In this episode of Hebrew Voices #245 - Secrets of the Jots and Tittles: Part 1, Nehemia brings on scribe Dr. Marc Michaels for a deep dive into his discoveries of the “jots and tittles” and their place in archaeological and phonetic history. Join us as they dig for the truth from the Dead Sea Scrolls and key Jewish sources for clarity.
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Hebrew Voices #245 – Secrets of the Jots and Tittles: 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.
Marc: But the thing is, all these medieval reinventions of what they think the letters are and what they think tagin are, are wrong. This is the brunch part of my PhD.
Nehemia: Wait, so, tell us… here we have…
Marc: Well, we have Obi-Wan Kenobi going, “These are not the letter forms you’re looking for.”
Nehemia: “These are not the letter forms you are looking for.”
Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I am here today with Dr. Marc Michaels, who earned his PhD recently from the University of Cambridge, Fitzwilliam College. We’ve had him on the program before, but he wasn’t Dr. Michaels before, he was, I guess, Mr. Michaels. Shalom, and welcome to the program. And congratulations on earning your PhD.
Marc: Shalom, Nehemia, thank you very much. Yeah, it was definitely earned. It wasn’t given. You have to work very hard. I got it in July last year. I went and did the lovely ceremony.
Nehemia: Did you wear the Harry Potter outfit?
Marc: I did wear the Harry Potter outfit, yes. But no hats. No hats.
Nehemia: Oh, you don’t wear a hat?
Marc: One of the rules in Cambridge; you don’t have a hat.
Nehemia: Oh. I don’t remember if Harry Potter has a hat or not. I don’t honestly…
Marc: I think they do; they have the sorting hat. I’ve never watched Harry Potter.
Nehemia: I watched the movie and fell asleep multiple times and eventually gave up. So, but okay, to each their own.
Marc: You have a special ceremony at the Senate House, and I was one of the few people who did not kneel and bow. Obviously.
Nehemia: I don’t know what you’re referring to. What do you mean? What? Do they kneel and bow? What are you talking about?
Marc: Yeah, yeah. When you go up to receive your degree, to receive the PhD, they basically say a particular Latin phrase, which varies depending on which God you believe in. And most people kneel, and they bow to the person who is conferring the…
Nehemia: That’s so interesting.
Marc: So, I didn’t. I just put my hands out, kind of like that…
Nehemia: So, tell us what it means. Or, why didn’t you kneel and bow?
Marc: Because I’m Jewish. And you don’t do any bowing to human beings.
Marc: I mean, I don’t know if you’re aware, but we recently had Purim, and Mordechai got into a lot of trouble with the prime minister, the evil Haman, for precisely that; refusing to bow. So, we organized that well in advance, when…
Nehemia: So, what’s interesting is that in our Megillah… and by our Megillah, I mean the one that you write; the one that’s in the Masoretic text, it doesn’t say why he doesn’t kneel and bow. But in the Greek editions to Esther, they explain that. I mean, it’s kind of implied in the Hebrew. Like, okay, Haman wants to wipe out all the Jews. Well, why all the Jews? Just one Jew didn’t respect you. No, it’s because he didn’t bow because he’s Jewish. But that’s implied; it’s not stated explicitly. In the Greek editions, it explicitly states that Jews don’t bow to humans.
And what’s really interesting is the word for bow there is, and I’m getting this wrong, but proiskanisen, or something like this, in Greek, and that shows up in the stories of Alexander the Great. When Alexander conquered Persia, he said, “Oh, the Persian officials are bowing to me. I like this! Let’s have everybody bow to me.” And his Macedonian and Greek cohorts say, “That’s disrespectful to the gods to bow to you. You’re not a god.” Right? It’s not just that they don’t want to bow to a human, it actually belittles the gods, was their response. So, it’s fascinating; this is in the story of Esther. It’s in the Greek editions of Esther more explicitly, in case you missed the point. That’s obvious to us, right? But maybe the Greek readers didn’t understand that. And then it shows up in the story of Alexander the Great, which I think is so cool. So, you didn’t kneel and bow, and all the others did. Were they bowing? Wait, so the Christian is…
Marc: No Trinity is mentioned, just one God in the Latin.
Marc: Not that I understood the Latin anyways.
Nehemia: Wait, so, the Latin for everybody else has the Trinity in it?
Marc: Well, everybody who’s Christian, yes. Latin with the Trinity, and anybody who is an atheist doesn’t get God at all in the Latin, and anybody who’s Jewish, Muslim, will get one God.
Marc: It’s slightly different phraseology.
Nehemia: Now I’m so curious. What does God have to do with you getting your PhD? I’m not trying to be funny.
Marc: Well, it’s a very good question. I think it’s to do with the fact that, a lot of it… So, when you get introduced, the person who introduces you, they doff their hat (they’re allowed a hat). They doff their hat, and they basically say that this is a proper, upstanding person, and merits this degree and having it conferred on them. And God gets into that, because obviously it’s about being a good, ethical person. All the Cambridge and Oxford… all these universities, are all originally Christian. They’re very heavily Christian. I mean, they have Lent term and Easter term and…
Nehemia: So, it’s not just that they’re Christian, they were religious institutions to begin with, right?
Marc: From what I understand, yes.
Nehemia: Okay. Right. Meaning, universities were invented by, I guess, the Catholic Church, because there wasn’t really another… well, the church, whatever, you know.
Nehemia: Right. I once heard the statistic that… and I know you got it from Cambridge, but Oxford was founded before the founding of the Aztec empire, and before the founding of the Inca empire. And still continues to exist, which is like a mind-blowing thought.
Marc: Very possible. I have no idea.
Nehemia: Okay. Like, maybe more of an American orientation…
Marc: That could be completely made up, I have no idea at all.
Nehemia: I don’t know Cambridge…
Marc: And Oxford is, of course, the dark side.
Nehemia: Right, so, they’re the rival of Cambridge, I suppose.
Nehemia: So, when I earned my PhD at Bar Ilan University in Israel, I don’t recall that God was mentioned. Maybe there was a prayer for the defense of the State of Israel or something at the beginning, I honestly don’t remember. If it was, like, it’s kind of one of those things you don’t pay that much attention… like it wasn’t… that’s interesting. Kneel… wow, that’s so interesting.
All right, so, the subject of your PhD is relevant here, because one of the things we talked about before you coming on was that you were going to share the insights of your PhD. And I saw a lecture you gave a while back, and I think it was like a speed version of your PhD dissertation.
Marc: It was an hour. It was my PhD in an hour. I’ve given it twice since, and it really is sort of strapping where we’re going now. And I go through quite a lot of information in a very short period of time.
Nehemia: So, do you have slides that you can share with people? Like, I don’t know if you prepared that.
Marc: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have slides.
Nehemia: Okay, so I’m going to ask you… So, we did a program where we called it something like, or maybe one of my editors had the idea, I don’t remember… they called it the decorative doohickeys, and you thought that was very funny. And I found out since that doohickey is an Americanism.
Nehemia: And yes, it sounds a little bit odd, that word in American English, but probably not nearly as odd as it sounds in British English.
Marc: Yeah, people don’t tend to use the word doohickey in normal conversation, which is why I thought it was funny at the time.
Nehemia: Well, maybe not in normal conversation either, but… So, like, it was being used… I looked it up, by Mark Twain, right? I mean, it’s a very old word in American English…
Marc: We know it because we have American TV shows. We’ve heard the word doohickey, yes.
Nehemia: So, I recently saw a video where they were talking about some differences between American English and British English, and one of the phrases we have is “to table a resolution”, which means we put it aside and we’re not going to talk about it. We’re sticking it on the table.
Nehemia: And in British Parliament, it means, “we’re going to discuss it now and deal with it.” Which is so interesting. And then…
Marc: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is exactly… So, I’m married to a Canadian…
Marc: … Aviella Barklay, who is the first ever female soferet.
Nehemia: Quick story; my wife said, “Who are you interviewing today?” I said, “Marc Michaels.” She said, “Who’s that?” I said, “You met his wife,” meaning, because we interviewed her in London.
Nehemia: And so, it’s funny; I’ve had you on twice, but she knows Aviella better.
Marc: So, when Aviella and I were discussing our wedding, and we were talking about various things, and it was all getting, you know, like all weddings, complicated stuff, and we were talking about the reception. She was talking about tabling something, i.e. putting it aside. And I was going, “No, I don’t want to talk about it now. We want to talk about it later.” And it went on for at least an hour before we realized we were using, completely, this… we were agreeing. We didn’t want to talk about it now, we were going to do it later, but it sounded like we were disagreeing.
Nehemia: So, this actually happened in World War II, where the U.S. forces were meeting with U.K. forces, and they were talking about tabling something. And the Americans are like, “No, this is really important. We don’t want to table this.” And it also took them quite a bit of time to figure out, “Oh, you use that phrase differently.” And what they said in this video I saw is that in Canada, they use it both ways. In the Canadian parliament, or whatever they have, they use it in the British sense. But in daily speech they use it in the American sense. So, they’re kind of like this hybrid in Canada.
Marc: See, over here, we would say… if we want to put something aside and think about it later, we’ll park it.
Marc: Which apparently in Canadian means we’ll talk about it now.
Nehemia: You know, it took me a long time to understand, when the British would say “full stop,” I’d be like, “What is full… what?”
