In this episode of Hebrew Voices #221 - Section Breaks in Hebrew Bible Manuscripts: Part 1, Nehemia and research assistant Nelson Calvillo explain the section breaks found in Hebrew Bible manuscripts going all the way back to the Dead Sea Scrolls, explore why they vary between different manuscripts and how that can alter meaning.

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Nehemia: It’s beautiful. “Anyone who makes a piska errs and he has not learned anything.” So, he’s not only removing the open section of the original scribe, he’s saying the original scribe is an ignoramus. That’s amazing! It’s like everybody’s got an opinion. He’s actually insulting the original scribe who wrote this manuscript.

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Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Nelson Calvillo, who is a research assistant at the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research. Shalom, Nelson.

Nelson: Shalom, Nehemia. Thank you so much for letting me join you today.

Nehemia: I’m excited, Nelson. We both went to an academic conference in November… November 24th, 2024, and I presented there on The Correction of Parshiot in Medieval Hebrew Bible Manuscripts; that’s the big fancy name for this topic. And I wanted to share that with the audience. And you actually helped me with a lot of this research. I would set you loose and you would go find like, amazing things, and I want to share with the people some of the findings. And also, I want you to share the experience of what it was like. Because sometimes I wouldn’t say, you know, “Go find me this specific thing,” I would say, “Go look for stuff.” And who knows what you’re going to find, right? So, what was that like?

Nelson: It was pretty exciting. There were times where you did ask me to find specific things. For example, I think one of our big topics today… you asked me to search through different manuscripts and look for basically things that seemed out of place or things that didn’t seem natural to the flow of the text. And then other times, you did say, “Find me something on this side of the page or that side of the page.” And I was essentially looking for the same kind of discrepancies; anything that seemed out of place, anything that seemed like it interrupted the flow of the text or any of what we call the marginal notes.

So, it was a great experience for me because I learned so much more about manuscripts just by seeing things that weren’t supposed to be there, and then getting acclimated to the different hands, the different hand of each scribe in each manuscript. In a sense it’s a lot like today, when, even though we don’t really write, we type, mostly, but we don’t really hand write that much anymore. But it was a lot like trying to decipher someone’s handwriting just 1,500 years ago, give or take. So, it was very educational for me in that sense, and it allowed me to be really, really hands on in terms of observing the way some scribes worked, the way some scribes made mistakes and then either corrected their own mistakes or another scribe sometime later came along and corrected that mistake. So, it was really something I greatly appreciated. Even though I did spend a lot of time on it, I learned so much that I really don’t think I could learn while reading a book.

Nehemia: Yeah, there’s definitely something to be said for that. Like, the experience of actually doing the work, you know, there’s no book that can teach you… like… It’s cliche, but the famous example is, you can write a PhD on chocolate and what it tastes like, and then you can taste it. And there’s no amount of writing that could explain what it tastes like. So, that’s very interesting. And I don’t think we should underestimate what a big deal it is for someone to say, “Go find me something which doesn’t fit.” Well, first you have to know what fits, right? You have to really understand the flow of the text… And so, anyway, it’s amazing things you found.

We’re going to talk about the parshiyot, or the section divisions. So, section divisions… what do we mean about the… and really, what we call these in English is the open and closed sections. And, you know, often I’ll be studying with Lynell, and she’ll read a verse, and then she reads another verse, and another verse, and then she keeps reading. I’m like, “No, no, that’s a different prophecy.” She’s like, “Well, how do you know that?” Well, it’s right there in the manuscript, right? And then later, in printed editions, that’s recorded.

Meaning, we have these chapter divisions that were created, from what I understand, at least, by Stephen Langton, who is the archbishop of… let’s see, he was the Archbishop of Canterbury. And the story is that he was… I think he was riding to Paris or something like this in a carriage, and along the way he said, “You know, we have to break up the Bible into sections.” Look, and there were sections. Like if you go to Psalms, the Psalms are broken up into sections, right? He’s like, “We need that for the rest of the Bible.”

