In this episode of Hebrew Voices #234 - The Jewish Bible: Part 1, Nehemia brings on “modern-day Masorete” Dr. Avi Kadish to discuss how crowdsourcing has produced what is possibly the most accurate version of the Hebrew Bible, the ancient Jewish methods that transmitted the texts we have today, and the modern approach to following in their footsteps.
I look forward to reading your comments!
Download Audio
Transcript
Hebrew Voices #234 – The Jewish Bible: Part 1
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: So, your working assumption, it sounds like, is that people like Aharon Ben-Asher knew the entire Tanakh by heart, along with its cantillation and perfect pronunciation, and that’s what they were recording.
Avi: That’s what they were recording, yeah.
Avi: Breuer tries to prove that. I think he successfully proved it by looking at the kinds of errors that some of the early Masoretes made. They didn’t make copying errors. They made the kind of errors that someone who’s singing might make.
Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Dr. Avi Kadish. He is the founder and chief editor of M’AM; Miqra al pi ha’Masorah. He has a PhD in Jewish philosophy, and he teaches Jewish philosophy, Jewish history, and medieval Jewish exegesis at Oranim College in Kiryat Tiv’on, which is near Haifa in Israel. Shalom, Avi.
Nehemia: So, what is Miqra al pi ha’Masorah, Scripture according to the Mesora?
Avi: Okay. It’s a digital edition of the Masoretic Text. It’s edited based on manuscripts and based on Masoretic scholarship. It’s documented, meaning you can use the documentation to trace the source for any detail within the text to know why it’s that way and not some other way. And you mentioned that it’s found on Wikitext, or Hebrew Wiki Source, which is true, but it’s also widely used… it’s also the text that you find of the Tanakh at Sefaria and at al HaTorah, which are two widely used websites for studying Jewish sources.
Nehemia: Okay. And I understand it’s used by some printers when they print the Bible, or they print the Tanakh in Hebrew.
Avi: Yeah, it’s gotten around. For instance, there’s an edition of former prophets, Judges through Kings with a modern Hebrew commentary, that’s actually published and sold in bookstores and uses it.
Nehemia: Wow, that’s pretty cool. So, can you show us what it looks like?
Avi: I’ll show you what it looks like.
Nehemia: Share your screen and let the let the viewers see. And for those who are listening… so, I guess we’ll just have to describe it, because most people actually listen these days.
Avi: Okay, well, here’s what it looks like.
Avi: For those who see the screen, this is the title, Miqra al pi ha-Masorah. It’s very, very basic. You have here links to all the various books of the Tanakh, as you would expect. Above, you also have resources. First of all, easy links to each book of Tanakh here, too, because that appears on each and every page. But you also have links to, like, a Bible index, Torah index, Nevi’im index, Ktuvim index, readings for holidays, audio recordings of Miqra, because Miqra, as we’ll talk about, is partially in oral tradition.
Nehemia: And Miqra is the Hebrew word for scripture, which is a bit ironic. Or maybe not ironic.
Avi: Except that it’s not.
Nehemia: It’s not. Okay. So, what is Miqra?
Avi: In Modern Hebrew, you call a Bible department, Ha’Chug le’Miqra. So, in Modern…
Nehemia: Right, the Miqra Department.
Avi: …for Scripture, you’re not…
Nehemia: Or, my PhD is from the Machlaka le’Tanakh; the Tanakh Division.
Avi: Bar-Ilan ran away from the word Miqra.
Nehemia: But in Hebrew University, you’re right; it was the Chug le’Miqra, the Miqra Department. Okay.
Avi: Yes. So, Miqra in modern Hebrew is used as a high-falutin synonym for Scripture. You’re correct about that.
Avi: But historically, it is not. Historically, the word Miqra is not scripture; rather, it’s the oral, out loud, performance, audio performance, of Scripture.
Nehemia: Interesting. So, you know, we say in Hebrew le’ma ha’davar domeh? So, what is that similar to? So, the word nusach is, and Modern Hebrew will say nusach and girsa, which means the particular version, like with very specific nuances. But in Gaonic Hebrew, meaning, let’s say in the 10th century, girsa was what was recited in the yeshivas of the Talmud, and nusach was a written copy.
Nehemia: So, it’s an interesting parallel. So, you’re saying Miqra is not the written form of Scripture, it’s the oral recitation. You’re going to have to prove that to me.
Avi: Okay. Right now, or…
Nehemia: No, let’s save that for later, but that’s worth discussing. In fact, maybe we’ll do an extra episode as…
Avi: Nehemia, so we don’t get off track, we were looking here at the index. This link here to audio recordings, the two words for the name of it are va’yavinu ba’Miqra.
Nehemia: Ah… which is in Nehemiah chapter 8. Okay.
Avi: Nehemiah chapter 8. What is va’yavinu ba’Miqra? “The people listening understood the oral reading.”
Nehemia: Let’s do, like, the last 30 minutes as like a separate episode, because I think that’s important enough.
Nehemia: The ancient Hebrew word for… well, what is it? So, all right, let’s save that; that actually is really important. I mean, it’s fascinating. All right. So, tell us about this. So, you have Miqra al pi ha-Masorah, and how did you produce this text? And by the way, this is Wikisource, so help me understand because I really don’t know. What is the relationship between Wikipedia, Wikitext, and Wikisource? Are those… I literally have no clue. I know that Wikipedia… let me just say a few words about this. Wikipedia has articles that are wonderful, reliable descriptions of information, as other articles that are, we say in Hebrew, a balagan, a complete mess. I’ve heard somebody say recently that if you look at articles in Wikipedia that are about things, they’re generally accurate. About people, don’t trust a word you read. I don’t think that’s entirely true, because if you read anything to do with Israel and Zionism, it’s written… No, I’m not even kidding. There’s a concerted worldwide effort, and it’s not a conspiracy, it’s an open conspiracy.
Avi: An open, built-in bias. Yes.
Nehemia: Yeah. And there are literally thousands, I understand, of editors who are coordinated around the world to write lies about Israel. Anything to do with Israel and Zionism. It’s fantasy world, when it comes to Israel. So, I hear this. So, something called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. Murray Gell-Mann, I believe it was, he was a physicist. And it’s interesting, the example he brought. He said, “I read something in the newspaper in the New York Times about physics, and it’s completely wrong. And then I turn the page, and I say, oh, that’s what’s happening in Palestine.” That’s called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. How is it that I forget… and he actually said Palestine. From one page to the next, why do I forget that, in the subject I know about, they make everything up and they’re wrong. And like, what’s their objective to lie about physics? They just don’t understand it, or they don’t care, or they want a story that sounds interesting. And you turn the page in the New York Times, and they talk about Palestine, and you suddenly believe it. Why would you believe it? So, why should we believe your text when there’s so many lies in Wikipedia? That’s where I want to… Now, I’ll turn it over to you.
Avi: That’s a good question, and the truth is, I really wanted to start with it. I want to give credit where credit is due to the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, and I also want to maybe help people understand, besides, you know, the text that we’re talking about, you know. In what ways can these things be used reliably and in what ways not?
So, way, way back, okay, I was one of the, I guess, early people who got attracted to Wikipedia, when Wikipedia was the only thing that existed. And I thought, “Wow! This idea is fantastic! Crowdsourcing will build the world encyclopedia.” And I even thought that the crowdsourcing would help eliminate the bias, because, you know, each side would have to source itself and something good would come out of it. And the truth is, that was the intention at the beginning. They had something called the neutral point of view, which in the beginning actually worked. Okay? It mostly worked. And in time, it didn’t, for reasons that are not relevant to our discussion. But what I really thought when I started looking at Wikipedia and even beginning some of the original Judaica articles in Wikipedia, was, “This would be fantastic, not for encyclopedia articles, but for a digital library; to take the books on the shelves, and crowdsourcing with thousands of people to create digital editions of them.”
Nehemia: Tell the audience who may not be familiar; what is crowdsourcing?
Avi: Crowdsourcing means, like, if there’s a Wikipedia article on, I don’t know, the institution that I studied at, Yeshiva University, so anybody who knows anything about it, or knows sources that write about it, can go in and improve the article more and more and more so that it gets better and better and better and better. That’s the idea of crowdsourcing. The idea of crowdsourcing in a pithy way is that perfection is the enemy of the good. Right? If you want a perfect encyclopedia article, you’re going to have to wait a long time to get it, if ever. But if you’re willing to have a good article, that little by little, over the years, can be incrementally improved, okay. The same thing with, say, Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, right? My idea was, “Okay. This is public domain, published in the 1800s, right?” Somebody can type in Huckleberry Finn, and even if he makes typos, it’s not the end of the world, because the next guy can come in and fix the typos.
Avi: So, by 2003, that already existed, not due to my efforts, in English and in some other languages which coexisted with English on the same website. But it wasn’t so easy for other languages, because it was English. So, in 2003, I made a suggestion. It ultimately came to a vote, and it happened; to have a Hebrew Wikisource. Hebrew Wikisource was the first Wikisource in a language other than Hebrew with its own website.
Nehemia: You mean other than English?
Avi: Other than English… French and German coexisted with English.
Nehemia: So, sorry… it’s Wikisource?
Avi: It’s called Wikisource. I will show it to you in English.
Nehemia: And so, Wikisource… I’m still not clear. Is that part of Wikipedia?
Avi: I will explain. Give me a moment and I will explain, okay? This is English Wikisource. Welcome to Wikisource; not the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, but rather the free library that anyone can improve. And most of the issues that you have with Wikipedia don’t exist with Wikisource.
Avi: Because with Wikisource, you’re just taking a scanned edition of Mark Twain and typing it in.
Nehemia: Yeah, but I could see how somebody with a certain agenda might want to change… Like, for example, famously in Mark Twain, there’s what today are considered, and they are… You know, it’s funny; in the Tanakh we have the word yishkalena, which, every time it’s written is read out loud as yishkavena, which maybe we can talk about. Meaning, there’s words that the ancient Hebrews… and how early that is, we can discuss, that they wouldn’t pronounce. Even though, obviously, when it was written they had no problem pronouncing it. And so, maybe you would go through Mark Twain, and every time you have one of those words, you replace it with a more acceptable word…
Avi: Well, the advantage of Wikisource, and even Wikipedia, for that matter, is that every edit is traced. If someone comes in and does damage, they get blocked, and then the edit gets reversed. You had asked about, how are these things related to each other?
Avi: These are sister projects. Wikipedia is a sister project of Wikisource. There’s also Wikidata, Wikibooks, Wikimedia Commons, all kinds of interesting things…
Nehemia: So, most of these I’ve never heard of. What’s Wikivoyage?
Avi: Wikivoyage is an online collaborative travel guide, if you want to…
Nehemia: Oh, okay. And Wictionary?
Avi: …go to Thailand or something.
Nehemia: Okay. So, what is the relationship… these are all part of the Wikimedia Foundation?
Avi: These are all part of, right here… if you want to know, it’s part of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Nehemia: Okay. Which is… what is the Wikimedia? It’s the one that owns basically all these different…
Avi: It’s a nonprofit organization whose purpose is to run these projects which contribute to human knowledge. Okay?
Avi: Now, what was my idea? My idea was, “Okay, for Mark Twain, it’s great.” Because what happens with Mark Twain? I’ll show you what happens with Mark Twain, okay? Here. Huckleberry Finn, okay? Here’s Huckleberry Finn based on a scanned edition from 1884, okay?
Avi: And I can open up, for instance, chapter one, okay? And it reproduces the illustrations, and this is the digital text that people edited, and they proofread, okay? And if I want to make sure it’s correct, I click on page 2, and you can see the scan of the 1884 edition here, and you can edit. This page has already been validated; it’s green, there’s no longer a need…
Nehemia: Wait, don’t leave this page. Finish what you’re saying about this page, and I want to talk about something here. This is a beautiful example. So, you can see there’s a correction in the text.
Nehemia: I don’t know how to show it here. I think I can circle it here. I don’t know if the audience can see that. Well, the ones listening definitely can’t. So, it says here…
Nehemia: “He put me in them new clothes again, and I couldn’t do nothing but sweat. And…” I don’t know what it originally said, but now it says “swear”. Or maybe it’s “sweat” and “sweat.” I actually don’t know. “…and feel all cramped up.” So, somebody physically drew… wrote in the text, in the printed text, to modify it. And so, we have what was originally printed, at least in this copy. One of the things I’ve learned is, not every printed book, even today, let alone in the 1800s, is necessarily identical. “I could do nothing but sweat and sweat.” And it looks to me like somebody changed it to sweat and swear.