Marc: Period. You say period.
Nehemia: So, you mean… oh, period. Because you call the period, full stop, don’t you? Like, you say, “I wrote a full stop in a sentence.”
Marc: We call it full stop, yeah, absolutely.
Nehemia: Right. So, isn’t that interesting? And speaking of paratextual notations like the period or the full stop, tell us about the doohickeys, meaning, the decorative features in Torah scrolls. Can you define for the audience… I know I used the term, but can you tell people what paratextual is?
Marc: Okay. So, on any manuscript, there is the main script, the main writing, the text, which in the cases of what I’m dealing with, is usually Hebrew, in various scripts. But around that there will be extra things. Now that might be some dots, it might be the letters are made large, it might be the… well, we don’t tend to get underline, but you get boxed round stuff in some manuscripts, which you know about very much because it’s about deleting things. And you get, sometimes there’s a Zayin or a Nun sofit letter in the margins, which also has some textual meanings. There are inverted Nunim, which are brackets, and they were originally brackets, Sigma and anti-Sigma, and I’ve written about that in the past. And there’s all these things that are happening in and around the text, hence paratextual. But what you’re talking about, really, when you talk about the doohickeys, isn’t really paratextual.
Nehemia: Okay. So, I was in Heidelberg, Germany about a year ago at a conference, and it was a conference on Masoretic studies. And you had some of the really top scholars in Masoretic studies there, and there was this fierce debate about whether Masoretic notes are paratextual or whether they are a text unto themselves. Because the Masoretic notes will be… you know, there’ll be a certain word spelled a certain way and they’ll say in the margin, “That’s spelled two times this way and three times that way.” And so, from my perspective, the Bible is the text, the biblical text, and the note in the margin is para-textual; it’s not part of the text. And some of the other scholars were saying, “No, it’s its own text!”
Marc: It is its own text.
Marc: So, the Mesorah Magna, the Gedolah, the big Mesorah, is an independent text. Probably, you get away with the small Masoretic notes in the columns; they aren’t really because they are, fundamentally, a shortcut to the bigger discussion. So, then one refers to the other. So, I would probably agree with you that the ones in the margins are paratextual…
Nehemia: Well, I didn’t take a position there, but…
Marc: The actual Masoretic notes are a text in themselves.
Nehemia: Yeah, but in relation to the biblical text, they’re paratextual.
Nehemia: Meaning, if it says, “Three times spelled full,” that’s like a typical note. Well, you’re right. That’s a small Masoretic note. The larger notes will say, “It’s three times full, and here are the three times.” Right?
Nehemia: But without the text, that’s meaningless. But anyway… so, we were talking about paratextual notations, and my point was that there is not a consensus about what is a paratextual, where the line between paratextual and textual begins. So, for example, in English, I think you mentioned an underline; if you have something underlined to emphasize it, that would be paratextual because I can’t read that when I read the text. And it doesn’t have… well, it does have meaning, so, it’s a bit complicated.
So, tell us about the decorative features, what’s called the strange… well, you don’t call them strange letters, you call them different letters, right? Otiot meshunot.
Marc: Well, actually, yeah, I don’t call them… otiot meshunot means strange letters. I tend to refer to them as visual midrash.
Marc: Because strange letters sounds a little bit negative, but visual midrash kind of sums up what they’re trying to do; they’re trying to take the letters on the page, and by the shape of them, or the decorative features around them, tell a story.
Marc: Now, what I’ve proved is, to a large extent, those stories are post-inventions, because the real reason behind the strange letters is different to what people say they are. But it doesn’t invalidate the stories.
Nehemia: So, can you show us an example of a strange letter, or… again, in Hebrew, guys, they’re called otiot meshunot, which means strange letters or modified letters. Shoneh is different, right? They’re being made different. And for those listening, you’ll have to describe what we’re seeing, because a lot of people listen to the podcast.
Nehemia: I know it’s a challenge.
Marc: Can you see my screen?
Nehemia: I can see the screen.
Marc: So, strange letters; and this is very important, there are other reasons… otiot meshunot. Otiot meshunot include large letters and small letters and dotted letters, and then Nunin hafukhim, the reversed upside-down Nuns; those are not part of Sefer Tagin. So, Sefer Tagin is the thing I did my PhD on, but they get lumped in with Sefer Tagin always. And there’s a very good reason why, and if we get to that, I’ll explain why. But they get lumped in, but they’re very different. So, the oddly…
Nehemia: But… go ahead, sorry…
Marc: …the oddly shaped letters are not an independent tradition; they are part of Sefer Tagin. They are not the large letters or the small letters or the dotted letters, that’s something completely different.
Nehemia: So, we haven’t defined Sefer Tagin, so, that makes this a bit complicated. So, I want to show people here the backwards Nuns, and I would show them in the Aleppo Codex, but we don’t have that page.
Marc: Numbers 10:35 to 36.
Nehemia: So, every Torah scroll in the world is supposed to have a backwards Nun here, and a backwards Nun here, and this is the passage that talks about, when the Ark would travel, Moses would say, “Arrive, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, and scatter Your enemies, and let Your enemies flee from before You.” And when it would rest, he would say, Moses would say, “return, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey,” and this is probably why the brackets are here. “Return, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, of the tens of thousands of the thousands of Israel.”
Okay, so there’s the backwards Nun here and the backwards Nun here, and you were explaining why those… and these aren’t part of the text, right? I could read the text, and I don’t say, “Be’nosam min ha’machaneh, Nun hafukha, va’yehi binso ha’aron.” You don’t say that.
Marc: No, you don’t say that. And in fact, they’re not in all Sifrei Torahs. They’re not in Kararite Torahs. And in some Sifrei Torah, if they follow a particular Rabbinic tradition, they are in the word. So, in binsoa, and ka’mit’onenim, they actually have the Nuns backwards…
Nehemia: Ah, interesting.
Marc: …as opposed to having them as brackets.
Nehemia: Okay. Well, tell us what you mean by brackets? What does that mean, that they’re brackets?
Marc: Right. Okay. So, the reason for these upside-down reverse Nunim is not what you might think it is, because, originally, they were not letters Nun.
Nehemia: What do I think it is? Meaning, I have a reason I heard from Emanuel Tov, but most people have no idea what they’re doing there!
Marc: Emanuel Tov is correct.
Marc: Basically, they are Sigma and anti-Sigma. So, they were originally actual brackets. And you know this, because you know how people…
Nehemia: Yeah, but explain to the audience because they don’t know.
Marc: Right, okay. So, in the very old days, the ancient… when I mean, ancient, so, sort of Dead Sea Scrolls days; in order to delete a letter that was wrong, or a word that was wrong, they would put dots on it. And there’s 10 in the Torah and 15 in the Tanakh, of dotted letters. And the reason those dotted letters or words are there are because they probably shouldn’t have been written. The brackets surround a lump of text that either should be deleted or is in the wrong place. And in this case, with Numbers 10:35-36, they’re in the wrong place.
Nehemia: How do you know they’re in the wrong place?
Marc: Because if you look at the Septuagint, you will see that the order of the verses is different. So, I think it goes 35, 36, 34. And what is probably happening is that the Hebrew underlying the Septuagint… because there were various different versions, not that many versions, but versions of the Torah, which were minorly different… you can see in the Dead Sea Scrolls that the Hebrew underlying the Septuagint, what became eventually the Masoretic text… We understand what became the Samaritan text, the proto-Samaritan text, all slightly different.
If you look at the Septuagint, the verse ordering is different. Because what’s happening is, somebody is correcting the Masoretic text to the Hebrew underlying the Septuagint and saying, “This should be in a different place. These two verses are in the wrong place.” And there was probably a dot that said, “this is where they’re supposed to be.” The dots disappeared.
Marc: Right? A bit like we have an asterisk now saying, move this, right? And what happened is that, over time, people seem to have forgotten what the purpose of these brackets were. And as a result, they just copied them. So, they never moved it to where it was supposed to be, they just carried on copying them, and over time the brackets became Nuns. And that is how that happened.
Nehemia: So, this is really interesting. So, here I’m going to pull up… this isn’t what I thought we would talk about, but this is more interesting. I mean, I don’t know if this is more interesting. It’s too interesting…
Marc: It’s more interesting than my PhD.
Nehemia: Well, no, it’s too interesting to gloss over. So, we have these two verses, and they’re marked with these backwards Nuns. And Emanuel Tov explained them… I’m just reviewing here, as basically deletion marks. Everything between this… these were marks that you see in Greek manuscripts called Sigma and anti-Sigma, or they were called parenthesis. Meaning, there’s the parenthese is plural, and these are… each one is the first parenthesis and the last parenthesis, and everything between them should be deleted. That’s one explanation; or they’re in the wrong place is the other explanation.
Nehemia: And as you point out… and here, I’m going to show up on the screen here. So, here I have in Accordance… so, we have verse 34, which is… well, let’s go back. So, verse 33 is the same in the Greek and the Hebrew, and then 34 is parallel. Meaning, 33 is followed by 34 in the English, which seems almost obvious, but then in the Greek, 33 is followed by 36, and then 34, 35. So, that’s very interesting.
Where it doesn’t, sort of, make sense is when you read the flow of the text. Meaning, they make more sense where they are in the Masoretic text. To me, at least.
Marc: Not much in it, that’d be perfectly honest.