And so, he went through… and for him that was the Latin Vulgate, right? I mean, that was his Bible. So, he goes to the Latin Vulgate, and he says, you know, “Let’s have a chapter in Genesis, it’ll end after the sixth day of creation.” Why not? Why after the sixth day? Because his use of these… from what I’ve been told is, that his function for the sections was that… or for the chapters, rather, was that they be used in the church. That they would read a section, you know, they would read a section…

So, in the Catholic churches, they apparently, I’m told, read sections of the Bible, right? So, how do you know what to read? You’re not going to read three verses or five verses. You want a nice chunk size. You don’t want it too long or too short, right? But you also want it to be some kind of logical unit. So, those sections were created in the early 13th century. The manuscripts have their own sections, and here we’re looking on the right at 1QIsaa from the Dead Sea Scrolls. And on the left we have here the Aleppo Codex. And here we have a passage in Isaiah 42, and it ends with a space, and this is what’s called an open section.

And then 1QIsaa written a thousand years earlier, maybe a little bit more than a thousand years earlier, 1,100, 1,200 years earlier, has the same space in the same place. And even though… by the way, there are some differences, like here; this word is written with a Hey-Mem at the end, and here it’s Hey-Mem- Hey, which means the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scroll are actually writing it the way they pronounced it. So, this would be pronounced in Tiberian Hebrew, niskeihem, and probably something like niskeihema in the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran, right?

So, they actually pronounce Hebrew differently, but they know the prophecy ends here, and so we have a space. Or we can say more broadly, the literary unit ends here. Right? Meaning, after each day of creation in Genesis 1, there’s a space like this. Right? So, obviously it’s all one unit. All six days of creation and Shabbat, that’s the unit. Even though Stephen Langton broke it up differently. But there are subunits.

So, here we have either an end of a prophecy or the end of a section of a prophecy. And then here the same thing, another open section. Open section means… although there are different definitions of what it means, for our purposes right now, we’ll say broadly, it means it goes to the end of the line, and the next section begins at the beginning of the next line. That’s the broad definition. There are more nuances.

So, what I wanted to find was, to what extent the manuscripts of what we call the Masoretic Text… 1QIsaa is a Dead Sea scroll; it’s not part of the Masoretic Text. It’s a different textual tradition. It’s very similar, almost identical; some words are spelled slightly differently, but it’s not Masoretic Text, 1QIsaa. 1QIsab is probably proto-Masoretic text, but 1QIsaa is not. And so, within the Masoretic manuscripts, are there any differences? And more importantly, are there changes? Are people saying, “Oh, this is what we have, but I want to make it something different”? That’s what I was interested in. So, all right, we’re going to… oh, so, here I’m showing where they have the same section in the same place.

All right. So, here’s what the Talmud says in Shabbat 103b. And the Talmud is made up of different pieces… and I don’t see you at the moment, so I’m going to try to get you back so I can see you, Nelson. Right? There you are. So, the Talmud is made up of different layers. One of those is written in Hebrew, and that’s from the Tanaitic period. So, this is a Tanaitic passage, even though it’s in the… meaning, this is probably formulated sometime before 210 CE or A.D.

So, it says “Parasha p’tucha lo ya’asena stuma, u’stuma lo ya’asena ptucha.” “An open section, he will not make it,” meaning, the scribe, “closed; and the closed section, he will not make it open.” What’s open and closed? It depends on whether the new section begins at the beginning of the line or if the new section begins later in the line, right? If there’s some kind of space before the new section, then that’s called a closed section. All right. And here it’s talking about… well, here it doesn’t say Torah scroll, but we kind of assume it’s talking about a Torah scroll, which may or may not be correct.

So, if you have a Torah scroll and… not only did you not put a section in, but you put the wrong kind of section, then the Torah scroll’s invalid. And by the way, that’s true even today. Maybe it’s more true today than it was in the Talmudic period. So… what’s that? Go ahead.

Nelson: Just one note, Nehemia. I think it’s a very important thing you just said, is, the first images you showed, on the Aleppo Codex, is that it is a codex. It’s like a book format, whereas the Book of Isaiah… in Qumran it’s a scroll, whereas normally it’s not a scroll; it’s part of the codex. Am I right?

Nehemia: What do you mean by normally? You mean in what we’re looking at in our examples, or…

Nelson: If, for example, in the Middle Ages, I wanted to read from the Book of Isaiah, would I…

Nehemia: Well, that’s complicated. So, if you’re reading from the Torah in the Middle Ages, with some exceptions, which included Karaites, or if you were… So, basically the rule is this: that you were required to read the Torah from a scroll. So, a codex… codex is a book form, guys. Like behind me; this is a photo I took on my iPhone at the Bologna University Library. It’s the oldest university in the world. The library isn’t from when the university was founded, it’s like, maybe… it’s not that old; it’s like 5-600 years old, right? I mean… which is old, right? The way one British guy said to me, “It’s old enough.”