Avi: No, no, no. It’s “sweat” and here the typed version…
Nehemia: No, that’s what they typed. But what’s in the original? I don’t know because I don’t have the original.
Avi: “Sweat and swear”. Yeah, wow!
Nehemia: It looks like you’re…
Avi: You’re raising a good question, which MAM, Miqra al pi ha-Masorah, has an answer to, but which English Wikisource does not have an answer to. Let’s look…
Nehemia: So, what someone needs to do is look at a different copy of this 1884…
Nehemia: …and see what it originally was printed, and maybe the T is broken, and it really is a T?
Avi: Look, look Nehemia; in the typed version here, I could change it to “swear”, okay? It would probably get removed, okay? People watching…
Nehemia: So, is there a way to say the original printing is “R”, and here’s your proof?
Avi: Exactly! That’s exactly my point. There’s no answer to this problem in English Wikisource. But we built Hebrew Wikisource with an answer to this problem, so I’m very glad that you brought it up, okay?
Avi: Let me show you what we did in Hebrew Wikisource. Huckleberry Finn, despite sweat and swear… got a good eye! Okay?
Nehemia: This is what I do; almost five days a week, I look for what’s written in the manuscript. But what was originally written before it was modified? This is literally what I do!
Avi: Despite that, Huckleberry Finn is not that hard to type in, and not that hard to understand.
Nehemia: No, but I’ll give you an example, and you can stop sharing the screen here. So, here’s an interesting example I learned about recently. So, we have The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, and when he decided to write Lord of the Rings, he had to modify The Hobbit. And so, he changed some things in The Hobbit. So, if you get an original edition of The Hobbit, it’s not what we read today in The Hobbit, because it didn’t… and it’s what’s called retconning, retroactive continuity, right? So, he literally changed his own book, and they reprinted it. So, you buy, or you go online, I don’t know if it’s in copyright, and you see The Hobbit, and it’s not what Tolkien originally wrote.
And another famous example is Star Wars. There are scenes in Star Wars that were digitally modified, and as far as I know, there’s no available copy of what we saw in the theaters in 1977, or whatever year it was. All the CGI was added 20 years later, or so. You know, a computer-generated images, or whatever that stands for, graphics, I don’t know. And so, you say, what’s the original? So, if I have a DVD, a physical DVD in my hand, that’s not the original that we saw in the theaters as kids. All right, so, talk to me. How do you deal with that? Are there similar issues when it comes to the Tanakh?
Avi: There are not just similar issues, there’s a lot more issues in Hebrew than in English, okay? In English, most of Huckleberry Finn, I assume, doesn’t have things like that, okay? Even in that scanned volume. But in Hebrew you have massive problems that you don’t have in English. If I type up Huckleberry Finn based on 1884, like they did at Wikisource, you can read it today, right? And it’s just like buying the book off the shelf. No difference.
But Hebrew public domain texts were not like that. They were completely different, and I will give you here an example. This was my first project at Wikisource before I worked on the Tanakh. This is… Aruch HaShulchan, which is a 19th, early 20th century halakhic code, and what you have here is… unlike Mark Twain, you have zero punctuation, no periods, no commas, no quotation marks. You have tons of words that they don’t write the whole word; they just cut off the end of the word.
Nehemia: Tell us what the relationship is between Aruch HaShulchan and Shulchan Aruch.
Avi: Okay, the Shulchan Aruch, which is much better known, of course… this is a re-statement of the Shulchan Aruch. Each chapter is restated. It’s the same…
Nehemia: Why is it restated? Is it more like a summary? Or more succinct? Or…
Avi: Aruch Hashulchan is actually somewhat encyclopedic. The Aruch HaShulchan, rather than telling you the ruling, like the Shulchan Aruch does, it gives you the sources in the Talmud and decisors, and how you get to the ruling.
Nehemia: Okay. So, wait; what were the issues here that you had, that…
Avi: The issues here is that, in order to have a modern digital version, you must add elements which the scan does not contain, which the original edition did not contain. Plus, like you’re saying, there may be mistakes or unclear places…
Nehemia: Or here, there’s two words that are broken.
Nehemia: You have to guess from the context… I mean, it’s not hard to guess.
Avi: So, the way we dealt with it was this, okay? What we did was, in the edit page… I showed you the edit page for Huckleberry Finn. We actually changed the words…
Nehemia: And let me just explain for those who are listening. I’m looking here at a Hebrew square script from, you said it’s the 20th century, the 1900s.
Avi: Around the turn of the century.
Nehemia: Okay, so, sometime in the late 1800s, early 1900s. And there’s a piece of paper missing! And we can guess what that word is; it’s probably not hard to guess if we read the context, but… Yeah, all right. So, in that case… and this is your only source, right? Or are there multiple scans?
Avi: The manuscripts of most of this work no longer exist. Certain parts do. And the only source for this text that we have is the published text.
Nehemia: Yeah, but there must be other copies of the published text, meaning…
Avi: There’s tons of copies of the published text. We want… we need to pick one. This is actually the original edition, also from 1884. But look at the difference between how Huckleberry Finn is presented, which… they built English Wikisource on stuff like that, versus this Hebrew text, which is the stuff we build Hebrew Wikisource on.
Nehemia: So, give us an example of something that you would modify here.
Avi: Okay. This is an abbreviation; U’Moshe rabbenu alav hashalom.
Nehemia: All right. So, we have five letters Vav, Mem, Resh, Ayin, Hey, and if you didn’t know what that was, it would be gibberish, or it would mean “and the pastor”, let’s say.
Avi: Yeah. So, we add punctuation. We expanded the abbreviations. We expanded the abbreviated words. And when there was something like this, we created a template.
Nehemia: Meaning, this paper missing… yeah.
Avi: Okay? Here, what we would do… for instance, we’d say the copy is damaged. Maybe we found the words in an alternative copy. Maybe we’re supplying it through a reconstruction, okay? But we document that there is a problem, and what we did with the problem.
Avi: Okay? And even adding the punctuation; every time we add a period, we don’t note it. But in the introduction to the edition, we say that this edition adds punctuation, crowdsourced punctuation, which did not exist in the original edition.
Nehemia: Let me ask this question, and that’s probably good for the average user. But if I were studying this, let’s say, to cite in an academic article, I need to know what actually was printed. Do I have access to that without going through… In other words, can I click a button and see, here’s what’s on the page, and then here’s how it was expanded? And why is that important? There might be a place where you thought, and this happens all the time. It happened to the Masoretes, which maybe we’ll get to, where you thought the abbreviation meant one thing, but the abbreviation, I think, means something else. There are examples where one Masorete was copying, and he misunderstood the Masoretic note of a previous Masorete. We have examples like that. So, I want to see the source. So, is that accessible with Wikisource?
Avi: Well, there’s a legal side to your question. Because Wikisource cannot use copyrighted material, we’re working on un-copyrighted materials like this. Since it’s un-copyrighted material, we provide links that… it exists on the internet because it’s not copyrighted. You can download the scan. And we’ve made an effort for the text within Hebrew Wikisource to always provide links to the volumes and the scans upon which the edition is based.
Nehemia: But there is no, what we might call a diplomatic edition, where it’s an exact reproduction. That’s the term we use. A diplomatic edition is supposed to be an exact reproduction of the source.
Avi: That’s the beautiful thing. It’s crowdsourcing. If you don’t like that I added commas and periods to this text, and you want a diplomatic edition, then nobody is stopping you!
Nehemia: I actually do like it, but I’d like to have access to both. That’s my point.
Avi: Yeah, well, that’s what I’m saying. If you’d like it, don’t say “I’d like it.” So, why haven’t you supplied it?
Avi: You should say “I’d like it, so, hey, Wikisource allows me to go and do it! I’ll go create my own diplomatic edition of Aruch HaShulchan on Wikisource.”
Nehemia: Okay. All right. Beautiful.
Avi: That’s what crowdsourcing…
Nehemia: If there’s somebody out there who says… and I’m just thinking out loud here. So, let’s say… I don’t know, I want to try to be diplomatic here. Let’s say I’m somebody with a particular religious perspective, and I believe… I’ll give you an example. So, Muslims have made the claim… it’s Islamic doctrine. Not all Muslims believe this, but there’s an Islamic doctrine that says that the Jews and the Christians have corrupted their sacred texts. And let’s say I were a Muslim…
Nehemia: It’s called ahrif. Okay. Is that with a Het or a Hey?
Avi: With a Tav at the beginning. Tah-rif.
Avi: It’s the Islamic claim that the Jews and Christians falsified the Scriptures.
Nehemia: Okay. So, let’s say I were a Muslim, and I decide I’m going to reconstruct the original Book of Genesis. And instead of Isaac being bound to the to the altar, it’s Yishmael, or Isma’il, and I decide to… Can I go on Wikisource and copy your text… and what is that called? A fork? Make a fork…
Nehemia: Meaning, I make a version of it where it’s Yishmael who’s bound! Can I do that? And I call this The Islamic Reconstructed Original Tarat.
Avi: Just like Sefaria and Al haTorah copied that biblical text, MAM, so too you can copy… And for instance, Al haTorah has done things to it, has changed it. Okay, modified it. So too, you can fork it someplace else and do whatever you want with it.
Nehemia: And that’s F-O-R-K, so, to fork is like a fork in the road. And so, this is another version of it out there that’s based on an earlier version. So, in other words, they could reconstruct what they believe to be the uncorrupted form of the Torah, and in it, I don’t know, Abraham will go to the Kaaba with Ishmael and they’ll build it together, right? He’ll have, you know, chapter 24B or something, I don’t know, where… I mean, literally… can they do that on Wikisource? Or do they have to do it on the different websites?
Avi: You can use the material on all Wiki, all Wikimedia Foundation Projects…
Avi: … in any way that you want.
Nehemia: But can they do it on Wikisource, is my question.
Avi: Oh, could you do that on Wikisource? Not quite.
Nehemia: Okay, because you say if I don’t like that version, make my own version. But now I’ve got to make my own infrastructure of the website.
Avi: Correct. Let me explain. English Wikisource is much stricter because they’re able to be stricter. They only allow scans, scan of a page and the text.
Avi: For Aruch HaShulchan that won’t work. I mean, it would work for diplomatic Aruch HaShulchan, but it wouldn’t work for a punctuated with links and all kinds of things…
Nehemia: Meaning, for it to be useful, you’ve got to make some modifications.
Avi: Right! Huckleberry Finn doesn’t have to be modified much, if at all, whereas most public domain Hebrew texts need immense modifications.
Nehemia: Can you go back to Aruch HaShulchan? There’s a really interesting example there on the page. And look, if you get someone who is, you know, very well versed in the literature, they don’t need it. But let’s say for the average reader… here, I’m going to see if I can circle this. So, guys, here on the page there’s something that’s in a different font, and it’s the letters Pey-Hey, with a double apostrophe; girshayim. And then it says Mem-Samekh-Nun-Hey, and another single apostrophe; it’s in square brackets. You know, it’s kind of like the young people say, “if you know, you know”. Right? So, it’s chapter 5 of Sanhedrin. Even if you know what that means, it’s not necessarily useful. I want a page number in the tractate for Sanhedrin for it to be useful.
Avi: That’s what we do, Nehemia. We turn that text, perek chamishi mi’Sanhedrin, into a link to the page of tractate Sanhedrin.
Nehemia: Beautiful. That’s beautiful! So, that’s a very powerful thing you’ve done. In other words, you haven’t preserved the text exactly as it was printed, but you made it far more useful than the printer or author ever imagined it could be.
Avi: Plus, we explain what we did.
Nehemia: That’s beautiful.
Avi: We don’t say that the link was originally there. In the introduction to the edition, we explain that we’ve added links to certain things.
Nehemia: So, I’ve worked on some medieval Rabbinical texts, and it might take me… and this is easy, right? Chapter 5 of Sanhedrin, that shouldn’t take a long time to find. But I’ve worked on things where it’s not easy, necessarily, to decipher what they’re referencing, and it’s detective work. And in some instances, you find out they’re quoting the Yerushalmi, the Jerusalem Talmud, but that rabbi in his life never saw the Jerusalem Talmud. He’s quoting Rabbi number two, who’s quoting Rabbi number three, who’s mis-quoting Rabbi number four, and the Jerusalem Talmud doesn’t even say that.