Nehemia: What do you mean?
Marc: If you can read it both ways and it still makes sense.
Nehemia: Okay. All right. So, here’s the explanation I heard, which, you know, there’s a bunch of possibilities. So, one possibility that is just worth stating is that these verses were in the margin, and somebody copied them into the text. And the Masoretic text copied them into a different place than the Septuagint. And let’s just look real quick at the Samaritan, because that would be really significant here. So, the Samaritan has the order of the Masoretic text. So, it’s really hard to explain that if that’s not the original order.
Marc: The Rabbinic midrash on this suggests that this actually is so misplaced that it should be 50. Hence Nun equals 50; 50 verses previous, I think, in the chapter on the de Gallium on the flags…
Nehemia: Which makes more sense for it; it’s more organic there. And that would explain a little bit better; meaning, it got misplaced. It was in the margin, and different people copied it into the text in a different place. But here’s the interesting thing that I find intriguing. So, one of the explanations is that there was a theological reason for removing it, and the theological reason was, when the Ark would rest, Moses would say, “Return, O Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey,” which someone might have read in a later period and say, “Wait, is he calling the Ark Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey?” Which is a theme in the Tanakh, right? So, that’s one of the explanations I’ve heard from scholars. I don’t know if that’s right.
To me, the fact that the Samaritan has it in the same order as the Masoretic text, against the Septuagint, tells me that it must go back, at least, to a time when the Jews and the Samaritans split. And the Septuagint here is the sort of aberration. But the point is, when scribes copy a Torah scroll, they insert this backwards Nun, whether into the letters or into just the margin (or the blank space, not so much the margin) and I call that a paratextual feature because it’s not part of the text.
Marc: That is a paratextual feature, definitely.
Nehemia: All right, now let’s talk about the doohickeys, which are not paratextual features.
Marc: So, Sefer Tagin, which means the book of… well, it’s translated as tittles in most of the New Testament translations that you come across, and they are decorative flourishes on the Hebrew letters.
Nehemia: Wait, wait, wait. You said the New Testament translation; this is not part of the New Testament though…
Marc: Yes, it is. Yes, it is.
Nehemia: Sefer Tagin is part of the New Testament?
Marc: No, no, no. Something in the New Testament is describing the same phenomena as Sefer Tagin.
Nehemia: Yeah, Matthew 5:17, “I’ve come, not to do away with,” I’m paraphrasing, “one jot and one tittle,” and what you’re saying is that in the time when that was recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, some sort of features existed. Is that what you’re saying?
Marc: Yes. So, tagin, as we understand them today… and you see (on the screen you’ll see some examples of tagin) at the top from a line of a recent Megillat Esther, as I wrote, and you can see that some letters have one little line with a dot on the top. So, ball on a stick; we quite often refer to them as ball on the stick.
Nehemia: What do you call it? Ball on a stick, okay.
Marc: So, these are ball on a stick, tagin.
Nehemia: So, basically there’s a straight line with a little ball at the end of it, just for those who are listening.
Nehemia: And that’s added to the letter, and that’s called a tag, or plural tagin.
Marc: It’s called a tag, right? And tagin is the plural in Aramaic, and they’re balls on sticks. And they’re used only in the Torah scrolls, or Megillat Esther, or mezuzot, or tefillin, i.e. what’s called kitvei ha’kodesh, which is Jewish Holy Writings. Some of them take three, as you can see, on the Shin and the Ayin and the Nun and the Zayin, they have three. And Tzadi as well. And some only have one, and then some have none. Oddly enough, the acronym for the ones that have none is melechet sofer, which means “work of the scribe.” Is that a coincidence? Who knows?
Nehemia: Wait, hold on a second. So, the letters that have no crowns on them are the letters melechet sofer. Mem-Lamed-Aleph-Kaf-Tav Samekh-Vav-Peh-Reish. Is that a coincidence? Probably not.
Nehemia: That’s itself sort of a midrash, right?
Marc: Who knows? Now, you also see, and I’ve collected a few examples here of these very decorative tagin, which are beautiful, but they have no historical or religious significance whatsoever. They’re purely artistic. But they’re lovely.
Nehemia: So, it looks like a peacock’s feathers. And is the idea that, instead of just three, maybe he had some extra space and so he elaborated it?
Marc: Yeah. They’re usually at the top margins because you’ve got extra space. So, they go mad. They have trees and peacock tails and explosions and, you know… it’s lovely. It’s lovely, pretty, but it’s just pretty. There’s nothing specifically important about this whatsoever. So, there is this book called Sefer Tagin, which is a manual. It’s in Aramaic, supposedly, and up until me coming along, everybody… read anything, it says, “It’s a Kabbalistic manual from Gaonic times.” So, around 700, 800 CE…
Nehemia: Well, that’s your conclusion, that it isn’t. So, let’s save that for…
Marc: Yeah, yeah, it isn’t. But I haven’t told you exactly what it is yet. So, it covers extra tagin and special letter forms that are on 1,914 words, roughly, in the Torah. Unfortunately, the Latin book, the first sort of printed copy of this, is particularly faulty, because it’s copied from a particularly faulty manuscript. Which is a bit difficult, because it means that most of what people talk about Sefer Tagin is not correct, because they’re basing it on this particular book from 1866.
But you can see an example here of… I mean, this is just one example, of a medieval reinvention of Sefer Tagin. And you can see an Aleph there with seven tagin, and a Bet with three, and a Gimel with four…
Nehemia: So, let me try to… my job is to… for the audience, to try to interface for them and help them understand. So, we’re seeing here a Shin. And let’s go back to the previous slide if we can. So, there’s sha’atnez getz, which is the seven letters, Gimel-Tzadi-Shin-Ayin-Tet-Nun-Zayin, which form the acronym sha’atnez getz. So, those seven letters systematically have crowns on them.
Nehemia: But then Sefer Tagin is, and correct me if this is wrong. I’m trying to, again, explain to the audience, there are specific instances of specific letters that have crowns different than the systematic crowns of the sha’atnez getz or the Bet or whatever.
Marc: Yes, and indeed Sefer Tagin preceded the sha’atnez getz.
Nehemia: Okay. So, in other words, this tradition of marking special letters in a special way predates systematically putting the little doohickeys on those seven letters mechanically.
Nehemia: Okay. And again, for the people who are listening, not seeing, some of the letters aren’t little tittles or crowns added to the letter. Like, for example, you have a strange Vav here, and here I really feel comfortable calling it strange. Where, if I didn’t know what that was, I’m not sure I’d know it was a Vav.
Marc: No, you’d think it was a Nun. And that’s part of the problem with Sefer Tagin, is that some of the medieval reinventions of it have corrupted the letter so much that authorities would consider them pasul, which is invalid. They can’t be used. And there are Zayins and Nun Sofits that look like a Kuf. There’s all sorts of stuff that wouldn’t really be permitted anymore under strict halakhic guidelines for rules for scribes. So, that Vav is a good example. And in fact, the Me’iri was one of the rabbis who wrote a version of Sefer Tagin. He calls it ra, a bad form. So…
Nehemia: And for those who aren’t familiar, Menachem HaMe’iri, he’s 1249 to 1316. That doesn’t sound right, he didn’t live very long. I guess that’s right, and he lived in what today is southern France; in Perpignan, wherever that is. It’s interesting; although he’s living in France, he’s not considered a French rabbi. He is part of the, I guess, cultural region of Provence, or Narbona, it would have been called in the Middle Ages. But anyway, so, he’s a rabbi in what today is southern France, Menachem HaMe’iri. And what’s interesting about him is, he was a scribe. So, unlike me, who studies scribal practices, he’s more like you; he was an actual working scribe.
Marc: Yes. So, what he writes is generally very good. But his version of Sefer Tagin is massively additive. Where he’s not sure of where something should be, he just guesses and puts in some extra ones.
Marc: So, that causes, kind of, some issues.
Nehemia: So, just to summarize; there are seven letters that systematically have crowns. That doesn’t mean anything particularly special, but then there’s specific instances… there’s a certain Aleph and a certain verse which has, I don’t know, seven crowns according to one version.
Nehemia: Even though you said before that Aleph is what it doesn’t…
Marc: There are in fact seven Alephs. There are in fact seven Alephs in the Torah…
Marc: …that have seven crowns, and they are in specific places. And in fact…
Nehemia: So, you’re saying it’s deliberate which Aleph they chose, it’s not just arbitrary.
Marc: Oh, it’s one hundred percent deliberate.
Marc: And this is the pattern that I was trying to unravel for my PhD.
Nehemia: Okay. So, why does this Aleph have crowns, and why does that Chet… and the Chet here is almost like a splayed Chet, it’s not…
Marc: Yes. So, it is actually…
Nehemia: Well, one of them doesn’t have crowns.
Marc: …called that. It’s called a splayed Chet.
Nehemia: Okay. It’s like doing a split.
Marc: … m’shokh, the split, splayed Chet. Yes, it’s exactly what it’s called.
Nehemia: What’s the word in Aramaic, or Hebrew?
Nehemia: How do you spell that?
Nehemia: How do you spell it in Hebrew?
Marc: S-H-O-K-H, in your translation.
Nehemia: Oh m’sokh. So, like, Mem-Samekh-Vav…
Nehemia: …Kaf or something. Okay.