So, book form codex didn’t exist at the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Or if it did, it was for very specific purposes. Like, if you were a student who had a private tutor, you would have something like a codex, but it was tablets of wood coated in wax. And you could flip between the pages, or maybe they folded up like an accordion, right? So, that’s the precursor of the codex, right? Or it’s believed that’s the precursor of the codex. But pretty much any book was written on a scroll in the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And then around the… and here I say “around”, because we don’t know exactly, 2nd or 3rd century, they start to introduce the codex. And it comes from a place called Byblos, which is on the coast of Lebanon. And one of the books that was famously made as a codex was the Biblia Sancta, the Holy Books, right? And that’s where we get our word Bible.

So, Bible is literally named after… Bible just means book, right? And it was part of the full phrase, which was holy book, and the original books were actually Greek Christian books, right? Jews didn’t do this in the 2nd, 3rd century, as far as we know. Jews were late adopters of the codex. That’s at least what we believe right now, right? So, the accepted opinion is that the first codex, codices or codexes, you can say as well, the first book form codexes were only adopted by Jews in the 8th century.

There’s a precursor of a codex that was found in a cave in Afghanistan called the Afghan Siddur. I won’t get into that; and that is, as far as we know, is the earliest known Jewish codex. But it’s not exactly a codex; it’s a single quire of a codex. What is a quire? Nelson, when you were a kid in elementary school… I don’t know about you, but in my elementary school we had these books that, every year you would sign your name in the book, that you received it. And when you gave it back, it had to be in good condition, and you had signed it out. And we had books that were probably 20 or 30 years old, because I went to a Jewish parochial school, right? It was all day, and they didn’t have a whole lot of money, so these were old books. Like, we were using books that were literally 20 years old, and the binding was coming off. And you could see, when the binding kind of fell off, the spine binding, you could see it was made up of little pamphlets, right? Each of which had pages that were folded in half, and each of those was four pages. And there were little pages, inside pages, inside pages, and they were sewn together. And because the books were so old they were coming apart. Each one of those little booklets, that’s called a quire. Technically, you could call it a signature, if you’re in a printed book versus a manuscript. In a manuscript, that’s called a quire. So, the Afghan siddur is a single quire. So, it’s not exactly a codex. It’s what would later… when you put a bunch of those together, that would be a codex.

So, Christians had been using codices since probably the 2nd or 3rd century. Jews were using scrolls. The scrolls were introduced, we believe, sometime around the 7th or 8th century. It’s generally accepted 8th century, but the Afghan Siddur, which has a carbon 14 date from the 7th century, I’m told, that kind of, you know, confuses things. Maybe it’s a little bit… 100 years earlier. What’s 100 years between you and me? Right? That’s kind of what scholars will say.

Yeah. So, the one on the right… I believe it’s on the right; sometimes it’s switched by Zoom. The one on the right, which is here, this one here is the Dead Sea scroll, 1QIsaa, and that’s a scroll. And there are no codices in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Only scrolls, hence the name Dead Sea Scrolls.

In the Middle Ages we have both scrolls and codices. And the rule was, you have to read from a scroll if you’re reading from the Torah. If you’re reading from the prophets… when you read every Shabbat from the prophets in the traditional synagogue service, it’s preferable to read from a scroll. But almost nobody does; everybody reads from a codex.

Now, there was an exception. They talk about in… the Jews in France were in these very poor, remote villages, and they said, “We don’t have a scroll, even of the Torah.” “Okay, then you can read from a codex if you don’t have a scroll. But get yourself a scroll if you can.” Right? But, you know, you had three Jewish families in some little village. They were like, you know, the cobbler or something, right? Because Jews weren’t allowed to live everywhere, right? They were very restricted where they were allowed to live, and so they’d end up living in some village where they’re, you know, they’re the cobbler and the smith, whatever. They weren’t allowed to work as farmers. So, there’s like three families. “We can’t afford a Torah scroll.” So, then they would read from a codex, which was less expensive.

Okay. It’s a bit surprising that a codex is less expensive, but it has less rules, right? The Torah scroll needs to be written according to very strict rules as they developed. And one of the rules is that if you have a mistake… now this brings us to our topic; if you have a mistake in the open and closed sections, then the whole scroll is invalid. A single mistake, and it’s invalid.