Like, I have an actual example of that in an article I published. Might be a slight exaggeration, but it’s something where it’s very clear that this rabbi has never seen the Jerusalem… Or if he does have the Jerusalem Talmud in his library, he’s not going to go to the trouble of opening up that volume and trying to find it. It’s quoted by this other rabbi, and he trusts him, right? And so, that’s actually a problem in the Jerusalem Talmud in particular; there’s a lot of quotations that are second or third hand. So, all right. So, now let’s go to the Hebrew Bible.
Avi: So, now we get to Miqra al pi ha-Masorah.
Nehemia: Let’s go. Let’s jump into it.
Avi: What I wanted to do, one last little point about Aruch HaShulchan. I thought with Aruch HaShulchan, which was my first project, “I want to study Aruch HaShulchan.” But there’s no commas, and there’s no periods, and whenever I would use a printed book, I’d write in the commas and the periods. I said, “Why don’t I do that online? If Hebrew Wikisource would exist…” which it did finally in 2004…
Avi: “…and as I read, I’ll punctuate and I’ll expand abbreviations. And then I’ll do this chapter by chapter until the book is finished.” Okay? And I did that; we did the first section “Orach Chayim” of the Aruch HaShulchan, myself and one other person. We finished the entire thing.
Avi: And you know, as I do it chapter by chapter, the next person who studies that chapter will have a better tool. I did that and some other projects, and then finally I started asking myself, “What about the Tanakh?” The Aruch HaShulchan wasn’t satisfactory in its printed version, and there are beautiful Tanakhim, but none of them was exactly the way I thought a Tanakh should be. And certainly, online I didn’t find a Tanakh that I thought was good enough, okay, for traditional Jewish use.
Nehemia: That’s an interesting statement that I think you have to explain. What do you mean?
Avi: Okay. Well, at the time, there were two Tanakh’s available online digitally. When I say Tanakh, I’m talking about the Hebrew Tanakh with the miqra, meaning with the vocalization, the vowels and the accents and all of that. The two that existed at the time were something called the Westminster Leningrad Codex, which some of your viewers may be familiar with. A wonderful fellow named Chris Kimball, he created this early on in the internet age. He wanted to have a diplomatic edition, an exact digital copy, of the Leningrad Codex. And that was available under an open license. He put it into the open domain, and anybody could use it.
Avi: The other thing that was available at the time was a lesser-known website, although some Jews might be familiar with it, called Mechon Mamre. Mechon Mamre was a digital Tanakh which was edited according to the Masorah. You know how…
Nehemia: So, we had what the young people call…
Avi: …how loaded that phrase is?
Nehemia: Hold on. We had some air quotes, for those who are listening. You say…
Avi: You know, it’s a loaded phrase, “edited according to the Masorah”. I wasn’t putting the air quotes because I think he didn’t do the job; he did the job. Okay? The editor, who passed away a couple of years ago, was a wonderful man, and he did an excellent job editing, okay?
Avi: But no matter who you are, if you’re one person, right, you can never do a perfect job. Ever.
Avi: Okay? No human being can do a perfect job, certainly on the digital Masoretic Text, which Yosef Ofer says has more than three million orthographic signs, letters, and accents.
Nehemia: Tell us what that means, orthographic signs.
Avi: In other words, letters and the little vowel symbol here, or a vowel symbol there, or an accent here, or an accent there.
Nehemia: Right. So, it’s not just the number of consonants; when you take into account all the vowels and accents, you’re saying the estimate is three million. I hadn’t heard that. I did hear a lecture from Yosef Ofer, like over 20 years ago.
Nehemia: I think it was over 20 years ago when they had the launch of the Jerusalem Crown Edition of the Tanakh, and this was at Mount Scopus, Hebrew University. And he gave a fascinating lecture that I’ve never forgotten, which I think will tie into what you’ve done. So, Rabbi Mordechai Breuer had created two editions of the Tanakh that were printed, but they weren’t available in digital format.
Nehemia: So, what he did is, he took some edition, I believe it was the Westminster. It’s been over, like 20 years, so I don’t remember exactly, but I believe it was the Westminster Digital Edition, and he had a team of research assistants who went through and modified the Westminster Edition to match the printed Breuer Edition. And he said, “It’s impossible,” I’m paraphrasing here, so, apologies Professor Ofer, but he said something to the effect that, it’s impossible not to have mistakes. And they went and they spent several years going through editing this.
I mean, it’s actually almost what Maimonides says about Ben Asher; that he proofread it many times. Right? There’s the quotation where Maimonides is talking about what became the Aleppo Codex, and was in Egypt at the time of Maimonides, and so, Ofer’s team went through multiple times, and he said, “When they would go eight hours and find only one or two mistakes, then I knew that, okay, it’s never going to be perfect, but this is as close as we’re ever going to get.” If you spent an eight-hour shift and you found, I think it was something, and you found two mistakes, okay, you’re probably not going to find too many more. So, it’s as close as perfect as was possible in the early 20th century. But now with crowdsourcing, maybe we can even do better.
Avi: So, yeah, that’s actually a factor here. It’s maybe getting a little bit ahead of ourselves.
Nehemia: So, let’s go back.
Avi: But it goes back to that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Okay? That was my mindset when I worked on…
Nehemia: The phrase I’ve always heard is, “perfect is the enemy of done”.
Nehemia: Right? If you want it to be perfect, it’ll never be done.
Avi: Nice, nice. So, Aruch HaShulchan, you know, wasn’t perfect, and people would come in after me and found that I made mistakes, and it would get better and better as time went on. The same thing with the Tanakh. Now, Mechon Mamre has errors. It doesn’t mean he didn’t do a fantastic job editing; it has errors. It also has editorial decisions. In other words, the reason I did these according to the Masorah…
Nehemia: Air quotes, for those listening.
Avi: Right, the air quotes, is not to cast aspersions on his editing, but rather that he made certain decisions that, you know, my idea of the Masoretic Text, that would have made a slightly different decision, and I’m sure you would do the same, okay? In other words, there are so many technical elements that it’s not worth getting into what they are. There are so many technical editorial decisions that have to be made…
Nehemia: Can you give us one example of what might be a technical editorial decision? Let’s take a really easy example. In Genesis, there’s the verse where, in one version it says vayehi yemei and the other it’s vayihiyu yemei. Can we look at…
Avi: That’s a very certain kind of editorial decision.
Nehemia: That’s a huge one though. There’s an extra letter…
Avi: That decision is related to a fundamental question, but it’s only one fundamental question out of a million.
Avi: It’s just a very visible one. The question there is as follows: after the Masoretic era was done, there was a halakhic process which happened to fix the letters of Torah scrolls according to the Masorah. And the results of that halakhic process, even though, you know, it was identical for almost all the letters of the Torah, it wasn’t identical for all of them. So, the question is: if the Masorah… if we know what the Masorah wanted in that word, okay, and yet the halakhic process afterwards has Torah scrolls with a different reading of that particular word, do you reflect that in the text?
Now, obviously it must be documented. On the edit page, it’s documented just like little dots are documented. The question is whether you want to actually see it in the text. And the answer for Miqra al pi ha-Masorah is yes. When there are differences between Torah scrolls, or between Torah scrolls and what we know existed in the Aleppo Codex, there’s an actual footnote within the text.
Nehemia: Can you show us an example of that?
Avi: Vayehi in the… nu… where…
Nehemia: I know it, but the audience, at least the ones watching on video, I think it would useful…
Avi: So, tell me what chapter, and I’ll give it to…
Avi: I think it’s chapter 5, right?
Nehemia: I think it’s vayehiyu yemei Noach, if I’m not mistaken.
Avi: Yeah, it’s in chapter 5. So, let me share chapter 5. Here’s what you do. I go in to Genesis, Bereshit.
Avi: I select chapter 5. And where down below, we’ll have… no, it’s not here.
Nehemia: It’s not that one. It’s one of them, I don’t remember. Let’s look at Petzu’a Daka. That’s easier to find.
Nehemia: So, that’s going to be… here, let’s see.
Avi: There’s an example here; Ze sefer. Okay? In Yemenite Torah scrolls, there’s a large letter Samekh in sefer.
Nehemia: Okay. So, that has to do with some letters are written unusually. Okay. Let’s see, I don’t know that that goes back to the Masoretic era, whatever that even means.
Avi: It doesn’t. But it is a difference between Torah…
Nehemia: So, Deuteronomy 23:2, let’s look at that. So, in one version there’s an Alef, and in one version there’s a Hey.
Avi: Deuteronomy, what chapter did you say?
Nehemia: Chapter 23, verse 2.
Avi: Chapter 23, verse 2. Lo yavo petzu’a daka. Okay, here we have the Alef, which is the Yemenite, and apparently also the original Ashkenazi reading. And the note says, “Besifrei Sfarad, be’rov sifrei Ashkenaz,” in Sephardic Torah scrolls and in most Ashkenazic Torah scrolls, and, by the way, with the exception of Chabad, Daka with the letter Hey.
Nehemia: Okay, so, here there’s actually… it doesn’t change the meaning, guys, but there’s a difference in… it’s literally the same meaning. It means crushed. I won’t go into crushed what, but you can read it in Deuteronomy 23:2 yourself.
Nehemia: It’s talking about someone who’s been disfigured, let’s say. So, in the version here you have an Alef, which is what’s found in Yemenite Torah scrolls, and we believe what was in the Aleppo Codex. Although we don’t have this page of the Aleppo Codex, or we don’t know where it is, anyway, if it survives, and then in the Sephardic and most Ashkenazi Torah scrolls it’s with a Hey. And you’re saying that the Chabad Torah scrolls have it with an Alef.
Nehemia: And I’ve seen lots of manuscripts where it’s been changed. Like, if you’re looking for, like, an easy, the young people say W, “an easy win”, right, you’re looking for a scribal modification, you just don’t want to spend a lot of time, always look for this. Deuteronomy 23:2 is a good chance it’s been changed, because…
Avi: Let me show you a surprise.
Avi: Based on what you just said.
Avi: If I press arikha, which means edit, and I look at verse 2, look at the documentation note on that word.
Nehemia: So, translate into English what we’re seeing here.
Avi: What we’re seeing here is this: the two “equals equals” is for technical reasons. It doesn’t appear in the notes as they’re shown. Alef, meaning the Aleppo Codex, which no longer exists, apparently, or is lost, but we have five witnesses that the Aleppo Codex had it as it’s spelled here, with an Alef,
Nehemia: With an Alef, okay. What do we mean, witnesses? People went and they checked the Aleppo Codex for this specific thing because it was a known problem, and they wrote about it. Okay.
Avi: That’s right. And then the Leningrad Codex, and another codex which is by the same scribe as the Aleppo Codex….
Nehemia: Is that what we call Lamed Mem? The…
Avi: No, not Lamed Mem. This is the Lamed Achat.
Nehemia: No, but… it doesn’t matter, go ahead. So, these are like abbreviations, each of which refers to a specific manuscript.
Avi: All of these manuscripts have it with an Alef.
Avi: And that’s the vast majority of manuscripts.
Avi: And then, we even have a notation that was taken in the 19th century.
Avi: Right. Daka is with a Hey, the person wanted to know. So, they checked the Aleppo Codex. Lo ken! That’s not the case. Ela b’Alef, ve’nimsar Gimel, meaning that appears three times in the Tanakh with an Alef.
Nehemia: Wait, wait, hold on. There’s a Masoretic note that indicates it’s…
Avi: Not a Masoretic note; a note taken in the 19th century, when the Yellen, the Tanakh…
Nehemia: What does ve’nimsar here mean? Ve’nimsar as in Masorah? Or what does it mean?
Avi: Oh, no. Ve’nimsar gimel. You’re seeing code. Okay? Let me show you how the note appears. You’re looking at code. Let me show you how the note appears. I click on Hatzeg He’arot Nosach. You can also see these notes on Hillel Novetsky’s…
Nehemia: By the way, does this have English interface anywhere? Or is it only in Hebrew?
Avi: There is the beginnings of an English interface. Nothing like this.
Avi: So, here you can see the notes as it’s meant to be seen.