Marc: Yes. So, regardless… I mean, it’s called that now, but it’s not what it is. That’s the thing. It’s very difficult because a lot of this stuff has been reinterpreted over time. So, one of the things I had to do was, in order to prove the patterns, by extension, I ended up doing a critical edition, which is going to get published at some point. It’s almost complete; I am just revising a certain section, and I’ll explain why in a minute.
But I had to go and find the different sources of Sefer Tagin. The probably oldest source, and I call these the core sources, because they are just Sefer Tagin; they haven’t added in all the other stuff. And we talked about the large letters and the dotted letters, and all that stuff, maleh, chaser, all those things; they’re not Sefer Tagin, right? They’re not. They become…
Nehemia: You’re saying some later versions of Sefer Tagin have all those little other features?
Marc: They have all those other stuff, all pushed into them. So, one of the first breakthroughs on the PhD was to identify core sources and then, well, I’m going to call later, compiled sources. So, the core sources are important; they’re only Sefer Tagin, only in alphabetical order. They have an introduction that talks about how this was passed down from Joshua’s 12 stones in Gilgal and passed down through the rabbis and to a particular person.
Nehemia: Tell us what you mean by Joshua’s 12 stones in Gilgal.
Marc: So, Joshua was told by God… well, actually Moses was told by God earlier, but Joshua does it when we get to the Book of Joshua, to set up 12 stones when he gets into Gilgal. And supposedly, on those stones, the Torah was written. And they wrote out the whole Torah on these stones.
Marc: So, he does that. And the story, the instruction, which is a later piece, because again, it wasn’t originally in Sefer Tagin, it’s a later addition. It talks about how these ideas have been passed down all the way from Joshua. It’s very like, if your listeners and viewers are familiar with Mishnah Avot 1:1, where it says, “ve’Mosheh kibel mi’Sinai”, “Moses received from Sinai,” and then he…
Nehemia: Let’s assume they don’t know. It’s worth explaining what that is.
Marc: Okay, so Mishnah Avot, so, The Ethics of the Fathers, is an ethical tractate of the Mishnah, and it gives you sort of life lessons, so to speak. But at the start, it has an introductory section that very much talks about passing this tradition down. And Moses passed it to Joshua, and Joshua passed it to the elders, and the elders passed it to the rabbis, and blah, blah, blah, blah, till it gets to the Tanaitic rabbis, the Pharisees. And Sefer Tagin has a very similar introduction that’s doing exactly the same job, which is to give it authority. Because if you can claim your thing goes all the way back to Moshe or Yehoshua, you have authority. So, that’s exactly…
Nehemia: So, I want to read this for the audience, because it’s worth dwelling on. So, Deuteronomy 27:2, this is the JPS translation. It says, “As soon as you cross the Jordan into the land that the LORD your God is giving you, you shall set up large stones, coat them with plaster, and inscribe upon them all the words of this teaching,” which is in the Hebrew, Torah. And then Joshua then does that later in the Book of Joshua. So, in other words, there was a physical copy, according to Deuteronomy… well, Deuteronomy commanded it. Joshua, let’s see, where is this in Joshua? It’s somewhere in there. I think it’s Joshua, I want to say 8. He actually does this, it says. Here it is, Joshua 8:32, “And there on the stones he inscribed a copy of the teaching,” meaning, the Hebrew Torah, “that Moses had written for the Israelites.”
So, in other words, we think of the Torah as a scroll, which isn’t wrong, but according to the Torah itself, there was a copy written on stone, technically on plastered stone. Which is interesting because there’s the Deir Allah inscription, which mentions Balaam, the son of Beor, and it’s a very old inscription in Aramaic from Transjordan in a place called Deir Allah, which was biblical Sukkot, almost certainly. And there, it has the story of Balaam written on plaster, which… coated stone. So, there was such a practice, and you’re saying that Sefer Tagin… Who makes the claim that Sefer Tagin goes, or that these special forms, go back to the Torah written by Joshua?
Marc: Right. So, a later author who is reusing the work of probably the original author of Sefer Tagin… so he’s sort of moving on, adds this section that claims it goes all the way back to Joshua, because it gives it extra authority.
Nehemia: So, this is what we call a chain of transmission.
Marc: Chain of transmission.
Nehemia: So, the Oral Law in Avot 1:1 in the Mishnah has the chain of transition. “Mosheh kibel mI’Sinai”, “Moses received the Torah at Sinai”. He transmitted it to Joshua, transmitted it to the elders who transmitted it, etc. on, as you said, until the rabbis. And you’re saying that Sefer Tagin has the same claim of transmission.
Nehemia: That’s very interesting. But that’s a later accretion, you’re saying? Well, I mean, these are all later things, presumably, but I guess it’s a matter of… In other words, like, if you asked an ultra-Orthodox Jew today, would he believe that this goes back to the Torah?
Marc: No, because they don’t tend to think about Sefer Tagin. Sefer Tagin is not that well known.
Nehemia: Oh, okay. But if they knew about it, would they take that at face value and say it goes back?
Marc: They might. It wouldn’t be correct. But anyway, so, this one…
Nehemia: Well, is Mishnah Avot 1:1 correct? That’s perhaps where I would disagree with many Orthodox Jews.
Marc: Of course it is, Nehemia.
Nehemia: As a Karaite, I would say no, but that’s fine. Let’s leave that for…
Marc: Yeah, yeah, alright.
Marc: So, Sefer Tagin; this is probably the oldest version of Sefer Tagin. This is the one I found in the Cairo Genizah. So, I’m a volunteer at the Cairo Genizah. Prof. Ben Outhwaite, Prof. Jeffrey Khan were my two supervisors, so I spent a lot of my PhD at the Cairo Genizah.
Nehemia: Okay. In Cambridge…
Nehemia: Oh, so that’s important. The Cambridge Genizah Unit at Cambridge University Library, although the university is not called Cambridge University, it’s called University of Cambridge.
Marc: University of Cambridge.
Marc: Anyway, this is the oldest version, so, in theory, the least corrupt version, maybe. And then there’s some other versions that are also core ones. One of the most important is Sassoon 82, which I think you’ve seen in person, and I have…
Nehemia: So, I examined that in Geneva in 2019. And at the time, I was there looking at the Sassoon Codex, which is, you know, a different manuscript; a more important one, from my perspective, of course. Meaning, that’s Sassoon 1053, the one I was looking at. But while I was there, I was asked to also look specifically at Sefer Tagin in Sassoon 82 to try to see if I could get anything with the microscope that would make it more legible. And it was not successful. That was actually a request of Jordan Penkauer, who has passed away recently, so, I’ll say of blessed memory. And we should talk more about that afterwards; there’s something that’s relevant to that that you might be interested in.
Marc: And if you recall, you told me that you were doing that, and I said, “I would also like that imagery.” Which I have used in the sort of study, and it wasn’t completely useless. I mean…
Nehemia: Okay, I didn’t know that.
Marc: We did get the odd reading from it, but I’ve kind of gone a step further. There’s one in Oxford which is rather nice. There’s one which is in Palmer, which is known as… I have acronyms for these, ST, OBP, so it helps me say these things quickly.
Nehemia: So, you’ve assigned letters to each of these different sources.
Marc: I’ve assigned letters to it to help me with the critical edition, but also, just generally I use them a lot. The Palmer one is probably the most complete version…
Marc: …but it’s also corrupt. Basically, there’s a few other manuscripts, and so forth. But then it kind of all went wrong, and we got what I like to refer to as the “Masoretic mixtape”, where somebody came up with, in theory, a very good idea of taking all of the paratextual features, if you want to call that, and the maleh and the chaser, and whether it’s a stuma or petucha, an open or closed section, and jamming them all together in parasha order, so, the sections that you read each week.
Nehemia: The weekly Torah portion.
Marc: What they did, though, is, it completely destroyed the integrity of Sefer Tagin. So, Sefer Tagin is still the biggest bit of it, because it’s 1,914 instances, but it’s buried. It’s buried in…
Nehemia: So, originally Sefer Tagin was in alphabetical order, and it said, “These seven Alephs have this form, and these whatever Bets have that form,” and you’re saying that…
Marc: And then it listed each one.
Nehemia: Okay. And then, you’re saying, they said, “Oh, wait, no. Let’s make this in chronological order of the biblical sections.”
Nehemia: And that messed it up.
Marc: Messed it up, big time.
Nehemia: And then here’s another thing I think is worth emphasizing. So, you have these systematic lists that say, you know, “These seven Alephs have this form, but when you compare the manuscripts,” maybe not in that feature, but “in various features are not identical.” Meaning, that’s why you’re looking at multiple manuscripts?
Marc: Yes, because you have to try and work out what might be more original. I hesitate to say you’re going back to an urtext, because people don’t like urtext, but you…
Nehemia: You have to explain what an urtext is, for my audience.
Marc: So, an urtext is a master text, the original text that was conceived by the author. And then, over time, it may have been corrupted. But in modern, sort of academia now, people don’t like the idea of an urtext, and they don’t like the idea of the idea that some texts are corrupt, because all texts have value. But that’s not the case. If you’re talking about a list, it’s a list.
Nehemia: Okay, hold on a second. So, this was another thing that was debated in Heidelberg, about what’s called the new philology.
Nehemia: Can you talk a little bit about that for the audience, who’s never heard of it? First of all, define what philology is, and then define what new philology is.