And here we have a scroll called Rhineland 1217. It’s from the 13th century. It’s called Rhineland because it was believed, at least at one time, and it might be true, that it was written somewhere in the Rhinelands. I don’t know, I’m not sure that’s correct. But it’s definitely Ashkenazi script from the 13th century, northern Europe. And originally, this was a closed section. You can see there’s some little writing here in small handwriting. So, originally this word here was written down here, and these two words were written much bigger. And we actually did multispectral imaging… Even without the multispectral imaging you can make out that’s a Dalet. That’s a final Mem, right?

So, this word ended here, and then “va’yeshev ya’akov be’eretz megurei”, some of that began over here, and it was a closed section, right? You had… the section ends here, there’s a big space, the new section begins here. That’s what we call a closed section. Meaning, the new section begins following a space not at the beginning of the line. And someone comes along a century or two later and says, “Wait a minute. We know this is supposed to be an open section.” How do we know that? Because in our tradition, it’s an open section, right?

So, here is where the complication begins. The Talmud says, if you make one section closed, it’s forbidden to make a closed section open, or an open section closed, but the Talmud doesn’t say what the open and closed sections are, right? And so, they scratched off this word and they scratched off some of these words, and they rewrote it, a different handwriting. You can see it’s a different handwriting. Like, look, for example, at this Alef and this Alef. This Alef has a little like whisker that comes down and to the left, and here it comes straight down. This is a different scribe. Right? This is the beauty… we’re looking at different handwriting, right?

So, this is very common. This scroll has this hundreds of times, where they change the open section to closed, the closed section to open, they added sections, they removed sections, and it looks very messy because of that. Now, this scroll’s in the 13th century, and what’s important about that? In the 12th century… and you gave a lecture about this at SBL one year, in the 12th century… I think we did a program about it that, guys, you can go listen to the recording. We’ll put a link on Nehemia’s Wall. So, what happened in the 12th century? I’ll let you explain.

Nelson: Well, before I get to that, Nehemia, if I may just sort of summarize…

Nehemia: Please.

Nehemia: …what you were just saying here about the correction that’s being made here. At first glance, it would look like somebody changed the section, and the correction violates the rule that we read. But in fact, the correction here is made in order to reinforce that rule, not to violate it. Is that about right?

Nehemia: It’s a bit more complicated than that, but then you need to explain what happened in the 12th century. Meaning, the person who made the change said, “Oh no! We’ve been reading from this scroll for a hundred years in this little synagogue,” somewhere in the Rhineland area, “for 200 years, maybe 300 years, and this isn’t a kosher scroll.” Why isn’t it a kosher scroll? Because the original scribe made a mistake, and where there was supposed to be an open section he made it a closed section. “I need to fix that. How can I fix that? I could replace the entire sheet.” That’s going to cost thousands of dollars and weeks of work. And this type of mistake happened hundreds of times in the scroll, so basically you have to replace the whole scroll. He said, “A better solution is, I take a razor, and I scratch this ink off, and I scratch this ink off, and I rewrite it in tiny letters.” And it looks ugly, but now we just saved something like $50,000, or maybe back then 75 or 100, right? Or the equivalent, right?

Okay. So, that was the traditional way of looking at this, Nelson; the scribe came to fix a mistake. What we learned, from the research we did, is that the original scribe who wrote this didn’t think it was a mistake.

Nelson: Yes.

Nehemia: That’s the big surprise. And the reason the later scribe thought it was a mistake is because of what happened in the 12th century. I’ll let you introduce that.

Nelson: So, in the 12th century, we have one of the most prominent rabbis in Jewish history. His abbreviation is called Rambam, but he’s known more familiarly as Moses ben Maimon, or Maimonides. So, he comes along, and he writes a monumental work, some call it his magnum opus, and, among the many, many topics he writes about are how to write a Torah scroll. And what he says, according to the copies of his manuscript that we have, because we don’t have his autograph, but… one of the earliest copies…

Nehemia: And, by the way, explain what an autograph is, because it’s not what people think.

Nelson: Right. So, an autograph… So, in scholarly jargon, when we say “autograph”, we’re referring to the text that is written in the hand of the author himself. So, for example, we could say that “We don’t have an autograph of the Torah.”

Nehemia: We actually do have his signature in… Maimonides’ signature, but that’s not what we mean by an autograph, right?

Nelson: Right.

Nehemia: Meaning, there’s a signature where he says, “This copy was checked against my copy.” Well, my copy, that’s the autograph. If the one that’s checked against his copy is an authorized copy, it doesn’t mean everything in it is correct. And he wasn’t claiming everything was correct. He was just saying, “It was checked against my copy. Whether he did a good job or not, I can’t guarantee.” But yeah, you were saying about the Torah, we don’t have the autograph. You mean we don’t have the one that Moses wrote or that Joshua copied.