Avi: Okay? And, here. Ela…
Nehemia: What does ve’nimsar Gimel mean? Actually, can we…
Avi: Ve’nimsar Gimel means that someone checked the Aleppo Codex and saw that the Aleppo Codex had a Masoretic note, Gimel.
Nehemia: Oh, no… so, that’s what I’m asking. So, that’s a very important thing. Can we stop sharing for a minute? We’ll come back to this. Explain what the Masorah is.
Avi: You should do that! That’s your…
Nehemia: No, I’ve done it many times. I want you to explain… and, you know, we say al regel achat, on one leg. What is…
Avi: I’ll tell you how I define the Masorah.
Nehemia: Beautiful, that’s what I’m looking for.
Avi: Not Masoretic notes. The Masoretic project, okay, is a project to take a written tradition, a scribal tradition of copying letters of books, and combine it with an oral audio tradition of reading it, by turning the audio, the oral tradition, into written signs like vowel signs and things like that.
Avi: And so, you put them together in the same text, meaning that the Masoretic Text is not a text, it’s not one text, it’s two texts.
Avi: It’s a scribal text and it’s an oral text. Every single word of the Bible in the Masoretic Text is not one word, it’s two words. It’s a word of the scribes, daka with an Alef, or with a Hey, and a word of the readers, daka, which it doesn’t matter if it has an Alef or a Hey. Okay?
Nehemia: They’re pronounced the same way.
Avi: It’s pronounced the same way. And so, you know, the reader might…
Nehemia: Because the irony here is that the Alef and Hey are both silent.
Avi: Correct. At the end of word. Yes.
Nehemia: In this particular case.
Avi: In this particular case. So, the Masorah is the project to faithfully record and transmit both of these traditions together.
Nehemia: And when did that take place?
Avi: When did that take place? I’m telling you your field.
Nehemia: No. As you understand it, I mean… Or, let me say it this way; if I were to define Masorah… and this is something that’s debated within the field, right? Meaning, like, do we call a 14th century, you know, codex written in Soria, Spain, a Masoretic Bible codex? Or is it after the era of the Masoretes, so therefore it’s not Masoretic? I would say it’s Masoretic. It’s not Samaritan. It’s not, you know, the Qumran scribal practices. It’s Masoretic in a very broad sense, right?
Some people would say, within the field, anything that has Masoretic notes is Masoretic. Right? So, BHS published in the 20th century is Masoretic in that respect. And it is in a sense, meaning, like, the process is still ongoing. But let’s be honest; that’s not what we mean. So, what do you mean when you say Masoretic?
Avi: I agree with you, first of all.
Nehemia: I didn’t… I actually didn’t state a position. I said there are… there’s a machloket, there’s a debate about it.
Avi: I don’t think that, you know, the only manuscripts from the Masoretic era are valuable for trying to understand the Masorah. So, like, it’s the first position, if I understand.
Nehemia: So, let’s define what we mean by Masoretic era, because that’s assuming the conclusion.
Avi: You have the era when these oral traditions were put into writing for the first time, okay? And then, you have a slightly later era when they were copied.
Avi: Okay? And the idea is, and Rabbi Breuer very nicely proves this and shows this, is that in the early part of the Masoretic era, Masoretes did not copy vocalization. They didn’t copy vowel signs from one manuscript to another. Rather, they had a written text, they had a scribal text, and they sang the text. And as they sang, they wrote in the oral tradition.
Nehemia: Would you say that your MAM is based on the approach of Rabbi Mordechai Breuer?
Avi: I would say, for the most part, it is. Recently, I learned one thing that it’s definitely not.
Nehemia: Well, the approach doesn’t mean you have to agree on all details, right?
Avi: Right. It definitely doesn’t agree on all details. I think if you took the two main editions, okay, that have tried to reconstruct the Aleppo Codex; one is the three editions of Rabbi Breuer, which are pretty much identical, and the other is Mikraot Gedolot Haketer, which is a project by Bar-Ilan University, as you know.
Avi: What? Menachem Cohen.
Nehemia: Prof. Menachem Cohen.
Avi: Prof. Cohen waxes prolific about how different his edition is, but the bottom line, when you compare them, they’re nearly identical. There are differences, but they’re nearly identical.
Nehemia: The average user would be hard pressed to find the differences, is what I would say.
Avi: Right. So, I would say that MAM, Miqra Al-pi ha-Masorah, is more different from Breuer and Mikraot Gedolot Haketer than they are different from each other.
Nehemia: Okay. So, there’s a debate within academia, and, you know, in Judaism we always have the machloket, the debate, right? There’s Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai. So, we have a machloket, a debate, between Israel Yeivin and Aharon Dotan, who were the great, I would say, scholars of Masoretic study at the end of the 20th century, even at the beginning of the 21st century. And Dotan wrote in the Encyclopedia Judaica that essentially every manuscript has its own Masoretic notes that were based on that manuscript. Right? In other words, there was never “a Masorah”, there are Masorahs. Or there are Masoretic texts; that’s what you could say, based on Dotan.
And then, Yeivin said, “No. The Masoretes got together whenever it was,” in the 7th century or the 9th century. He doesn’t commit to that, because he doesn’t know, “and they decided in this verse, and they didn’t just make it up,” right? “They say we have all these traditions that say, in this verse and this word there’s a Vav, and in that verse and that verse there’s a Yud, and in this verse there’s not,” and they said, “You know what? You have a different tradition than me. What is the tradition?” And they codified it, and they came to a conclusion on the spelling of every single word. And vowels and accents is a little more complicated, but certainly for the orthography, meaning, the spelling of every word, there was a Masorah. And Breuer unequivocally accepted the approach of Yeivin, and maybe was more extreme than Yeivin.
And Breuer says something profound in the introduction to one of his books. He says, “I’m not saying this is the text that was used by the Rabbinical sages of the Mishnah and the Talmud by Chazal. They might have had a different text. I’m trying to determine what the text was in Tiberius in the 9th and 10th century that was codified in the Masoretic notes.”
Avi: He’s not just saying they might have had a different text. We know they had a different text.
Nehemia: In specific instances, right? Meaning, in some of the minutia, in some of the small minor details. So, there’s this really interesting book that someone referred me to recently, and I forget the name of it, but it’s by… I think he’s a journalist, I don’t remember. And he’s saying how he was at Hebrew University, and they’re working out the Equidistant Letter Sequences, ELS, which is what people call, in common parlance, Bible codes.
Nehemia: And he’s out there 20 or 30 years ago, and they’re demonstrating it, and he says, “Which text is this?” And somebody says, “Oh, that’s the Leningrad Codex, but it’s not a great text.” And he says, “What do you mean? Aren’t all the texts the same?” “No, not even on the letter of…” you know. And then, of course, there’s the nine differences. I was told this in fourth grade by my homeroom teacher, Rabbi Weil, that they’ve searched all the Torah scrolls in the world, and they found nine differences between them. And one of those is the Alef and Hey of daka, one is vayehi, vayihiyu, in Genesis, wherever that is. And that’s a bit more complicated, right? It’s far more complicated.
So, let me turn it back. So, what are the Masoretic notes, as you understand them?
Avi: The Masoretic notes mostly concentrate on the scribal tradition, on the spelling of the letters, and they try to guide the Masorete in his correction of the text. Somebody prepared for the Masorete a codex with letters. Not all the letters are correct, according to the Masorah. He writes in the Masoretic notes after he’s already vocalized the text, and that enables him to check; to go through the Bible again and again and again, and to make sure that the letter text accords with what the Masoretic notes say it should have.
Nehemia: So, this is the context in which Maimonides says the Aleppo Codex is so reliable. He says, “Because Ben-Asher proofread it many times for many years.” Right? Yes, there were mistakes in it, and he corrected those mistakes based on what Yeivin calls the Masorah, right?
Nehemia: And so, here was a controversial statement, and I’m going to ask your opinion. I don’t know that it’s… you know, there’s something called the Dunning-Kruger effect; as you get more and more knowledge, you realize you know less and less. So, would you say the Aleppo Codex is a representative of the Masoretic Text? Or the Aleppo Codex aims to be the Masoretic text, or the Aleppo Codex is the Masoretic Text? How would you…
Avi: I’ll say two things. Number one, the Aleppo Codex is the best representative of the Masoretic Text.
Avi: Number one. And number two, I said earlier that no human being can do a job like that perfectly. The only reason Aharon Ben-Asher was able to do it almost perfectly is because he never rested. He read it again and again, from the beginning of the Bible, he sang from Genesis to the end of Nehemiah, right? He sang the Bible again and again.
Nehemia: Why the end of Nehemiah? Is that where it ended in…
Avi: Nehemiah is last book in…
Nehemia: Okay. Because Chronicles is before Psalms in the Aleppo Codex. Okay.
Avi: Right. Right. In other words, he sang the whole Tanakh to himself once and made corrections. And then he did it again. And then he did it again to the end of his life. And by the end of his life, or by the end of his editing process, it was a near perfect representative of the Masorah.
Nehemia: So, your working assumption, it sounds like, is that people like Aharon Ben-Asher knew the entire Tanakh by heart, along with his cantillation and perfect pronunciation, and that’s what they were recording.
Avi: That’s what they were recording.
Avi: Breuer tries to prove that. I think he successfully proved it by looking at the kinds of errors that some of the early Masoretes made. They didn’t make copying errors. They made errors where… the kind of errors that someone who’s singing might make. For instance, you have two similar but not identical verses, okay, and they transpose the cantillation from one to the other.
Nehemia: Yeah, but copyists make that mistake too. We call that… Malachi Beit Aryeh, of blessed memory, told me the term he uses for that is ashkarat sofrim, right? “The familiar idiom of the scribe,” and where that phrase comes from is, I believe it’s in the Talmud, or the Mishnah… Well, the Mishnah says that the people who, if they read from the Megillah, you’re not… which I think you have behind you, a Megillah, the Scroll of Esther.
Nehemia: So, if they read from the Scroll of Esther, you haven’t fulfilled your duty of hearing it, and one of those is a minor, one is a woman, and the other is cheresh. And the Talmud discusses it; they say, wait, cheresh is a deaf mute. How could a deaf mute read you from the Scroll of Esther? He can’t speak, he’s mute. And so, they explain. “Oh, with the rabbis of the Mishnah, that was ashkara; it was fluency of the tongue.” Meaning, this is a common group of people that are often mentioned together. I forget what it is in Hebrew; cheresh, katan… oh, shoteh I think is the other one.
Nehemia: Yeah. The person… I don’t know what the correct term is today for shoteh. Back in my day, we used the R-word for that, but there’s an example of yishkavena yishvalena. I can’t even say the word. So, someone who is mentally handicapped, I guess would be the term… or… I don’t know what the term is. So, the point is that this is a group of people that’s often mentioned together; cheresh, katan, ve’shoteh, or however the order is. And so, when they say that cheresh… it’s essentially an oral, O-R-A-L, an oral error that they stuck in the word cheresh there, and the Talmud’s saying that about the Mishnah.
So, Malachi Beit Aryeh added the word sofrim. Ashkarat sofrim, right? The familiar idiom of scribes. And I see that kind of error all the time in medieval manuscripts, right? So, the example I was looking at the other day is, there’s a verse in Numbers where it says, “And Moses said to the Lord,” right? And the scribe miscopied it in this 14th century Ashkenazi Torah scroll to, “And the Lord said to Moses,” because Moses doesn’t speak to God; God speaks to Moses dozens of times, right? So, that’s the phrase in your head, that’s an example of… I mean, beyond just like, you know, the spelling of words. He put the wrong word. And then he has to go and correct it, and he has a problem because he can’t erase God’s name. Anyway, we won’t get into that.
So, yeah, I’m not sure that convinces me because written texts have that type of mistake all the time. When I write emails or text messages, I’ll often write t-o-o instead of t-w-o, even though I know the difference. But in my head, it’s the word two, and my fingers know more than my head knows, in a sense, right? And the pen is… it’s the fluency of the pen, in a sense, right? What you’re describing.
But okay, so the Masoretic notes…
Avi: We should give Breuer due credit. Look at his examples and then see…
Nehemia: Okay. Fair enough.
Nehemia: So, now that we understand what the Masorah… Wait, so, the Masorah only existed essentially… did it ever exist perfectly in any manuscript? Let me ask, according to you. And I don’t know the answer to that.