Marc: No, I’m not going to go into any detail, but I will show you a slide.
Marc: So, we talked about all these different versions, right? Unfortunately, every single extant source is corrupt. Now, this is where you get to your new philology, because you’re not allowed to say that something is corrupt anymore. Because the paradigm behind new philology is that every variant should be celebrated and every variant has merit, and you can’t assume that the author wouldn’t have wanted it to be like that. Maybe. And in fact, in many works, the author does change, because it’s a bit like print on demand now. You can actually change your book, right?
Nehemia: So, let me explain for people. Philology is… and there’s different definitions of philology. In Germany, they have a slightly different definition. But my definition of philology, which is the correct one, is that it’s the study of ancient texts using various tools, linguistics, codicology, paleography. Whereas a linguist is interested in and of itself in the linguistic forms, a philologist says, “I want to understand this as far as it’s necessary to understand the ancient text. But I don’t really care that much inherently about linguistics.” It’s a tool that a philologist will use.
So, the old philology did something like this: they said, “Every modern text we have is corrupt, and let’s peel away the layers to get to what’s called the urtext.” U-R is German for original, the urtext. And they said, “The later ones, we don’t really care about that, we want to get to the urtext.” The new philology says, “No.” They’ll sometimes use the term like the reception of the text, and the reception of the text is a text as well. And even if the text changed over time, each one of those is a valid and legitimate text for study and important in and of itself.
Whereas the old philologist said… and I’ll give a really easy to understand example. So, many New Testament scholars will say the story of the stoning of the woman, you know, where there’s the famous line, “he who is without sin will cast the first stone,” isn’t in the earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of John. And therefore, the original Gospel of John didn’t have it, and therefore, that story is completely irrelevant for understanding the urtext.
And a new philologist would say, “Well, no. People made paintings and sculptures based on that story because in their version it was there. And so, that’s just as valid a part of the text, even if it wasn’t there in the 1st century.” And so, they don’t want to say there’s such a thing as an urtext. When it comes to Masoretic studies, it’s very interesting, because, was there ever an urtext of the masora? That’s a very debatable thing, but let’s not get into that.
So, do you believe there was an ur, an original Sefer Tagin?
Nehemia: And have you been able to reconstruct that? But you’re saying something, I think… let me say this: even if the later corrupt versions aren’t the urtext, the original text, there are people who made midrashim on these later corruptions. Am I right?
Marc: They did. Yes, they did.
Nehemia: So, in that sense, the new philologists have some validity in what they’re saying.
Nehemia: It depends what your question is. If your question is, “what’s the original text,” then you don’t care about the later ones. But if you want to study the reception of the text, then it is interesting and important.
Marc: What I want to understand, and this is why you have to try and get to an urtext of some kind, is because this was originally a list. It said: there are seven Alephs with seven decorations, and this is what the decorations are, and here are the seven. And that had a pattern behind it, right? There are a certain amount of Daleds. That has a pattern, and we’ll look at the patterns later. If you destroy the integrity of that list by adding extra ones and making new midrash and changing it to parasha order, you lose the original meaning of why he chose those particular letters in that list. And the fact that it’s a list, I mean, it’s deliberately put in a way that you don’t add it. You’re supposed to have seven. So, if you’ve got nine, something’s wrong. This is the thing. But you don’t know anymore, because once it gets spread out over the parshiyot, you can’t tell.
Nehemia: So, an interesting example of an urtext (and this is a totally different field) is J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. So, in the original… and when I say original, the one that was printed, the first edition; there were certain details that, in the later edition, he changed. And that’s what they call, the young people call, today, retconning.
Nehemia: Retroactive… what does the con stand for? Continuity. So, after he wrote The Lord of the Rings, there were some details in The Hobbit that contradicted the continuation of the story, so he rewrote the story. And so, there you have an urtext of the first edition, but we could say there’s an urtext of the later edition. In other words, there we would talk about the first recension and the later recension in, let’s say, philological studies.
Nehemia: And they’re both written by the author. Here you’re dealing with something a bit different, which is, over the centuries, people didn’t understand what this strange Aleph was, and they made up a bunch of stories about it. And then they ended up adding a bunch more, and you gave the example of Me’iri, who added a bunch for whatever reason. But you’re asking the question, “what did the original version of Sefer Tagin, what was the purpose of these unusual forms?” That’s the question.
Marc: Well, basically I was answering two questions. What is the form and what is the function?
Nehemia: Okay. And those are related.
Marc: So, what is the form of Sefer Tagin, i.e. what was it originally intended to be? And what is the function? Why was it? Why did they have it?
Marc: And this faulty transmission over time meant that things just got bonkers. I mean, I don’t know if I can make this bigger on the screen, but…
Nehemia: Well, my editor, if you send him this, he can put that in really big. Which part do you want large?
Nehemia: He’ll make it larger.
Marc: The bits where… there’s a couple from my book where you can see some of the forms of the letters, the medieval recensions. Remember, you said you thought the Vav was weird. You think the Vav’s weird? Some of the other letters are just bonkers.
Nehemia: Well, I’ve looked at some of these Torah scrolls, and if I didn’t know what the word was, I would have no chance of reading that word.
Nehemia: If I don’t know the word in its context, and that’s just because I’m not that familiar with them. And I can’t even imagine a medieval Jew who’s not fluent in Hebrew, but he learns for his bar mitzvah to read (if they did that, I don’t know) he learns for his bar mitzvah to read from the Torah. What chance does he have of knowing that that’s a Vav or a final Peh?
Marc: So, I mean, some of these things, Vavs that look like Pehs, and Zayins that look like Kufs, they are somewhat crazy, which is why they’re otiot-meshunot.
Marc: Weird letters. Weird, strange letters.
Nehemia: Weird, strange letters, right. Okay.
Marc: Yeah, strange letters.
Nehemia: So, actually… can you zoom in? I’m going to draw here on the screen, so, I don’t know how to point to it, and we can remove that later. So, this one here, what is this letter? Because that looks to me like a final Kuf.
Nehemia: Or it looks like a Kuf, rather. And you’re saying that’s a Zayin. Amazing.
Marc: That’s a Zayin. So, all of the ones on the top one are Vavs, and all of the ones on the bottom one, bottom page, are Zayins.
Nehemia: So, if you didn’t know better and you saw this letter, which I’ve just circled here, you would think that’s a final Peh, and it’s actually a Vav?
Marc: So, the problem is, over time, because people didn’t really understand what Sefer Tagin was about, and it had been mixed up in this Masoretic mixtape, you got more errors, emissions, mistranscriptions, misspellings, innovations, which tended to be additions, and they just didn’t know where they were supposed to happen.
Nehemia: By the way, this one here that I’m circling, there’s no chance without context that anybody but a scribe would know that they would think it was a Kuf.
Nehemia: Right? The scribe who wrote it would know that’s a Zayin. And from the context, you know it’s a Zayin because the Kuf doesn’t fit there, but it really genuinely looks like a Kuf. Especially…
Marc: The more outlandish they got, the more there is doubt over the kashrut, the validity, of the Torah.
Nehemia: So, you’re saying… well, I guess this is one of your conclusions that I know from the lecture you gave, but you’re saying that originally, no, it didn’t look like this.
Nehemia: It looked something different, and that then informs you of what the purpose and function was of making that unusual-shaped letter.
Marc: So, we have this problem…
Nehemia: Can you tell us what mixtape means? Can you go back to…
Marc: Oh, sorry, mixtape is a…
Nehemia: I know because I’m old enough, but the younger people may not know.
Marc: Right. A mixtape is… let’s say you have a girlfriend, and in the old days, before you had streaming and downloads and mp3s and stuff like that, you would take her favorite music, and you would put it on a cassette tape and mix the different bits of music together.
Nehemia: So, this was sort of a way of… boy, we’re that old. This was a way of sort of honoring the woman you were interested in, or maybe other people did in other contexts too. You’d hear on the radio a song, and you’d hit record, and then you hit stop at the end of the song, and then the next song came on, you know, “I love you, yeah, yeah, yeah,” and you hit record real fast and you send her that. That’s a mixtape. So, what do you mean, “This is a mixtape of Sefer Tagin”? Or a Masoretic mixtape?
Marc: It’s a mixtape of compiled versions of Sefer Tagin. This mixtape is, they’ve taken things like the small letters… hang on, let me go back to the compiled thing. So, this mixtape is, they took all these other traditions, the small, the large, the dotted, maleh and chaser, petuchot and stumot, the special layouts for Shirat Hayam and Ha’azinu, and they bung them all together in parasha order. They took off the introduction of Sefer Tagin, they took out the descriptions of the letters… that was the most terrible thing to do, because that’s why you end up with all of these crazy forms, because they no longer…
Nehemia: So, there wasn’t just the form of the Aleph, there was a verbal description of it, and they stripped that out.
Marc: There was a written description.
Nehemia: They’re like, “You can see it! You don’t need a written description.”
Marc: Yes, exactly. [Laughter] And then over time, the description has gone, and everybody’s going, well, I didn’t know what it is, and they make stuff up. And that’s what they do.
Marc: So, the real Sefer Tagin, the core bit of it, just gets buried.