Nelson: Exactly. We don’t. Unfortunately.

Nehemia: That’s too bad.

Nelson: We have copies of copies of copies.

Nehemia: Right.

Nelson: So, as Maimonides is preparing to lay out how to write a Torah scroll halakhically, he gives a preface to the open and closed sections. And in his preface, he details that, in his day, he sees many Torah scrolls in which there is no consistency, or no uniformity, to the open and closed section. Meaning, let’s say you have a specific verse in Leviticus, and this scroll will have an open section, and one scroll will have a closed section. So, he sees no uniformity within the system of open and closed sections. And so, in his preface, he lays out that he is basing his list of open and closed sections on a very specific manuscript. And…

Nehemia: Which one is that?

Nelson: So, many scholars have done a… So, he doesn’t give us the name of the manuscript, but he gives us details about it, very specific details. And so, scholars have concluded that… and the consensus is that he uses what today we call the Aleppo Codex, also called the Crown of Aleppo. So, he is basing his list of open and closed sections on the open and closed sections that are laid out in the Aleppo Codex. And his intention is that, from that point onward, every Torah scroll will have its open and closed sections match the open and closed sections from the Aleppo Codex. That’s the intention.

Nehemia: So, in other words… let’s go back to our quote here of the Talmud. The Talmud said, “A scribe may not make an open section closed, nor may you make a closed section open,” but it doesn’t say what the sections are. Maimonides comes along and says, “I’ve got to fill in the blanks. How do I do that? I’ll take…” He says, “The famous manuscript that was in Jerusalem, and people used to correct their Bibles against it.” Right? Which, today we call the Aleppo Codex; that’s before it ever came to Aleppo. It was his son, apparently, who brought the Aleppo Codex to Aleppo. It was in Cairo at the time, because of the… the Crusaders apparently had taken it as war booty and then ransomed it to the Jews, and it ends up in Cairo. The Aleppo Codex, that is. Right. So, at the time it was called the Jerusalem Codex, basically, the Jerusalem Codex of Ben Asher.

So, Maimonides establishes what the rules are, right? Meaning, he establishes where there’s an open section, and where there’s a close section based on the Aleppo Codex. And Maimonides died in 1204, so he had already done that by 1204. Why didn’t the scribe in 1217 do it according to Maimonides? Because he was somewhere in northern Europe, and Maimonides’ books hadn’t reached the Rhineland by then. Or if it reached that, they said, “Who cares what Maimonides said? I’m copying from an earlier Torah scroll; that’s more ancient than Maimonides.” Right? And they wouldn’t have been wrong.

So, in other words, they had their own tradition in Europe about where the open and closed sections are, and here’s where this becomes really important, okay? People are like, “Who cares about this, Nehemia? Why is this important?” Here’s why it’s important. There are arguments that are made, especially in the Jewish-Christian dialogue, but within Judaism itself, there are arguments that are made that say, “Well, you know what? In your modern chapters, that’s a new section. But in our manuscripts there’s no section break there; that continues.” And my question is, I want to know that that’s correct. In which manuscripts is that correct? Is that true? I don’t know. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Maybe that’s true in Maimonides’ version, but not in the version they used in northern Europe, which evolved and descended out of a version that came from the Land of Israel, right?

So, this is something that some scholars have proven; that there are forms of the text in Ashkenaz, in northern Europe, northern and central Europe, that came through southern Italy, originally from Israel. Probably around the 10th century, that there are the Jews who started to settle in, you know, Taranto, in southern Italy sometime around the 10th century, and they eventually migrate north into Europe.

And then… this is incredible! We’ll look at a 13th century manuscript in northern Europe, in Ashkenaz, and we’ll see that it’s similar to a manuscript in the 10th century Israel that’s different than the Aleppo Codex, right? So, when the Aleppo Codex was made, there were various forms of the text. And look, it’s not like there’s a version of the text that said, “Ishmael was bound instead of Isaac.” Right? That’s not…

But there are versions of the text that, here, in one version, this was a closed section, and in another version, it was an open section. That does exist. Is that really that important? It’s a much bigger deal when there’s no section versus a section. Because then if you say, “Oh, no, that’s part of the same prophecy,” or it’s not. And you’re basing that on whether there’s a section there, well… in which manuscripts, right? We saw a beautiful example here. And look, it was a strategically chosen example, right, where the Aleppo Codex and 1QIsaa have a space at the same verse. But there are places where one has a space and the other doesn’t, and vice versa. There’s places where the Leningrad Codex has a space and the Aleppo Codex doesn’t. And that’s where it becomes important.