Avi: In the Aleppo Codex, it almost reaches perfection.
Nehemia: He has two examples, by the way, Breuer, where he disagrees with the Aleppo Codex in the letters, not just in the vowels or accents. In any event, all right. So, now let’s go back and look at daka with an Alef or a Hey and understand the notes that you have in Miqra al-pi ha-Masorah. So, you’re saying that in the Aleppo Codex, there was a Masoretic note that says Gimel, that confirms that the scribe…
Avi: Nehemia, let me show you. This is the Al haTorah website…
Avi: …which is a fantastic website. It also has academic oversight. It uses my text. If you click on the notes, you get this…
Avi: So, the note gives you all the witnesses to the Aleppo Codex, all of the parallel Masoretic manuscripts, and the manuscripts confirm that this, you know, was certainly the Masoretic reading. There’s a link to an article about this example by Mordechai Glatzer, and other examples. But it also tells you why we have dakha with a Hey. If the evidence is overwhelmingly Alef, then where did we get Hey from? Hey entered Torah scrolls because of a halakhic ruling after the classic Masoretic era of Rabbi Meir Abulafia, Halevi Abulafia, who is the Sephardic halakhic decisor who decided which letters should be in Torah scrolls, and on following the Ramah are the Torah scrolls of Sepharad, Spain and Ashkenaz, Germany, but not Yemen.
Nehemia: And by the way, for those listening, this is Ramah with a Hey, not with an Alef. Rabbi Rama with an Alef is Rabbi Meir Isserlis. Okay.
Nehemia: All right. And you don’t have that? That’s actually important information.
Avi: What do you mean by “I don’t have?”
Nehemia: Do you have the Ramah information there?
Avi: What do you mean? I don’t understand.
Nehemia: So, that part of the note; is that in your version of the note? Like, why are you showing this one?
Nehemia: Ah! The whole thing is, they’ve copied your note. Okay. With permission, of course. Show it to me on your website.
Avi: Okay, on my website, the note doesn’t look as nice. You either have to see it with the code, or you can view it like this.
Nehemia: Okay, so, the layout is kind of a pop-up. Is there a way to copy the information in that pop-up, or do I have to go to the other site?
Avi: You can copy the information in the pop-up by going to the edit box, or by going to Al haTorah, where you can, you know, you can copy it.
Nehemia: Okay, so, let’s look at it for a minute at Al haTorah and explain what we’re looking at. It’s the same note we’re looking at…
Avi: What we’re looking at in this note.
Nehemia: Yeah. So, you have a very important piece of information, which is Alef ve’nimsar Gimel; in the Aleppo Codex, there’s a Masoretic note that says this is one of three instances of daka…
Nehemia: With an Alef. If that’s what it means. Okay. And what… Decipher the rest of it. What’s Alef, Reish...
Avi: So, here… Okay, I’ll show you how you look at the sources. The whole thing has to be documented. So, to see the sources, what you do is this; let me show you. Okay, here I have this index again.
Nehemia: So, there’s a lot of abbreviations, and to understand what any of these abbreviations are, there’s the method. Okay.
Avi: Okay. So, there’s a Mavo leMiqra al-pi ha-Masorah, an introduction. It’s a six-chapter introduction.
Avi: If I go to the introduction, it explains all of the different kinds of editorial decisions. If I go to the appendices, the appendices show me this.
Avi: Further, the main source; the first source is the Aleppo Codex.
Avi: Okay? Alef, for instance. Samekh, we saw. This is the letters of the Aleppo Codex according to the notes of Rabbi Yaakov Sapir in a work called Morot Natan. This is a work which somebody wrote notes on the Aleppo Codex. It was edited and published by Rafael Zer. Okay? And there’s even a link to the book itself here.
Nehemia: Wow. All right, that’s pretty cool.
Avi: To Morot Natan, on a different website. Okay? Alef… what else do we have there? Alef, Reish…
Nehemia: The importance of this is, I’ll just explain for the audience, is, most of the Aleppo Codex, especially on the Torah, is missing. But people went to Aleppo, or lived in Aleppo, and they studied it. Meaning, they knew that some Torah scrolls have a Hey and some have an Alef, and they went, “What does the Aleppo have?” And they checked. Even though we don’t have that page anymore, we have witnesses to what was there. Okay.
Avi: Right. And Alef-Reish is an article by Yosef Ofer…
Nehemia: Yosef Ofer, right.
Avi: …about Cassuto’s notes on the Aleppo Codex. He, too, went to Aleppo and he sat with the Aleppo Codex and wrote the voluminous notes on the Aleppo Codex. And so, he checked also this word daka; is it Alef or Hey?
Nehemia: And Umberto Cassuto, or Moshe David Cassuto, was the founder of the Bible Department at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and he traveled to Aleppo… I want to say it was 1942, but it could have been ’43. And at the time… What’s that?
Avi: 1947, if the number…
Nehemia: No, no, it wasn’t ’47, it was ‘42 or ‘43. And at the time this was… the Axis powers had allies in the Syrian government, and Cassuto tells the story they begged him to take the codex with him back to Jerusalem. They said, “Smuggle it out of here,” and he was afraid to. Well, he wasn’t just afraid to, he said, you know, “I’m an academic. I’m a scholar. I can’t do that. That’s something that, you know, antiquities dealers do. I don’t do that kind of thing.” And I think he said he later regretted it. I certainly regret that he didn’t take it. So…
All right. But he wrote, as you say, voluminous notes about what he saw in the Aleppo Codex, so even though we don’t have the Aleppo Codex for Deuteronomy 23:2, we have Cassuto’s witness that there was an Alef there. Okay.
Avi: Yeah. So, if we go back here now, so Alef… Where was it? Alef-Reish. This is Cassuto’s note. And Alef-Samekh; this is Sapir’s note.
Nehemia: Why a Reish? Because Quf was already taken? For Cassuto?
Avi: Yeah. Quf was already taken.
Nehemia: Okay. Fair enough.
Nehemia: All right. Ah, “his lists”, or “his notes”. All right. Ah, so, he also says there’s a Masoretic note, that it’s one of three.
Nehemia: Ah. And then… oh, wait a minute! Lo yavo ve’et daka teshev. So, is that what the three are? That’s the catch phrases? But that’s not…
Avi: Maybe that’s a Masorah gdolah note.
Nehemia: It sounds like it is. In other words, not only did the Aleppo Codex say which three, it listed the verse… they didn’t have verse and chapter numbers, so they would quote a word from the verse. Okay.
Nehemia: All right. So, in other words, there’s a difference between the manuscripts. And look, even Torah scrolls written today have this different, like you said. Meaning, if you go to different, even Ashkenazi synagogues, some of them will have it with an Alef and some will have it with a Hey, because you said Chabad has it with an Alef.
Avi: If you want to see a more normal note, meaning on a less famous example, maybe on a smaller detail, lo teta’ev Mitzri, “do not despise an Egyptian”.
Avi: So, this is not what I thought it would be. This is a note saying that there’s a space in the middle of the verse.
Nehemia: So, it’s not a matter of dispute, just typographically it’s difficult for you to make the space.
Avi: Most of these notes, if we go to the previous chapter…
Nehemia: Do you need that note because on the website it’s hard to make that space?
Avi: Yeah. You know what I think? I don’t think that’s my note.
Nehemia: Who did? I didn’t hear…
Avi: This will be my note, for sure.
Avi: Vekhen ta’ase. Okay?
Avi: This is something very typical, okay?
Avi: Not very… well, it happens. Okay? The printed editions have different cantillation than the manuscripts. So, in the manuscripts we have it confirmed, in a whole slew of manuscripts, that it’s a munakh revi’i, meaning this, and this dot here.
Avi: But in the printed editions it has a different cantillation, like this, on top.
Nehemia: Kadma ve-azla. Okay.
Nehemia: And wait; go back to that note. Oh, you’re…
Nehemia: Okay. So, when it says vachen ta’ase klita’ay kadma ve-azla, question mark, lo chen ela munakh… that’s you writing that? Or…
Avi: No, no, no, that’s the note. In other words, Yeshua Kimchi took a Tanakh, a printed Tanakh, to Aleppo. He was on a mission. And the rabbi wrote all these questions. Like, here he had a question, “Is this the correct cantillation? Kadma ve-azla?” And then Kimchi would write ken or lo. He’d write “yes” or “no” or what it is.
Nehemia: How do we know this is Kimchi? I mean, you know, because you wrote the note, but how would I know if I look at the note? Because I see Alef…
Avi: This is another one of Yosef Ofer’s most important articles, right? He edited all of Kimchi’s notes on the Tanakh, and he gave me the honor of sharing the scan of the Kimchi Tanakh, and I put it up on Internet Archive. You can read the note there too, if you like. And maybe your viewers would like to know the amazing story. You know the amazing story about…
Nehemia: I want to hear the story in a minute, but when I’m looking at your note, how would I, as the end user, let’s say, who can read this, how would I know that comes from Kimchi’s note? Because I see here Alef-Samech, which is Sapir’s notes.
Avi: Well, this Alef-Samekh. Oh, that’s a mistake!
Nehemia: Wait! There’s a scribal error in your note?
Avi: At some point they changed the abbreviations for the different witnesses of the Aleppo Codex, and it looks like I missed one here.
Nehemia: So, there’s an oral tradition from Avi Kadish that this is from Kimchi, but if you’re looking at the text, all you know is it comes from Sapir. So, can we see this in Kimchi’s source?
Avi: You want to see the Kimchi Tanakh?
Nehemia: I want to see it, absolutely. I say I’m a Missourian. I’m actually from Illinois, but in my heart, I’m from Missouri, the Show Me State.
Nehemia: I always want to see it.
Avi: So, these are… wait a second. These are my uploads to archive.org.
Nehemia: So, what is the relationship between archive.org and Wiki Media Foundation? Is there any…
Avi: Well, there’s no official relation.
Avi: But here too, you can preserve public domain material.
Nehemia: I see you did a search for Jordan Penkower. Did you hear that he passed away last week?
Avi: Did I hear that he passed away? That’s exactly why I searched for him. I wanted to find something.
Nehemia: Yeah. I’m very sad about that.
Avi: If I write “Yellen”, we’ll get the Yellen Tanakh. Here’s the Yellen Tanakh. Kimchi was the fellow who brought it to Syria to write notes. Here you can see a page from Isaiah; this is the Tanakh, and these are the notes on the side that Ofer deciphered.
Nehemia: Wait, so, where is this Tanakh physically today?
Avi: It’s in the Heichal Hasefer…
Nehemia: The Shrine of the Book.
Avi: The Shrine of the Book, next to the Aleppo Codex.
Nehemia: And the only thing available is this horrible scan? No offense. Meaning, it’s a black and white scan. This is from microfilm or something. Or it’s a photocopy.
Avi: That’s what Ofer was able to share.
Nehemia: Okay. Ah, okay, got it. No, this has to be made available in color. This is…
Nehemia: Wow. All right, so, find me the note on… what was that? Deuteronomy 22…
Avi: We have back to Deuteronomy for that.
Avi: Isaiah’s not going to help us.
Nehemia: So, if I see Alef-Quf and then those angled brackets, I know to look in this thing on archive.org.
Avi: The angle brackets, what they should be… there’s a mistake here, but…
Avi: I’m going to fix it when we’re done.
Nehemia: Okay, so guys, by the time you go and look at this, it’ll be retconned. It’s going to be fixed. Retroactively fixed.
Avi: [Laughter] What you see here is if there’s one witness to the Aleppo Codex, and then there’s something in brackets, that’s a quotation of that witness.
Nehemia: All right, beautiful. So, what’s the verse here? Deuteronomy 22 verse 3.
Avi: Well, we’re still in Joshua. Oh, man.
Nehemia: It’s not that far.
Avi: Wait, wait. We’ve got to go down to Deuteronomy…
Nehemia: So, for those listening, we’re on archive.org, and he’s flipping through a black and white scan or photocopy of a Bible that someone took with them to Aleppo and wrote notes in the margin based on the Aleppo Codex.
Avi: What was it? Deuteronomy… what was it?
Nehemia: 22, verse… I want to say it was 3 maybe.
Avi: Let’s look and see what it was. 22:2.
Nehemia: No, 22:3… Ve’khen ta’ase. It’s 22:3.