Marc: And then you get partial versions of it, as well. So, there’s all sorts of stuff. It all goes a bit wrong, and confusion reigns supreme, literally. And then, as scribal practice has become stricter and more standardized, you start to get deliberate omissions. And then eventually, in the 1800s, the tradition sort of disappears. It just goes because it’s too far out; it’s too meshunot, it’s too crazy.
Nehemia: Well, and just a practical sense, if you have people who are used to reading printed books, and then you have them go up and read from the Torah, and they see a Zayin that looks like a Kuf, they’re like, “I don’t even know what to read here.”
Marc: Yeah. But the thing is, is that all these medieval reinventions of what they think the letters are, and what they think Tagin are…
Marc: …are wrong. This is the brunch part of my PhD.
Nehemia: Wait, so tell us here, we have… I see Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Marc: We have Obi-Wan Kenobi going, “These are not the letter forms you’re looking for.” And…
Nehemia: “These are not the letter forms you are looking for.”
Marc: Because they’re not, at all. What actually is happening is that all of the letter forms that are being described in the Aramaic are allographs. An allograph is a variant form of the letter.
Nehemia: Give us an example from English of an allograph so that people can understand.
Marc: Well, it doesn’t really kind of work, but basically…
Nehemia: Sure, it does. Think about the letter G, how you write G when you’re writing…
Marc: Okay, so, G; sometimes you have it like that and sometimes you have it like that.
Nehemia: Yeah, guys, think about the G in the printed form, which is almost like an 8, like with two circles…
Nehemia: I don’t even know how to write that. I can read it, because I’ve been learning since kindergarten to read it. But when I write a G, it looks completely… so, that’s an allograph. It’s an allograph between different writing methods. But within a single text, you could have an allograph.
Marc: Yes, because humans aren’t robots.
Nehemia: And allo is… graph is obviously graphic, and allo is, what, different or something, I believe?
Marc: I think it’s variant.
Nehemia: Yeah, so it’s a variant form. This is a term I learned from Judith Schlanger, the greatest living paleographer of medieval Hebrew. So, you’re saying that these modified, or strange, forms are allographs that existed in ancient times. Okay.
Marc: Well, no. The modified versions are reinventions to try and understand what they originally meant, but they’re wrong because what they originally were referring to… the descriptions are referring to allographs that you can find in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Nehemia: Okay, guys, the young people have the expression TLDR; too long, didn’t read. The TLDR here is that most scholars say Sefer Tagin is from the Gaonic period, let’s call that the 700s. And Marc Michaels, in his PhD, argues that the core idea of Sefer Tagin goes back to the Second Temple period. Is that right?
Marc: It goes back to just after the destruction of the Temple.
Nehemia: After the destruction? Ooh, that’s…
Marc: Just after. And there is a reason for that.
Nehemia: So, it doesn’t predate the destruction of the Temple?
Marc: It doesn’t, no. Because it actually is… well, we’re going to see.
Nehemia: Alright. So, that’s really the big idea and the major conclusion that I took away from your lecture, at least.
Marc: Yes, the major conclusion.
Nehemia: And this is very significant, because there’s a lot of scholars, guys, who study Sefer Tagin and say, “Gaonic times? No, that’s some much later thing.” And you’re saying the opposite. It’s a much earlier thing, at least in some form or another.
Marc: It’s a much earlier thing. It’s a much earlier thing, because if you actually read the Aramaic descriptions, they are describing letters that only existed in late Tanaitic times. They did not exist later on.
Nehemia: In late Tanaitic times. Tell us what it is. Give us a century.
Marc: Basically the 1st century, so it’s…
Nehemia: Because I would say late Tanaitic times is Yehudah Hanasi, which is the early 3rd century.
Marc: Yeah, well, okay. It’s fundamentally somewhere between 70 and 250.
Nehemia: Okay, 250 already brings us into the Amoraic times, if I’m not mistaken. But let’s not split hairs over that. All right.
Marc: I’m just talking about when Sefer Tagin was written, how that fits. That’s the problem; it’s difficult because there’s no definitive “this is the time.”
Nehemia: Right. And nobody said to these rabbis, “Hey, the Tanaitic times have ended, now we’re in Amoretic times.” That’s a retrospective…
Marc: Right. No one says this. But this is a Tana. Well, this is in the Tanaitic milieu.
Nehemia: So, guys, when you talk about the rabbis, let’s say the ancient rabbis, you have two periods of history. Well, you have more than two periods, but there’s the Tanaim, or singular Tana, which is up until… generally thought of up until when Rabbi Yehudah Hanasi codified the Mishnah, around the year 210. And then between 210 and 500… and all these are give or take, guys, is the Amoraim, and the Amoraim… and it’s important in the Talmud, because an Amora can disagree with another Amora, but if he disagrees with a Tana, then he has to justify it by bringing a second Tana to justify his opinion. Right? So, this is kind of an internal chronology within the Talmudic way of thinking.
So, the Amoraim are interpreting the words of the Tanaim. Sometimes they’re interpreting their own words, right? But by and large, they’re interpreting these earlier periods. And another interesting feature is, by and large, the Tanaim are writing in Hebrew, sometimes Aramaic, but usually Hebrew. And then the Amorim are almost exclusively formulated in Babylonian Aramaic. There are exceptions, of course, but anyway… All right, go ahead. So, this is Tanaitic, you’re saying?
Marc: So, this is Tanaitic.
Marc: Because the descriptions of the letters are letters that you can find in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And from 2017, when I discovered this, I’ve found them all.
Nehemia: And guys, an example of a Tana would be Rabbi Akiva, you might have heard of; it would be Rabbi Yehudah Hanasi, or Judah the Prince, which maybe you haven’t heard of; but Jews have. And also, Shammai and Hillel would be considered Tanaim.
Marc: The importance of the critical edition, trying to get back to an urtext was important, because if you can, then that can unlock the patterns behind the choices. So, those two things are joined at the hip.
So, in effect, these allographs have certain letters coexisting in manuscripts, and Yardeni talks about this in particular.
Nehemia: So, tell us who Ada Yardeni is.
Marc: So, Ada Yardeni was, was a wonderful paleographer, but she was also a graphic designer and a font designer, who I adore, and think was just the best thing since sliced bread. And being a graphic designer, calligrapher and scribe, I kind of follow in her footsteps.
Nehemia: So, one of the really powerful things about Ada Yardeni is, she didn’t just study the forms of the letters, she would write them out, and she learned things about… I’ll just throw out the fancy word ductus.
Nehemia: The ductus, or ductus; it’s the order of strokes, let’s call that. When I was in China, I paid this calligrapher to write my name, Nehemia, in Hebrew, and I wrote it down for him. He showed it to me and he said, “What’s the order of strokes?” I said, “I haven’t the foggiest idea what the order of strokes is. I just write it; I don’t know what you mean! It doesn’t matter.” But in Chinese, the same exact character, to us, written with a different stroke order, means something completely different. So, in Hebrew that’s not necessarily the case, but what she would learn by writing out… and one of her great accomplishments was helping to decipher the Elephantine Papyri, which we did a whole series with Betzalel Porten, of blessed memory, on. She wrote out every letter of the Elephantine Papyri, and that was one of the ways they were able to figure out what it actually said, because it’s so difficult to read. So, Ada Yardeni… sorry, what’s her connection to this?
Marc: Ada Yardeni, she specifically talked about the coexistence, in manuscripts, of allographs…
Marc: And she was very… So, a lot of my work was based on Yardeni, Birnbaum, Frank Moore Cross, Naveh, Avigad, these are all greats. Malachi Beit-Arié, all these really important people, right? You can’t do it without… you know, we do stand on the shoulders of giants.
Nehemia: There you go. So, that’s a British expression, actually. I understand it was Isaac Newton who said that. Wouldn’t he say we’re dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants?
Marc: Standing on the shoulders of giants. I mean, you know, without their work…
Nehemia: And that was a jab at Robert Hook, who was actually a dwarf, his rival.
Marc: Without their previous work on paleography and the development of Hebrew scripts, I wouldn’t have known where to start. But as a graphic designer, I also do abecedaries, and I specifically do abecedaries that are multiple.
Nehemia: What are abecedaries for those who don’t…
Marc: Abecedaries are exactly what Yardeni did, which is tracing out letters to understand how they’re formed. And then have visual representation of these letters so that you can compare them against other scripts, to help take things, et cetera.
Nehemia: So, you look at a manuscript, and you say, “Oh, this is the form of Aleph,” but you keep looking on the same page and you say, “You know what, this is also an Aleph.”
Nehemia: “And then, this is a third Aleph, and they’re all on the same page.” That’s an a-BE-cedary, I always said, but I’m American.
Marc: Yeah. So, you have to…
Nehemia: That’s A-B-C-D-ary. That’s what abecedary…
Marc: Yeah, ABC-daries, I call them.
Nehemia: ABC-daries. Maybe that’s right, I don’t know.
Marc: Because I’m British.
Nehemia: I only ever saw it in writing, to be honest with you. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anybody say it before now.
Marc: I’m not sure, actually, I’ve heard anybody ever say it either, to be honest. But there you go. But it’s very important, and it’s very important that you do multiple letter forms. Because if you do one, that’s really dangerous, because you are not looking at the importance of these paragraphs.