So, here’s what Menahem Cohen, who was one of the great scholars of… you could call him a modern- day Masorete, right? I mean, the Masoretes are the scribes who transmitted the text of the Hebrew Scriptures. Menachem Cohen, in a sense, was a modern-day Masorete. And here’s what he writes. He says, “Thus far, no Masoretic list of the Tiberian masora whatsoever concerning open and closed section has been found. Similarly, there is not a single Masoretic note on this subject in any of the early Tiberian Mastoretic codices; not in the Aleppo Codex, not in any other manuscript close to it.”

In other words, yes, there’s a statement in the Talmud that the open and closed sections are important. But the Tiberian scribes, like Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali, those are the two famous ones we know about, they didn’t care about the open and closed sections. Or if they did, they didn’t consider that to be something authoritative or they would have recorded where there are supposed to be open and closed sections. Or if it was authoritative, they didn’t know what the authority said; that’s another way of looking at it, right?

And when you compare any two Masoretic manuscripts, they’re not identical. They might be identical in most places or in many places, but not in every place. And that’s what Maimonides was saying in the 12th century. He’s saying, “Look, I went to the synagogue. I pulled out a bunch of Torah scrolls from the same ark, and they’re not identical as far as where the open and closed sections are.”

Here’s another quote. Oh, he goes on… here’s what he basically… his conclusion: “The issue of the parshiyot,” that’s the open and close sections, “was not, in Aaron Ben Asher’s eyes, nor the eyes of his predecessors, part of the defining characteristics of the Masoretic Text.” In other words, if you have an open section there, or a closed section, or no section there, it doesn’t invalidate it as being part of the Masoretic Text. Whereas, if you have a Hey there, or not a Hey, like we saw an example of the word niskeihem vs. niskeihema in Isaiah; well, that, okay, it’s not a valid manuscript because there’s an extra Hey there. That’s how… well, especially that Hey, how Ben Asher would have looked at it. But for open and closed sections, ehh… You know, who knows where the sections are supposed to be? That seems to be how Menachem Cohen interpreted it.

Yosef Ofer, who was my professor at Bar-Ilan University when I did my PhD, he’s much more careful here. And we’re going to see why he’s careful. He learned something that Cohen apparently didn’t know about, because… look, this is what you… And look, in fairness to Cohen, he said, “Thus far.” Right? Meaning, until somebody else discovers it. He says, “The Masoretic sages of Tiberius barely dealt with this issue of open and closed sections,” meaning they did deal with it, just not a lot, “and in the Bible manuscripts from their school we did not find Masoretic notes that deal with this matter.”

Now, what Ofer is referring to, and Cohen as well, when they say the Tiberius, or Tiberian, meaning the scribes who are in Tiberius, like Aharon Ben Asher, what they’re alluding to here, and they talk about in more detail, is that there are Babylonian lists, right? So, we’ll often talk about the Masoretic Text, but what we really mean is the Tiberian Masoretic Text. There’s another Masoretic Text that’s being copied in Babylonia, in Sura and Nehardea, which are two major centers of learning in Babylonia, and there they do have lists.

And look, we have differences in our manuscripts that say, “In the West they read this way, and in the East, they read that way.” The West is Israel, the East is Babylonia, Sura and Nehardea. And then sometimes we have differences where they say, “Well, in Sura they read this way, in Nehardea, they read that other way. And then in Tiberius they agree with Nehardea,” or something like that, right? And now I’m actually talking about the actual consonants of the text. I’m not even talking about open and closed sections. So, there are lists of open and closed sections from Babylonia, but not from Tiberius.

Okay. So, here is what one of the things that we looked at, and you painstakingly went through this entire manuscript, the Damascus Crown. It’s one of what I call the “Big Six”. These are the big six that were identified and used by scholars such as Mordechai Breuer. Today, we can say confidently that there are a lot more than six, but still, they’re important because they’ve been, frankly, more studied than any other one so far.

