the Leningrad Codex contains some copying errors, as a codex of
that magnitude has well over 2,500,000 details in it. Even if a copyist would
make only one error per every 1,000 details, that would still result in over
2,500 mistakes.
As for the meaning of the Gemara in Kiddushin, I
will note that if one has familiarity with the text as it is written in the
Torah scroll, the statements the Gemara make become immediately suspicious, as
one notices that the words or letters that are referenced to contain either a
large or small letter: the vav of gachon, is a large vav; the word vahitgalach,
contains a large gimmel; and the ayin of ya’ar in Psalms, is a small ayin.
Rabbi Yitzchak Zilber, who noticed this, suggested
the following explanation (mentioned by Rabbi Menachem Kasher in Torah Shlema
28 pp. 286 – 289):
“The vav of the word gachon (Leviticus 11:42)
is the middle of the Torah's letters” – meaning the middle letter of the unusual
letters – the large and small letters – of the Torah, which it is; “the
words darosh darash (Leviticus 11:16) are the middle of the words” –
meaning the middle of double words (where there are two words following each
other that are spelt identically, such as אברהם אברהם (Genesis 22:11) or עדר עדר (Genesis 32:17)) in the Torah, which it is, and; “the ayin of miya’ar (Psalms 80:14) is
the middle of Psalms” – meaning the middle of the large and small letters in
Psalms, which it is as well.
(I have not found if Rabbi Zilber offered an explanation for
the meaning of “the verse 'Vahitgalach...' (Leviticus 13:33) [is the middle] of
the verses.”)
Lastly, with regard to the number of 5888 that
the Gemara provides as the count for the verses of the Torah, Rabbi Yitzchak
Zilber notes that there are 43 verses which are found in Psalms and Chronicles
that are identical to verses that are found in the Torah. Accordingly, the
Talmudic statement can be understood as follows: “The Sages taught: 5888 are
the verses of the Torah scroll (that are found throughout the entire Scripture
– 5845 in the Torah, and another 43 in other books), eight more [verses] in
Psalms (i.e. 8 identical verses) and eight less in Chronicles (i.e. 35, which
is eight less from 43, as the other 8 verses are in found in Psalms).” I’ll readily
admit that this explanation doesn’t fit very well into the words, but it is
possible that it reflects the true intent of the passage nonetheless,
especially when considering the other details that fit in well.
It may very well be that the intent of the Talmud
by recording these teachings were to assure the future generations that the
unusual features that are found in the Torah text are not mistakes; rather that
they are supposed to be there, and are part of the original scribal tradition.
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