Nehemia: So, I can’t under-emphasize the importance of allographs for what I do, and obviously you’re doing something maybe on a whole different level because you’re dealing with the strange letters, which are really different. But when I’m looking, for example, at a manuscript, and I see the corrector in a 10th century manuscript has a different form of the letter than the original scribe, and then I say, “Oh, wait, there’s two correctors.” But then I realize over time, if you collect enough, “Oh, those are just allographs.” Sometimes he writes his Shin like this, sometimes like that, but when you take all the letters together… and I don’t write them out. I do a lot of cropping and pasting to make the abecedaries. And I’m like, “Okay, there’s three forms of the Shin, and the original scribe had two other forms.”
So, if you give me a second here, I want to show this. And tell me if this is what you’re referring to, and then you’ll tell us how it applies to… let me share the screen real quick here. This is a book by Malachi Beit-Arié, who went through probably thousands of manuscripts, I want to say, and for each manuscript that he had a solid date for, and this is an important one here, guys. This is 903 to 904. It is the earliest undisputed date on a Hebrew bible manuscript. And this is, I suppose, apropos to what’s going on in the world right now. It’s from a place called Da Gunbadan, which I’m sure I’m mispronouncing, in Iran or today in Iran…
Nehemia: …and it was written by Yosef Ben Nimrod, or NimROD. And so, what he did is, he took the page here, right? This is the page of that manuscript, and he goes through, and he says, “That’s an Aleph. I mean, those are all very similar, right? But wait a minute; that Aleph is not the same as this Aleph.” So, here let’s zoom in. So, for example here, the bottom of the Aleph sort of curves in, and here it doesn’t curve in, it points down. And if you don’t do these abecedaries, then you might think, “Oh, so Scribe A has a curved in Aleph, and the Scribe B has sort of like this little pointy down thing.” But no! It’s the same guy; he just has variations of his letters.
Or here’s a really good example. The Gimel’s foot sort of sticks out here, but here it points down. Well, is that two different scribes? No. Those are very minor allographs compared to what you’re talking about. But this, to me, is a much bigger difference. So, does the left leg of the Hey attach to the roof or not? Well sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. He’s not consistent. So, these, I would definitely… I don’t know if you called these allographs, because maybe they’re so similar. But these are definitely allographs in my terminology.
Marc: No, no, they are allographs. They’re absolutely…
Nehemia: Okay, all right. And this is an abecedary… how do you say that?
Marc: A-B-C-dary is what I say, because it’s ABCs, you know.
Nehemia: Right, right. Well, and you could technically call this an abjadary, but whatever. Let’s not confuse the audience too much.
Marc: Yeah, that’s right. It’s a good point, abjadary.
Nehemia: Yeah, whatever. It’s an A-B-C-dary. And look at the left leg of the Tav; does it touch the roof, or doesn’t it? Well, it would be a big mistake to say, “Oh, this is Scribe A and this is Scribe B.” No, it’s the same guy who writes his letters… He’s a human; not every letter is identical, and this is important to realize the allographs. Okay, now that we understand what an allograph is, what does that have to do with the strange letters?
Marc: Well, hang on. Before we get to that, let me just talk to this. Let’s ram this home. Script really matters, right? I taught on Cambridge last week on this one. So, this is an example of one of my abecedaries.
Nehemia: Wow! And what’s the manuscript here?
Marc: So, the manuscript… I was asked to come in particularly to look at something that had a really interesting damage pattern. It was a Megillat Esther, and it was going to go into a book, a nice coffee table book, for the 50th anniversary of the Cambridge Genizah. And I said, “Yeah, it’s really interesting. It looks very pretty, but it’s also the oldest Megillah on the planet.”
Nehemia: Wow. And Megillah is a scroll of Esther written out as a scroll, not as a book form.
Marc: Yeah. So, if you can see here, you’ve got the damage pattern, and what I’ve done is reconstructed…
Marc: …what it would have looked like. But also, by pairing its script here…
Nehemia: Wait a minute. Sorry, finish what you’re saying. You just said something that blew my mind. Not said something, I read it in the note there. Esther is not in the Dead Sea Scrolls, so this is the earliest ritual Esther. Not just in the Cairo Genizah, but ever.
Marc: Which was my discovery, which I’m really…
Nehemia: That’s a very important discovery.
Marc: It was very exciting.
Marc: And there were various clues that sort of gave it away, but one of the things was particularly the script type, which is very similar to a dated ketubah. So, a ketubah is a wedding marriage document, and it’s got a date on it, right? So, that’s great. It’s a properly dated thing. So, one of the things that Beit-Arié and Engel didn’t do, they didn’t look at gitin and ktubot, and they’re actually resources that I think are completely undervalued in the Genizah.
Nehemia: So, Edna Engel and Malachi Beit-Arié are… Edna Engel is one of the greatest paleographers alive, and Malachi Beit-Arié passed away a couple years ago. He was more of a codicologist but also dabbled in paleography. And you’re saying… so, why didn’t they look at gitin, or ghets, divorce certificates?
Marc: They were generally interested in the codices, because they had colophons…
Nehemia: So, one of their approaches, especially Beit-Arié, was: if it doesn’t have a date, it’s not very useful because I want to compare other things to it. And how do I know what the date of that thing is, if I don’t have… Meaning, I have to start with something where I can put a pin in it, meaning, I need points on like, you know, if you think of a map. I put a pin on the map, and in this case it’s a date, so if I don’t have a date, then it’s not useful. But a ketubah and a ghet does have a date. So, it’s a bit surprising.
Marc: It does. It’s just… they had about three-and-a-half-thousand manuscripts, which is a lot of stuff. I think were dated in filedata, which is a database, but ghettim and ketubot didn’t feature as much, and they were more concerned with codices. Anyway, that’s…
Nehemia: Well, and Beit-Arié is a codicologist, so he’s actually interested in the structure of the codex, and the choirs, and, you know, meaning, that’s part of… And look, that comes from a long tradition of Latin codicology and Greek codicology. So, they were like, “All right, people, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. People have been doing this for centuries in Europe. Let’s just do it for Hebrew manuscripts.” But they weren’t looking at marriage certificates?
Marc: Yeah, it’s unexplored and undervalued, and I find quite useful in my bibliographical activity.
Marc: So, going back to Sefer Tagin. So, the allographs; the type of allographs that I found were archaic or older forms that survived alongside more recent developments in how the script was written. Semi-ligatures, which are basically when the scribe rushes to the next letter and creates a little uptick, or sometimes a downtick as well. And there’s two types; one is de-akim and one is de-a’kim with an Ayin, if you can do the proper Ayin sound. One is raised up and one is bent backwards, downwards from the right.
Nehemia: So, guys, there’s two words even in some dialects of ancient Hebrew would be pronounced almost identically, and this has to be deliberate, that they want similar sounding words just to mess with you.
Nehemia: Meaning, it seemed poetic to them, right?
Nehemia: In other words, you have… that is literally standing up, and that is bent, and you’re saying one is going up and one is going down. So, those are two forms. Semi-ligatures, okay. And those exist in the Dead Sea Scrolls?
Marc: Because they’re rushing to the next letter. That’s how the medial forms in the letters were created anyway. The original Tzadik, for example, Tzadik sofit, the final Tzadik, went down like that, and then in the middle of the letter it curved upwards, and that’s how we got those letters. Or decorative slab serif tagins, which are protrusions from the monoline, and there’s three kinds.
Nehemia: Okay, what’s a monoline? Tell us that.
Marc: Right, I’m going to have to show you in a minute. I’m going to show you. It’s difficult. So, when Sefer Tagin talks about chad karna, which is Aramaic, means one horn, it means a tip. It’s an approach stroke. You mentioned Judith Schlanger. She calls this the atac de plume. It’s when you go around like this.
Nehemia: She’s a French speaker. So, what is that in English?
Marc: It’s an approach stroke, when you come down the letter. And then karnei, which are horns, that’s a triangular shape. I’m going to show you those in a minute. Ziyunin, which unfortunately has got a different meaning in Modern Hebrew, is a kind of tripartite dagger knot shape.
Nehemia: So, this comes from the word Zayin, which is one of the letters. And so, ziyun is an ancient Hebrew, medieval Hebrew in this case… or no, actually ancient. What is ziyun? How do you translate that?
Marc: Ziyun is a weapon or an armament.
Marc: In what it meant back then. That’s what it meant back then.
Marc: So, here are the three, sort of tagin things. So, you can see on the Reish, the monoline is just a curve round. And then you get this little approach stroke, which is the karna.
Nehemia: Can you point to that on the screen? Because I’m not sure what we’re looking at, sorry. Oh, there you go, okay. So, that, I would call that a serif. You’re saying that’s an approach stroke, okay.
Marc: It’s an approach stroke. It’s an approach stroke; it is a serif, in our understanding of serifs, but it’s a slab serif, because it’s not pretty…
Nehemia: And guys, what’s a serif? So, the font he has here on the screen is… what is this, Arial, or something? What is this?
Marc: It’s Calibri. It’s a sans serif.
Nehemia: Calibri, okay. So, it’s a sans serif, which is without serif. And then my favorite font, because I’m old, is Times New Roman, which is a serif font.
Marc: You can have a favorite font, it should be Bembo.
Nehemia: It should be what?
Nehemia: I’ve never heard of Bembo.
Marc: Bembo is the most beautiful serif font you’ll ever see.
Marc: It’s Italian. Anyway, sorry. We own Helvetica, the movie, that’s how much we’re geeks.