And here is a passage in the Damascus Crown where there’s no section. And another scribe comes along and writes in the margin: patuach – open. Right? He’s saying, “Right here there should be an open section,” but there isn’t. So, he’s correcting it. So not only do we have differences between the manuscripts, but within the manuscripts we have two different opinions. We have the opinion of the original scribe, who says, “No, there’s no section here.” And the second scribe… I won’t identify who that is here. I think I know who it is. But anyway, at this point, the second scribe is saying that, “Well, there is supposed to be a section here; I disagree with the original scribe.”

Now, in a Torah scroll, you’d have to scratch off a whole bunch of text and rewrite it, right? It’d be much messier. But in a codex, you could just record something in the margin. So, it goes from none to open. And what’s interesting, by the way, is that it’s patuach and not ptucha. Because parasha is a feminine noun and gets a feminine adjective, which should be ptucha. Parasha ptucha. But he says patuach. Why is that? Because for him the word is either pesek or pasek. Here it’s satum, so the original scribe has an open section, and the corrector says, “No, it’s supposed to be closed.” And guys, Nelson went through hundreds and hundreds of pages to find these. And then, some of them were very difficult to find.

Nelson: I will say, Nehemia, there were times where I would give you a report about what I found, and I would show you some of these, and you’d say, “That’s great. Go through it again and just make sure you didn’t miss any.” And there were times when I went through it again, and I found some that I had overlooked, just like scribes sometimes.

Nehemia: So, I mean, here’s how I look at it. People are like, “Oh, you wrote an article and there was a mistake in it.” Well, if the scribes are writing the Word of God and they make mistakes, I’m going to make mistakes too. Hopefully I can correct them in the future. Hopefully there’s not too many of them.

So, here, again, we had a closed section originally, from the original scribe… and look, this is a different handwriting than that of the original scribe. Look at this Chet and look at this Chet. This Chet has kind of like this kind of swirly thing here. It’s not the same scribe, I’m quite confident of that. It’s the same period, roughly, right? Look at that Tav with this, like, little nodule here. I call this the Frankenstein bolt. Bolt head. Because, like, Frankenstein has these little bolt heads, they’re called. He has this big, thick bolt head; that’s a feature of a certain period. We won’t go into that. That’s not how this scribe writes his Tavs, right? These are two different scribes. And so, it’s not the original scribe correcting his work, it’s somebody else. So, originally, the original scribe wrote it is as closed, and the corrector said, “No, it’s supposed to be open.” How did he know it was supposed to be open? It’s very interesting. It’s not so clear. Okay. Hold on.

Let’s go to the next one here. Here there’s no section, and he says it’s supposed to be a closed section. You guys get the idea. This is beautiful here. Here there’s an open section, and he says, “It’s supposed to be closed,” and he even fills it in with these little, like, kind of arrow, these little mountain type decorations, right? So, graphically, it actually is closed now, right? This has to be a word here to make it closed, right? But he’s like, “This will have to do, along with the note in the margin. That’s the best I can do.”

Here’s one where there’s supposed to be no section, according to the corrector, but the original scribe made it closed. So, first of all, he filled it in. And then he said, “Lo paskim be.” “They do not make a piska,” or a pesek, I suppose, actually, in it. “We,” or “they don’t make a section here,” right? And it’s interesting; does the word piska mean “the space” or “the section”? Depends which source you look at. It’s a bit complicated.

Here’s one where it’s closed and he makes it open. This is one of my favorite ones. Here there was an open section, and he removed the entire section. And it’s beautiful what he wrote. He says “Kol de’avad lei piska,” and here he has the Alef at the end, right, so it is piska. And so… wait a minute; why isn’t it feminine if it’s piska? Because normally a word that ends in ah is feminine, but that’s kamatz Hey. This is kamatz Alef. It’s an Aramaic ending for masculine. If it was feminine, it would be pisketa or something like that, right? So, patuach is correct.

So, “Kol de’ava,” this is Aramaic he’s writing, “kol de’avad lei piska ta’ei ve’lo g’mir midei.” It’s beautiful! “Anyone who makes a piska errs and he has not learned anything.” So, he’s not only removing the open section of the original scribe, he’s saying the original scribe is an ignoramus. That’s amazing! It’s like everybody’s got an opinion. He’s actually insulting the original scribe who wrote this manuscript.

And you have to understand, guys, we look at this manuscript as this… and it is… it’s an amazing document that preserves… when we say, “the Masoretic Text”, what we really mean is, the text preserved in this and several other manuscripts. You could say 50 or 60 manuscripts if you want, right? But this is one of the key witnesses of the Masoretic Text. And the corrector to this manuscript is saying the original scribe’s an ignoramus. Wow! That’s an amazing thing. Now, was the original scribe actually an ignoramus? I don’t think so. I think he just had a different textual tradition. Or maybe he made a mistake.