Avi: Okay, it should be here. Let’s see.
Nehemia: And here… oh, vakhen ta’ase, there, it’s at the top.
Nehemia: Bet-Kaf… something… munakh revi’i.
Avi: When I say that it’s a munakh revi’I, as it is printed here… but where’s the question?
Nehemia: Ah. So, these are answers to questions.
Avi: You’ll have to look at Ofer’s article. You know, what Ofer did in his article is he transcribes all of these things and then he interprets them.
Avi: It’s question and error. You have to look at the article.
Nehemia: So, what does Bet-Kaf stand for?
Nehemia: Okay. So, my suggestion would be that… you know, everybody’s a critic here, right? So, go back to your note.
Avi: Yeah. Go back to my note, yeah?
Nehemia: Yeah. So, this is not a direct quote from the article. Meaning, the words lo ken ela munakh revi’i…
Avi: Oh, I know… wait a minute, I know what this is! This is Alef-Samech… wait a minute…
Nehemia: It’s Sapir’s notes.
Avi: This is… wait, wait… Alef… yeah, it’s Morot Natan. I apologize.
Nehemia: No worries. All right. But now you have to add this as a second witness, right? Meaning…
Avi: This is a second witness, right. This has to be…
Nehemia: So, that’s really important. That has to be added.
Avi: Alef-Samekh-Reish, now it has to be. Yeah.
Nehemia: Ah. So, how will that appear in the note? How will we know what’s a quote from Samakh, Sapir, and what’s a note from Reish?
Avi: Okay. So, what I’ll do is, now that I realize that I need to add more witnesses here, so, I’ll do Alef-Samekh equals what you have here.
Avi: Okay? In Alef-Samekh, it’s always in two columns, in the article by Rafi Zer. You have the question, you have the answer.
Avi: Okay? And then I’ll add Alef… what is it?
Nehemia: Alef-Reish, I think we said…
Nehemia: If you don’t know, I certainly don’t know!
Avi: Oh man, oh man, okay.
Nehemia: Yeah, Alef-Reish.
Nehemia: Because you said it’s reshimotav, his notes.
Avi: It’s not reshimotav, it’s Kimchi.
Nehemia: Ah, it’s Kimchi!
Avi: It’ll be Alef-Quf equals Bet-Kaf, and we’ll look at Ofer…
Nehemia: We have to figure out what Bet-Kaf means, or Ofer maybe defines…
Avi: He definitely does know what Bet-Kaf means.
Avi: And then it says munakh revi’i.
Nehemia: Right. And by the way, here, guys, there’s two people in this conversation with PhDs in Jewish subjects and we don’t know, off the top of our head, what this acronym stands for! And, like, imagine the average user who’s going to use your Aruch HaShulchan and he sees some acronym, he’s like “What’s that?” Right? I mean, it’s not obvious. And I’m looking here on kitzur.co.il, and we said it’s Bet-Kaf, is that what we said? I’m just going to see if we can… So, we have here… yeah, it’s a bunch of things, it could be… I have no idea. So, they have ba ko’ach, which is…
Avi: No, don’t look up the kitzurim like for regular Hebrew abbreviations. You have to look in Yosef Ofer’s…
Nehemia: No, I understand, but as a starting point, if I were reading this, I would look in Kitzur and I’d see one, two, three, four, five, six, seven possibilities; none of these fit! So, now I’ve got to do some more research. Maybe that’s not a Bet, maybe it’s a Hey, I don’t know. I’ve got to look at the guy’s handwriting, right? He’s writing in script, and it’s a black and white scan or photocopy, it’s not even color.
Avi: You know what I want to do, Nehemia, with your permission? I want to prove that I am not perfect, and that I forget tons of things. Can I prove that to you?
Avi: Okay? First of all, if I correct this thing we found… it’s not actually a correction. If I add another witness to this note, it’s always recorded in the history of the Wiki page.
Nehemia: Oh, can you do it live, while we’re on the conversation?
Avi: I can do that. I’ll make a first attempt. I’ll do it live as a first attempt, although more will have to be done afterwards.
Nehemia: Okay. And where do we say the missing source is? Who published that? Was it Zer or Ofer? Now I don’t remember.
Avi: The one we have in the note already is Zer.
Nehemia: So, the other one is Ofer, and which… oh, is this Ofer’s Cassuto article? No, it’s not. It’s not. I’m confused.
Avi: Morot Natan is our notes on the Aleppo Codex, published by Rafi Zer.
Avi: …on the Yellen Tanakh were published and edited and explained by Yossi Ofer.
Nehemia: And is that the article on Reshimotav Shel Kasuto?
Avi: No, that’s a different article.
Nehemia: Oh, it’s a different article. Which article is it?
Avi: It’s also on that same website; you can find it. Actually…
Nehemia: Let’s see. Let’s see the source.
Avi: I’ll show you how to find it based on this. You go to the introduction.
Avi: You go to the list of sources. Okay? In the list of sources on that thing, okay, al pi ma’amaro shel Yosef Ofer, here’s the article, a link to the article.
Nehemia: Oh, let’s open it up and see.
Avi: Here’s your article that you were talking about before…
Avi: …and here’s the article we’re talking about now. Okay? [GUF HA’MA’AMAR] is the article itself. Here’s the article itself. At some point in this article, he explains all of the abbreviations. You can see that he’s transcribing Kimchi’s abbreviations.
Nehemia: Okay. And they’re not obvious. Some of these, you would… Oh, here’s Bet-Kaf-Samekh.
Nehemia: Keter stuma… no, that’s not what we’re looking for. It’s very similar, so… And we’re looking for Bet-Kaf.
Avi: We’re looking for Bet-Kaf. This is a different issue. These are parashot…
Nehemia: Okay. Open and close…
Avi: Gaps and the spaces in the text.
Nehemia: Guys, this is not trivial. Meaning, what I would love to see in the future… and again, everybody has an idea, is there to be a direct link, if there’s some way to do it, in the note, that I can go… I don’t have to do a whole bunch of research. I can click on the note and then see the source in…
Avi: Well, let me tell you something, Nehemia.
Avi: If you want to invest your time and energy, you can put that in.
Nehemia: Can that be done in this, so I don’t have to invent my own thing?
Avi: It can be done in this note, if you wanted to.
Nehemia: All right, beautiful.
Avi: Okay? It just takes people who want to do it. And I wanted to prove to you how mistaken I am, okay? First of all, if I change a documentation note, the change is recorded. It’s not lost. It’s not like, you know, like you said that, you know, someone changes it, and then the old version is lost. In Wikisource, if I make that change… let’s make the change, let’s make the change.
Nehemia: Oh, this is awesome. Guys, in real time…
Nehemia: …Miqra al-pi haMesorah is being modified and more… I mean, it’s not being really corrected, but more data is being added.
Avi: It’s not being corrected, but more data is being added. What verse was it? Here.
Avi: This, I’m going to now write, is Alef-Samekh.
Nehemia: That’s a Dalet. Yeah, there we go.
Nehemia: This is very cool.
Nehemia: We’re fixing the online documentation of the Bible.
Avi: Okay. And what did Yellen have?
Nehemia: I think it was Bet-Kaf.
Nehemia: Yeah, that’s what it looks like to me. Now, when will this show up in Al Hatorah?
Avi: When he gets around to it.
Nehemia: Okay. So, it doesn’t update automatically in the…
Nehemia: In the people using it…
Avi: My comrade, Ben Denkla, who… now I have an excuse to mention him.
Nehemia: Tell us about Ben.
Avi: He’s a programmer. He’s a graduate of Harvard, and… excuse me, MIT. I think he studied music at Harvard, if I remember correctly.
Avi: So, whatever I do, automatically gets taken by him into a format the programmers can use. So, somebody can take what he has, and automatically upload it to Al Hatorah, for instance.
Nehemia: Okay, got it. This is amazing. So, here, guys, in future generations they’re going… scholars are going to look at this, and maybe laymen, and they’re going to say, “There’s two witnesses to this particular set of accents in the Aleppo Codex,” and someone’s going to say, “Oh, and that was corrected on a podcast called Hebrew Voices in real time.” I don’t know if that’s going to happen. Maybe there’ll be a link to the episode even someday in the future.
All right. If somebody wants to give the… I mean, this is beautiful. You know what’s so beautiful about this? So, the Masoretes, we have this story that they corrected their Bibles many times, or Ben Asher did, and you’re like, “Wait a minute. How could Ben Asher make a mistake where he needs to come back and correct it?” And here’s an example, right? Meaning, like, there’s one source and there might be four more sources. We don’t know. Meaning, maybe you did this early on, and you weren’t looking at all the sources or what…
Avi: This is definitely something that I did early on. Maybe after I show you this example and how I make mistakes, I’ll tell you how I did it.
Nehemia: Okay, beautiful. Tell me.
Avi: So, [PIRSUM SHINUI’IM], I’ve saved the edit and now watch this. This is cool! I go to [SHINUI’IM ACHARONIM] – recent changes. Recent changes anywhere on Wikisource, even for Huckleberry Finn, okay? And here… here’s the change I just made at 7:30 in the evening, Israel time. And I click on [HEVDEL], on difference.
Nehemia: Oh, wow. That’s cool.
Avi: At 7:30, here is how the text was before, and here is the change. Not just one witness, Samekh, but two witnesses…
Avi: Samekh and Quf. I’ve added that the first witness was Alef-Samekh, and I’ve added the second witness, meaning Alef-Quf. And if somebody thinks that I did something stupid or I made a mistake, they can revert my change.
Avi: Now, I’m a registered user. They know me, they respect me, okay? If somebody would do something silly, okay, here, it would immediately get reverted. This won’t get reverted.
Nehemia: And who would do the reversion? Who would change it back?
Avi: So, take a look. I’ll go to [RECENT CHANGES], and in recent changes, you can see what people are working on, and you can see all the various people who work on it. This guy’s been on Wikisource for at least 15 years. This one’s more recent.
Nehemia: Is there someone here who’s anonymous, who, if you saw it, you would be like, “I have to check to see if this is right.”
Avi: There’s definitely anonymous people, but you learn them by their edits. If they do stupid things, they get blocked. If they do helpful things, right, then they get recognized in their edits; they get accepted. Now one second; Nahum, I just want to mention him. Nahum, okay, in his real life, when he’s not doing his Wikisource hobby, is one of the editors at the Chorev Publishing House, and one of the editors of the Chorev Edition of the Breuer Tanakh.
Nehemia: Okay. I believe that’s the Second Edition of the Breuer Tanakh.
Avi: Second Edition of the Breuer Tanakh. So, he is reviewing my edit. He always reviews.
Avi: Okay? And if he sees that I made a typo, he fixes it.
Nehemia: Okay, so, he might come along and say, “Oh, I don’t think that’s a Bet, that’s a Hey, and it stands for X, Y, Z.” Right… for example. All right, beautiful. That is very cool. It’s very cool!
Nehemia: All right. So, you’re going to show an example of when you make a mistake.
Avi: And his name is Nahum Wengrov…
Avi: … and he’s a professional editor. And in his free time, he contributes to the public by editing Hebrew texts here.
Nehemia: Wow. What’s this Mishnah… Where was that thing, about a page from the Mishnah? What is that about? 11:58. Mishna menukedet lelo itzuv…
Avi: 11:58. That’s one of Nahum’s projects.
Nehemia: That’s not related to Miqra al-pi haMesorah.
Avi: No no, no. People here are working on the Mishnah, on the Rambam… This is an addition, here that I’m pointing at now, of the entire Israeli law code, all of the law…
Nehemia: Wow! Like, the modern Israeli law code.
Avi: Laws that are in the public domain.
Nehemia: That’s really important, because if there’s a judge who’s making a decision, and he goes to look at what the law is, and maybe he ends up on Wikisource, and there’s a mistake.
Avi: So, Wikisource is the best place on the internet if you want to see how an Israeli law is formulated.
Avi: And here’s something you’ll love. Ben Sira. Ben Sira, the apocryphal book, whose original Hebrew was lost for centuries, and then a large part of the Hebrew original was found in the Cairo Geniza and then at Qumran. Editions of various translations into Hebrew and various editions of the Hebrew have been published, and there’s a fellow who for years has been working on the Hebrew Ben Sira, combining all of the different translations and editions. David Kahana, for instance, has an edition of the Hebrew of Ben Sira, and if you go to the main page, okay, what he’s done is, he’s…
Nehemia: David Kahana is doing this?