Nehemia: The movie? There’s a movie about the font?
Marc: There’s a movie about typeface. Yes.
Nehemia: You’re kidding me.
Marc: No, I’m not. Look, that’s how you can tell a geek; ask them if they own Helvetica, the movie.
Marc: Okay. Meanwhile, the second shape, here, with the Dalet, these are karnei, right? These are horns, because they double back on themselves. There’s several ways of doing them in terms of the ductus, or ductus. And then here, at the end, you have got this, and we talked about monoline. So, a Zayin, originally, in the very oldest Dead Sea Scrolls, right? So, the archaic ones, the early Hasmonean… Zayin is a straight line. Over time, it gains a little; it’s the de-akim, so it goes a stroke downwards. But then, towards the Herodian period, it gets this little hat. These are the ziyunin. It gets this little hat decoration.
Nehemia: So, originally a ziyun was a little decoration on the top of a Zayin?
Marc: Yes. And different letters, as well. And this is the important thing for you and your…
Marc: So, when Matthew talks about the jot or tittle, he’s not talking about the jot or tittle. A jot, in the Greek, he’s actually saying “Iota” and “kariah“. And “Iota” is the letter Yud, and you can see right at the bottom down here, that is a Yud in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Nehemia: So, help me out; this is the letter Yud.
Marc: This is the letter Yud. It’s the smallest letter, and this is how it was formed in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Marc: So, when he’s talking about…
Nehemia: So, guys, what you’re seeing here is one and two, that’s what’s called the ductus or the ductus. So, in other words, the first stroke is what he has written here as one, and the second stroke is two. And how does he know that? Because he’s a scribe, and he can figure these things out. That’s why I’m a consumer and not a producer of paleography, at least not in the sense of ductus. All right.
Marc: So, when Matthew is talking about Iota, he’s talking about Yud, which is formed by a line and then a sort of sideways karnei form, a triangle.
Nehemia: And karnei is a horn.
Marc: Is a horn. It’s horns, plural.
Nehemia: Horns. So, these two things are horns, okay.
Nehemia: Well, chad karnei is one horn?
Marc: Right. So, chad karnei is one horn, which is what he calls a kariah. So, our approach stroke…
Marc: Yes, is a horn. And kariah is the Greek for horn. He is using the same terminology as the guy from Sefer Tagin.
Nehemia: So, this is something… wait a minute, wait a minute. So, kariah is the Greek word for horn.
Nehemia: Okay, hold on. So, this is important, guys. Let’s stop here for a second. So, let me share the screen here for a second, if I may. This is important. So, let’s go back to the Greek here. So, we have here Matthew 5:18. “Verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” And jot in the Greek here is iota, which, that’s my Israeli pronunciation. Apologies to the Greek people. And tittle, which is kariah. And kariah, when we look in the Greek dictionary, is a horn, from the word keras, and it could also be the antenna of a crayfish or an insect, anything projecting like a horn.
Marc: It’s a protrusion from the monoline.
Nehemia: Okay. So, now I don’t know the answer to this question; the Hebrew word for horn is keren. It’s hard to believe that keras is not related to keren.
Marc: I suspect that there is a relationship.
Nehemia: Or, if it’s not, this is what’s called phonosemantic matching. That’s where you’re trying to translate a word, and you already have a word that has a similar meaning to begin with, so you choose that word. So, the example I love is, in Biblical Hebrew, tur is to spy out the land, latur et ha’aretz, and in Modern Hebrew tur is to tour, tourist, tayar. And that’s an example of phonosemantic matching. They say, we’ve got to come up with a word for tourist. We already have a word that means to spy out the land, and here you’re doing it for leisure, not for espionage. So, they chose that word in Modern Hebrew tayar, based on the biblical tur. And then the symbol of the Israeli tourism industry is two of the ancient Israelite spies carrying the grapes, right? Because that’s what’s described; it’s actually the midrashic interpretation that describes, but we don’t need to go into that. So, that’s phonosemantic matching.
So, kariah here is presumably phonosemantic matching of the Hebrew word keren. Meaning, that it must be; it’d be too big of a coincidence. Wow! So, in other words, there’s this Hebrew concept that’s being used that the Greeks are like, “Okay, well we have a word very similar to that, that has almost the same meaning. Let’s use that word.” Wow! Amazing!
Marc: So, they are describing these protrusions from the monoline. That’s the point.
Nehemia: What did he mean by the Yud? By the iota? Is that also a seraph? Or is it just the letter Yud?
Marc: That’s just the letter Yud.
Marc: That’s the most common version of a letter Yud.
Marc: Funny enough, it’s not the one that Sefer Tagin is describing, because that’s the really common one.
Nehemia: Okay. Wow, this is amazing stuff. So, when is your book coming out? Because I think a lot of people are going to be very interested to learn… You know, there are these secret meanings that may go back to the 1st century, and you’ve uncovered them, and they’re going to be available in your book. And am I right? Up until your discovery, nobody knew this. Am I right?
Nehemia: Okay. So, that means this is a big discovery.
Marc: Very few people heard… Anything written about Sefer Tagin says it’s a kabbalistic work from Gaonic times.
Nehemia: Was there such a thing as Kabbalah in Gaonic times? I mean, Kabbalah, I think it was…
Marc: It probably wasn’t known as kabbalistic then, but it’s become known as kabbalistic. And this is the thing; this is very important. It doesn’t invalidate these kabbalistic interpretations that are layered on top of it and these compiled versions of seven. That doesn’t invalidate them at all. But it’s not what the original author intended. What he intended was to say, “The Temple’s been destroyed. I want to put the Temple into the Torah. I want to give some meaning to letters and themes that will bring out the fact that God is still here, but if you don’t behave, He’ll punish you just like He did with the Temple.” You know, this is what he was trying to do, this coded theodicy. And yeah, nobody knew.
Nehemia: Wow. So, that’s a very important discovery, guys. We’ll look forward to… for his book being released. Is there a timeframe?
Marc: Well, I would probably say, because I’m having to edit it, and be putting all the stuff back that I had edited out for PhD, and also finish the critical edition with the new multi-spectral imagery. So, it’s difficult to say exactly when, because all these things go through a very long production cycle. However, this presentation is on Academia. So, you can link to that. That’s on the…
Nehemia: Academia.edu. We’ll link to that, okay.
Marc: Yeah. And also, my PhD is controlled access, because it’s got a few images in that need copyright clearance for the book, which I have now, but I didn’t have it for the PhD. And also, there’s going to be a book. But if somebody wants to get the PhD for their own private study, there’s a link. You can go to Cambridge and ask for it, and they’ll send you it as long as you don’t use it for nefarious purposes.
Nehemia: All right, wonderful. Thank you so much. This is an amazing conversation, and we’re going to have to have you back on when the book comes out. And then we’re going to squeeze you for every mystical interpretation of the Samekhs and the Ayins and the Nun sofits, and whatever.
Marc: Yeah. There is a lot. There is, the Qof Debuqa article is out. The pe melufefet article is in train…
Marc: Because the book takes so long, I am doing bits of it as articles…
Marc: …to get stuff out to people, so that they can get an idea. And I’m happy to give talks, like I’ve just done, kind of thing, and go through the presentation properly.
Nehemia: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Marc Michaels. We appreciate it.
Marc: And lovely to see you again, Nehemia.
Marc: So, for example, Dalet. Dalet de lehon, Dalet tagin karnei. This is very important. It means the Dalet that has four tagin, consisting of karnei, horns. Now if you look at the development of a Dalet, it starts off and it’s got two protrusions from the monoline, and then it gradually starts to have this doubling back. And then it ends up with this double karnei as a quite rare form, and generally in Sefer Tagin he’s talking about the rare forms, the rare allographs that turn up.
Nehemia: And so, he doesn’t need to describe the common ones, because those are just everywhere.
Marc: Exactly. He’s describing… He’s describing special ones, and then he’s going to put a meaning on the special ones.
Marc: So, there are 11, and it’s figured as 10 plus 1, and they all appear in either of the word adam or dam. Adam meaning man, or dam meaning blood, and they’re all about avoiding the murder or the shedding of innocent blood, and the consumption of blood, which is not allowed.
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VERSES MENTIONED
Esther 3
Numbers 10:35-36
Matthew 5:18
Joshua 4; Deuteronomy 27
Mishnah Pirkei Avot 1:1
Joshua 8:30-35
John 7:53-8:11
Mishnah Peah 2:6
BOOKS MENTIONED
The Hobbit
J. R. R. Tolkien
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Support Team Study – The Woman Who Writes Torah Scrolls: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #188 – Writing a Torah Scroll: Part 1
Support Team Study – Writing a Torah Scroll: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #189 – The Cairo Genizah: Part 1
Support Team Study – The Cairo Genizah: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #191 – The Cairo Genizah: Part 3
Support Team Study – The Cairo Genizah: Part 4
Hebrew Voices #187 – Second Temple Hebrew in the Middle Ages: Part 1
Support Team Study – Second Temple Hebrew in the Middle Ages: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #91 – The Aramaic Name of God
OTHER LINKS
Marc’s website
Marc’s PhD thesis
Presentation used in the video
Oldest megillah in the world
Qof Devuka article
The post Hebrew Voices #245 – Secrets of the Jots and Tittles: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.