Nehemia: On your website? Or somebody’s taking…
Avi: He published a Hebrew edition of Ben Sira using the Genizah manuscript…
Nehemia: It was one of the books I had as a teenager, The Apocrypha. Or the Sfarim Chitzonim; it wasn’t just the Apocrypha, translated by Kahana.
Avi: That’s Avraham Kahana.
Nehemia: Ah, okay. It’s not the same one. Okay.
Avi: Not the same one. So, here, if you look at the first chapter of Ben Sira, you can see it in a whole bunch of different editions and translations into Hebrew.
Avi: Okay? Franco, in the 19th century… this is a 19th century Hebrew translation from Greek into Hebrew.
Nehemia: Before they had the lost Hebrew sections.
Nehemia: That’s very cool. That’s very cool!
Avi: Okay? So, if you look at recent changes in Wikisource, besides the Tanakh, you can find…
Nehemia: You’ll see everything
Avi: …all kinds of interesting stuff.
Nehemia: Okay. Are there people who… like, there was this Chinese woman who wrote an entire history of Russia in numerous articles on Wikipedia, in Chinese. And this is like a famous example where it turned out that she had just made it all up. Or the other example is the inventor of the toaster. Do you know the story? The inventor of the toaster? So, there was someone who was sitting in a college class, I don’t know, 20 years ago or something, and the professor said, “You know, anybody can go into Wikipedia and change it.” So, he’s like, “Is that really true?” So, he goes into Wikipedia and changes the inventor of the toaster to the guy sitting next to him. And says that he was born in Scotland, and there are high schools in Scotland named after the inventor of the toaster. And the guy just changed it to see if he could do it, and nobody ever changed it back, for, like, decades, or a long time. I don’t remember the exact details, and literally there are… it’s crossed over into real life where there’s like a high school in Scotland named after the supposed inventor of the toaster, based on somebody just saying, “Can you really change anything you want in Wikipedia?”
And part of their problem is that, I suppose, they have… I don’t know if it’s millions or tens of millions of articles in numerous languages, and here’s probably a much smaller community of people who are making the changes. So, are there people who deface any of these Jewish texts? That’s what I’m really asking.
Avi: We have them. We call them vandals. We have had vandals.
Avi: And what we do is we revert the change, and we…
Nehemia: Can you show us a vandalism of the Tanakh in Hebrew? I mean, the Miqra al-pi haMasorah…
Avi: I don’t remember vandalism. Since people are so interested in the Tanakh… so, somebody… sometimes somebody thinks he knows, and he says, “That’s the wrong cantillation,” and then changes…
Nehemia: So, it’s not deliberate in that case.
Nehemia: Meaning, it’s a pious, let’s say, corruption, right?
Nehemia: Meaning, when you’re dealing with scribes, and ancient scribes, even, right, there’s… I did a really interesting series with… and we can stop sharing for a minute here. So, I did a really interesting series with this scholar on the Book of Mormon. And so, what does he have? He has the original manuscript, which, you know, according to Mormons, was dictated by Joseph Smith. That’s actually factual, and Mormons believe that it was through revelation, or some kind of process, that he was getting the information. But it was dictated by Joseph Smith to a scribe. And then they made a copy of it that they took to the printer, so it’s called the printer’s manuscript. And then they printed it. And you’d think, “Okay, all three are identical. It’s 1830.” Like, no! There are huge differences. Not huge differences, but there are significant differences. And he shows how sometimes in the original manuscript there are errors that they corrected in the printer’s manuscript, and he says the printer’s manuscript is obviously right. Like, there’s some phrases that are gibberish that the scribe, writing it down from the dictation, made a mistake, and then they realized it when they made a copy.
And so… what was my point about that? It’s an interesting insight into how in a very short… like, all of this is within a short period of time, like 1829 or so, to 1830. And then there are cases where they corrected the original manuscript based on their printed edition. Right? That’s… talk about retconning, right? They’re like, “Oh, that was a mistake in the original. Let’s correct it now. We have it fixed.” And there are some instances where it’s not clear that it was a mistake in the original.
Ah, so, the point is that he really fleshes out how there are these different types of modifications. There are pious corrections by somebody who thinks, “Oh, it was originally a mistake,” maybe because he doesn’t understand the original. There are errors. And so, he distinguishes between an editor and a copyist. An editor makes deliberate changes, whether they’re pious or maybe not so pious, and a copyist makes very mechanical types of errors. You know, he knows in his head it’s supposed to be a certain thing, because that’s a common phrase, and he writes that down instead of the phrase that’s actually in the source. It’s very interesting stuff.
Nehemia: All right, so, you showed us the example. Did you show us the example of the mistake that you made? That you’re not perfect.
Avi: Well… me not being perfect, that’s easy.
Nehemia: No. You were saying you wanted to demonstrate to us…
Avi: I just want to show you the… you know, what I showed you just now is a correction to a note, right?
Avi: There wasn’t actually a mistake in the biblical text.
Avi: What about mistakes in the biblical text itself?
Avi: Okay? So, this is what I want to show you.
Nehemia: You mean the Aleppo Codex?
Avi: No, no, no. Not mistakes in the Aleppo Codex.
Nehemia: So, what do we mean?
Avi: I mean, mistakes in my project and…
Nehemia: Ah, in your project.
Nehemia: Oh, okay. Fair enough.
Avi: So, we have here [TIKUNIM VE’SHINUI’IM], changes and corrections, in Miqra al-pi haMasorah, in this digital online Tanakh. What you’ll see in a moment, if it… here…
Avi: Okay? This is the list of actual corrections to the biblical text, okay? And over time, it’s become less and less. Now we sometimes go more than a month without finding anything. Sometimes, you know, in the past, we would get daily, weekly, multiple corrections. Now it’s far, far less, and it’s interesting; that is crowdsourcing. The more people who are using it, the less suggestions for corrections you get. Why? Because the more people who are using it, the more they’ve already located the mistakes and they’ve already been corrected. Okay?
So, what you have here is me and my partner Ben; BD is Ben Denkla. He does the, you know, the programing stuff like auto edits. But what I do is, for instance… okay… Ben discovered… this was Ben’s discovery, that this secondary accent in the Book of Psalms, called a tsinorit, was printed over the wrong letter.
Avi: No, not printed, it was typed…
Nehemia: Oh. In your edition, okay.
Avi: Yeah. It was over the Ayin instead of over the Vav, as it should have been, and as it appears in the Aleppo Codex.
Nehemia: Okay. And what would be the difference? And can you just demonstrate the difference in, let’s say, pronunciation?
Avi: I think the difference in pronunciation would be zero. The Masoretes apparently, I guess, had some kind of… perhaps… I’m not even sure they did, with tsinorit specifically. If there’s a musical value of that tsinorit…
Nehemia: No, but wouldn’t it put the emphasis on a different letter? A-voni instead of av-On…
Avi: Except that tsinorit does not appear over any…
Nehemia: Over the accented letter.
Avi: It’s not over a primary accent, and it’s not even over a secondary accent.
Nehemia: Okay. Wow. Alright.
Avi: A tsinorit is a very minor, minor thing, okay?
Avi: So, it might not have affected pronunciation or chanting at all, but it was typed in over the wrong letter.
Avi: Okay? That I corrected at the end of August. In the middle of July… this was also Ben who found this, there wasn’t a stress helper. We had stress helpers. Stress helpers are… the Masoretes, most of the cantillation notes are written over the stressed syllable, but some of them aren’t. Some of them are written always at the beginning of the word, or always at the end of the word, even though the accent is not there. So, you don’t know from the mark where the accent is. What the Miqra al-pi haMasorah does is, it does something the Masoretes started to do. The Masoretes themselves, even in the Aleppo Codex itself, in certain words where the accent isn’t clear…
Avi: …the reader might not be sure where the accent is. It supplies an extra copy of the accent over the stressed syllable.
Avi: What we do in Miqra al-pi haMasorah is we provide it everywhere.
Avi: This already appears in printed editions more than two centuries ago. Heidenheim, Wolf Heidenheim, who printed the Torah in Germany, which was the basis of the Torah in the Koren Edition of the Bible, he already does this. So, Ben noticed that I missed the stress helper in this word, so I added it.
Nehemia: Can we look at Psalm 49:15 in your edition?
Avi: Give me a date. Oh, you want to see this…
Nehemia: Yeah, I want to see this exact one.
Nehemia: I want to see, how can I know that in the manuscript it might not be written twice? It’s only written once, and you’ve added the second one.
Nehemia: That’s what I’m asking.
Avi: So, we have two kinds of documentation; we have local documentation notes for things like we already looked at, like daka, or the change in the cantillation. We also have a global introduction. The global introduction explains global editorial decisions like the decision to add stress helpers. The idea is that you can always know what the manuscript has even before you look at the manuscript. How do I do that?
Avi: If the Aleppo Codex, on occasion, adds a stress helper, and the digital edition, of course, also has a stress helper, then I add a documentation note saying that the stress helper even exists in the manuscript.
Nehemia: And if there’s no note like that, then you can assume it’s not in the manuscript.
Nehemia: Wow, this is amazing.
Avi: The introduction explains that.
Nehemia: This is amazing. I want to do a second part if you have time. If not, we’ll do it a different time. I don’t know, if you’re…
Avi: I’m good tonight. It’s before Rosh Hashanah…
Nehemia: And I appreciate…
Avi: …done before the new year.
Nehemia: So, I’d like to try to do like a 30-minute separate segment, if you’re willing to, that I put for just subscribers. Would you be willing to do that? This is all going to be open source. You’re an open-source person. I’d like to have a bonus section where we talk for maybe 30 minutes. You explain the meaning of the word Miqra. Can we do that?
Avi: Ooh! I’d like to do that!
Nehemia: So, any final words Avi? Let’s sum up the episode, and… what do you want to share with people?
Avi: Okay. I wanted to sum up with… I didn’t actually say what it’s based on. I didn’t actually type the Tanakh, okay? I took preexisting typed versions. I’m very grateful to Chris Kimball for the Westminster Leningrad Codex. You know, it was very useful for Jews on the internet, but I don’t think it was meant for Jewish use. The purpose of the Masoretic codices was double. A Masoretic Codex was meant to be correct in its letter text, so that the Torah scrolls could be corrected against it. And it was also meant to be correct in its vocalization so that readers could check and verify their reading to make sure their reading was correct. But since the Leningrad Codex has lots and lots of letters that are wrong, and the Leningrad Codex has all kinds of, not necessarily mistakes, but anomalies, let’s say, in its vocalization, so the diplomatic edition of the Westminster Leningrad Codex wasn’t sufficient in my eyes. Okay?
Nehemia: Rabbi Mordechai Breuer has this great statement where he says something to the effect of, “If you wanted to choose a worse codex than the Leningrad Codex, you couldn’t have found one.”
Nehemia: Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. He’s very critical.
Avi: But he also said that to copy the vocalization of the Leningrad Codex…
Nehemia: No, for the consonants, he’s talking about.
Nehemia: No, but for the consonants, he’s talking about. And look, guys, we’re not talking about… like I said, you won’t have Ishmael bound to the altar. But what you might have is the word be’or, referring to, you know, Balaam, Balaam the son of Be’or. Is it written with a Vav or without a Vav? Right? That kind of thing.
Avi: The bottom line is, if you want to read the Torah in the synagogue, or even if you want to study the Torah with commentaries, the Torah in the Leningrad Codex is not good enough.
Nehemia: It’s not good enough.
Avi: And so, the Westminster…
Nehemia: Even to study it! What would be an example where it’s not good enough even to study it?
Avi: Because I’m assuming that study… later you want to talk about Miqra. I’m assuming that studying includes vocalizing the words…
Nehemia: All right, let’s save that for the Miqra discussion, because otherwise… we’re wrapping it up.
Avi: Okay. And the second thing is that there was the Mechon Mamre edition. The Mechon Mamre edition is far more accurate than the less…
Nehemia: What’s that based on?
Avi: It’s meant to be like Breuer. They even write that they follow Mordechai Breuer. And in almost all the details, it’s identical to Brewer. There’s certain global editorial decisions they made to distinguish themselves from Breuer, like, how you represent kri o ktiv, or do you write a dot in the divine name? Okay?
Nehemia: You mean the cholam?
Nehemia: The O, the cholam in the…
Avi: The O, the cholam. Those things are stylistic, but basically, they follow Breuer, and they did a good job. But A, there are some mistakes and B, this was the big one; it’s not available under an open license.
Avi: Okay? So, what would I do for the parts that the Aleppo Codex does exist? So, I started with the Torah where the Aleppo Codex doesn’t exist. I used the Westminster Leningrad Codex with corrections. I would just dump the Westminster ones, the WLC, the Westminster Leningrad Codex onto Wikisource, and then week by week I’d go over the weekly portion and I’d change the consonants, and I’d fix the vocalization.
Nehemia: So, where the Aleppo Codex isn’t preserved, and there’s no witnesses, what are you basing it on, your correction?
Avi: I’m using the work of people like Breuer…
Avi: …about how to reconstruct it, although I didn’t follow exactly either of their methods.
Avi: Okay? And the introduction explains all of that. Okay.
Avi: And so, week by week I do the parasha. And I didn’t do a perfect job. And it didn’t matter that I didn’t do a perfect job. Why? Because it was a good enough job, and then next year, or next week, or whenever, somebody could fix it and make it even better and better and better. And the people at Wikisource, like Nahum and others, are fantastic, right? They would also go into it and they would help to improve it.
Avi: So, then I also did the five megillot, which mostly don’t exist in the Aleppo Codex. Then I had the rest of the Tanakh. For the rest of the Tanakh, I wanted to use Mechon Mamre. Mechon Mamre, it’s their right to refuse permission.
Avi: They worked hard on their text, and they provided the first text like that on the internet. So, he wrote me, the editor, he wrote me like this; I still have the email. He said, “You know, you can’t publish my text, but if you want to use me as a typing service and then you do the work yourself from the manuscripts, not only do I not want to stop you from doing that, but I couldn’t stop you from doing that.” Okay? So, that’s what I did. Unlike the WLC, which I dumped the Torah onto Wikisource, I couldn’t dump anything from Mechon Mamre. Okay?
Nehemia: I wonder. Well… okay, so, there’s actually a legal question that… neither of us are lawyers and we shouldn’t get into, maybe. But there’s this concept that you can’t copyright facts, and this was the famous case between Elisha Qimron and the Biblical Archeology Review.
Nehemia: And they took Qimron’s text and they printed it, and he sued them for two things; copyright infringement, and the other was more droit morale, which is something like plagiarism rights.
Nehemia: Right. And he lost on the copyright infringement, because they said, “What do you mean? You didn’t write this text. This text was written 2,200 years ago or whatever, by the Yachad in Qumran. You just transcribed it.” And so, although it took great skill to transcribe facts, facts can’t be copyrighted. And this is like what happens with maps. So, when you print a map, what the printers used to do, I don’t know if they still do, is, they put fake information. They make towns that don’t exist, because the map itself is facts, and you can’t copyright a fact, but if there’s a made-up town that doesn’t exist, that’s not a fact. And so, they can sue you, and what you would have to do if you wanted to, let’s say, steal their map is… or they do this with phone books as well… there was a case in Beit Shemesh where somebody put together a Yellow Pages type thing. This is a long time ago, obviously, and somebody stole it and made their own, and they sold advertisements, and so, they’re making money off of it. And in the court case, it said, “Wait a minute, all of these phone numbers are facts.” Although it took great skill and a lot of money and a lot of effort to collect all these phone numbers, they’re facts and you can’t copyright facts. And so, what they did going forward is they put in… or maybe back then, even, they put in fake phone numbers and fake names. And when you sue them, you sue them over the fake names, right? Because those aren’t facts. So, I’m not sure Mechon Mamre… Now, all their commas and stuff like that? Yes, I agree those are not facts…
Avi: We’re talking about the one with cantillation. There’s no…
Nehemia: So, I’m not sure that’s copyrightable, based on Israeli law or even American or European law.
Nehemia: I don’t know. But I mean, who wants to…
Avi: His claim was… you know, he’s deceased. He was a very wonderful man. His claim was that I have my certain editorial way of doing this…
Avi: …my copyright, but if you want to go back and do it from scratch, you have my blessing.
Nehemia: All right, that’s good for him. All right.
Avi: So that’s what I did! I couldn’t dump even a single chapter. I had to take each chapter…
Nehemia: Why didn’t you take the Westminster Codex for that as well, and just correct it? It’s obviously more work.
Avi: Because it’s good if you’re starting with the Leningrad Codex. It’s not good if you’re starting with the Aleppo Codex.
Avi: It’s not that bad, it doesn’t fit as well.
Avi: Mechon Mamre fits the Aleppo Codex better than the WLC.
Avi: Okay? So, that’s what I did. Chapter by chapter, I’d use the manuscripts, go over Mechon Mamre, and only after I went over it and did it according to my editorial way instead of their editorial way, only then did I publish it chapter by chapter. The dates are… I finished the Torah in 2012, Parashat Mishpatim, and then the rest of the Tanakh was about a year-and-a-half later. I dedicated it to my wife, and we’re talking about keter – crown, you know… Masoretic…
Nehemia: Wait, explain that. What do you mean, keter – crown? In English, they don’t know what you’re talking about.
Avi: The Westminster Codex, the codex is Latin. There’s also a word from Arabic. A codex is not a Jewish thing. Jews use scrolls, so there’s no Hebrew word for it. So, where Jews started using codices… not only for the Bible, by the way, could even possibly be for other works, it was called a keter. A keter is a crown, or a taj in Arabic. So, my wife is the jewel in my crown, and I dedicated it in advance of our wedding, and so, I tell her that this is her Tanakh.
Nehemia: Beautiful. That’s beautiful. All right. And by the way, there are different words they use for codex, right? Mahzor in some manuscripts are for…
Avi: Mahzor is sometimes used, yes. It’s for other things too, mahzor. Yeah.
Nehemia: Right. Very cool. All right. You said there were two things you wanted to emphasize?
Avi: … codex prayer book was called mahzor in Europe.
Nehemia: Right. So, that’s confusing because there’s a different meaning of the word mahzor also within the same… maybe you would call it like semantic realm, right?
Nehemia: So, that’s going to be a bit confusing, but hey, language can be confusing. All right. It is what it is. All right, any other final thoughts for this episode?
Avi: I had one other thought, but it’s slipping my mind, so we’ll leave it.
Nehemia: All right, beautiful.
Avi: And at least people now know how I did it.
Nehemia: Okay, beautiful. There’s one thing I want you to look up in your version, and it might take me a minute to find it. It’s something really interesting in the Aleppo Codex, and I’m curious to see, because you mentioned the vocalization of God’s name. So, I can’t… you know, I’m like the pit bull; I can’t let that one go. Ezekiel 28:22, show us what you’ve got in your edition.
Nehemia: Chapter 28 verse 22.
Avi: Ezekiel 28:22. Hold on a second. This will take a moment.
Nehemia: We’ll end with this. This is a great place to end.
Avi: Okay, you see the addition here, you want… I’ll click on Ezekiel. Yechezkel. Well, what verse?
Avi: Verse 22. Are you going to want to note on this or not?
Avi: Okay, so, I’ll put it with…
Nehemia: If there is one, there should be one.
Avi: To show notes. And what, what verse? 22?
Nehemia: Verse 22, Kaf-Bet.
Avi: Verse 22. Kaf-Bet. Adonai Elohim has a note.
Nehemia: What’s the note?
Avi: Okay? Why is this Lamed… this is Ezekiel?
Avi: Ah! Now I understand my own note, okay. I’m following Lamed here by vocalizing…
Nehemia: The Leningrad Codex.
Avi: Elohim. I’m following the, not the Aleppo Codex, but the Leningrad Codex.
Nehemia: What does the Aleppo Codex have?
Avi: Okay, so let’s see. Shem havaya benikud Elohim. Okay. Alef with an exclamation point, meaning, this is very unusual, highly unusual, maybe a mistake. Shem havaya benikud shel ha’dmut be’shva ve’kamatz. In other words, it should have the Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey name. It should have it with the vocalization of Elohim, but instead it has the vocalization of Adonai. Okay?
Nehemia: Okay, so go on. What else does it say?
Avi: Okay. Bimkom nikud shel Elohim be’shva ve’chirik uve’tosefet shel nekudat cholam ba’ot Hey ha’rishona be’dome le’nikud haragil shel Elohim. And this needs to be explained, that normally when the Aleppo Codex vocalizes the divine name Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, pronounced as Adonai, it doesn’t write the cholam down for the sound “O”. But when it vocalizes it as Elohim, it does write the cholam dot as “O”. Here, it vocalized it, maybe accidentally, as Adonai, but it wrote the dot as in Elohim.
Nehemia: Okay. If it’s not an accident, how else could it be explained?
Nehemia: Okay. No, it’s obviously a mistake.
Nehemia: Well, “obviously.” My hypothesis would be that it’s a mistake. And, all right, we won’t get into these. But I actually have a pretty cool thing here; I got to examine the Aleppo Codex on January 15th, 2020, and let me share my screen here. I imaged that particular pair of words with a 50x microscope, and then I had to stitch the images together because there are multiple images. So, let me share the screen and I’ll show you.
Nehemia: No worries. So, here is what it looks like in the manuscript at 50x magnification, and it’s interesting; there was originally a cholam on Adonai. In fact, when I say originally, maybe it’s still there. It’s not clear to me from this image whether the cholam was scratched off. It might have been there…
Avi: But Adonai, I can’t remember…
Nehemia: That’s a separate thing; it’s a separate story. But here you have the shva, cholam, and kamatz, which is what you were… And what I wanted to see is, okay, if I look at high resolution images, maybe something was modified here. I don’t know. I was trying to see if I could see any modification of the name. I couldn’t, obviously. To me, it’s obvious that this is a mistake, right? In other words, the scribe generally wanted to write the vowels of Elohim on that instance of Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, but in this instance, he wrote different vowels, you know, because he made a mistake. And it’s a kind of mistake that other scribes make all the time. For the Aleppo Codex, it’s very, very surprising that Ben Asher proofread it many times, and he still never noticed the mistake.
Avi: Could you put the image back? I had a thought.
Nehemia: Yeah, yeah, hold on. Oh, yes.
Avi: Okay, okay. Here, here’s a thought; the difference between Elohim and Adonai in the vocalization is very, very slight because the main difference is between kamatz and chirik. You have a line with a dot under it, okay? Without the line it’s a chirik, with the line it’s a kamatz. Okay? My thought is, maybe, by accident he wrote Adonai, the vowels for Adonai, then he realized he made a mistake. He added the cholam that he normally adds for Elohim, but he forgot to erase the line.
Nehemia: Okay, that’s a great explanation. It would have been extraordinarily easy to turn the kamatz into a chirik, the “ah” into an “ee”, because literally all he had to do was erase this line. And that kind of correction, where a line is erased, appears on almost every page, probably every page of the Aleppo Codex. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. Meaning, now we have these high-resolution images which were taken recently, and there’s what’s called raking light, so there’s a light coming from the sides. So, you can see where something’s scratched up.
Nehemia: All right, Avi, this has been an amazing conversation. I feel like I’m a kid in a candy store, and I just loved every minute of this. And this is wonderful.
Avi: I’m glad, thank you, too.
You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.
We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!
SHARE THIS TEACHING WITH YOUR FRIENDS! Subscribe to "Nehemia Gordon" on your favorite podcast app!
Apple Podcasts |
Amazon Music
| TuneIn
Pocket Casts | Podcast Addict | CastBox | iHeartRadio | Podchaser
| Pandora
Donate Now ~ Bring His Word to Light
VERSES MENTIONED
Nehemiah 8:8
Deuteronomy 23:2
BOOKS MENTIONED
YHWH’s Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach
by Daniel O. McClellan
RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Hebrew Voices #230 - A Deeply Human Jewish God
Support Team Study – The Masorah as an Error Correcting Code
Hebrew Voices #174 – How We Got Our Hebrew Bible
Hebrew Voices #203 – Revelation or Imagination: Part 1
Support Team Study – Revelation or Imagination: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #206 – Revelation or imagination: Part 3
Support Team study: Revelation or Imagination: Part 4
OTHER LINKS
מקרא על פי המסורה – ויקיטקסט
The post Hebrew Voices #234 – The Jewish Bible: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.