All right. So, what’s interesting about that insult is that we find it in a list of Babylonian sections that was published by Prof. Yosef Ofer, I think like in the 80s. And this is in the Cairo Geniza, and it’s in a different section. It says “Man de’amar Va’yelekh Reuven satum ta’eu velo g’mir.” “One who says that Genesis 30 verse 14, the verse ‘Va’yelekh Reuven’, is a closed section, errs, and he has not learned anything.” So, number one, it’s in Aramaic. It doesn’t prove that it was written in Babylonia; there are people who spoke Aramaic in Israel for sure, a different dialect, yeah. But this type of phrase, “he makes a mistake and hasn’t learned anything”, that might be a Babylonian comment. Maybe. Or it is in this case for sure, because this is a Babylonian list from the Russian National Library.

All right, British Library Or. 4445; this is another one of the Big Six. And this is a beautiful example, guys, where I set Nelson loose and I say, “Look for anything unusual.” And there’s no reason that he should have found this, right? There’s no obvious… Like, in the other one, it’s relatively easy. We’re looking for, like, a line in the margin, which has this kind of like, I call them doohickies. It has, like, a very special type of symbol; it doesn’t appear anywhere else.

Here it’s like… wait, you had to notice that in a several hundred-page manuscript there’s a line that’s written in smaller text. Now, why is the line written in smaller text? And this is really beautiful. So, what happened here is the original scribe, and I can tell from the handwriting this is the original scribe, realized he left out an entire verse. And why did he leave out an entire verse? Well, how do scribes work? They have a manuscript that they’re writing, and it’s a bunch of blank sheets in a quire. Usually the quire is by itself; it hasn’t been sewn to the other quires to make a codex yet, right?

So, he’s writing this kind of, like, booklet, called a quire, and it’s blank. And he’s writing the letters, and he keeps looking back at his source. Let’s say he’s copying these letters. So, he looks at the source and he probably says out loud, “lo yekhalel”. And then he writes lo yekhalel. And then he says “et mikdashai”. He sees in the source and he writes et mikdashai. “Ki ani”. Ki ani. And then he probably says, “Adonai”, because that’s how most of the scribes pronounced it. “Mekadsham.” Mikadsham. And then he says “va’yedaber”. Va’yedaber. And he looks back at his source, and he says, “Oh, there’s a space here.” And the first word after the space is va’yedaber. Great. And then he looks back at his source and he copies Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, instead of “Moshe”. And why is that? When he looks back at his source, his eye lands on the wrong instance of “va’yedaber”, right? You have two verses, one after another, that began “And he spoke.” And he ends up copying the wrong one.

So, he has his space, and he copies “Va’yedaber Yehovah el Moshe le’emor” instead of “Va’yedaber Moshe el Aharon ve’el banav ve’el kol bnei Yisrael.” So, he loses an entire verse, and then he realizes his mistake, and he says, “What do I do? Where do I add this verse? I could erase this whole thing here. That would be a pain. Plus, I’ve got God’s name I’m not allowed to erase. What do I do? I have a blank space here, let’s fill it into the blank space in small, tiny letters. I’ll just squeeze it in. But now I’ve got a problem; I filled in the missing verse, but now I don’t have my open section.”

So, what does he do? And look, it’s a bit lazy. He writes in the margin: pasek patuach, or pesek patuach, we don’t have vowels, so we’re not sure. There’s a debate between Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and, I believe it’s Marcus Jastrow, who were two dictionary makers, who… one said it’s pasek and the other said it’s pesek. Or maybe it was somebody else. Maybe it was Yevin who said it was the other one, I don’t remember. One of the scholars says… they’re debating how to pronounce this word; it’s the same word, it doesn’t matter. It means “a section”. It’s the Hebrew form of piska, right? In the other manuscript we saw “piska”, which is the space or the section, depending how you interpret it, and here it’s the Hebrew form, pasek.

So, he says, “There’s supposed to be an open section here. I wasn’t able to represent it because I had to fill in a missing verse.” Beautiful. Finding this is almost a miracle, Nelson. That out of, what is this? Four, five hundred pages of this manuscript that have been preserved, that you found this. That’s amazing. That’s very impressive.

Nelson: And Nehemia, one of the things I learned as I’m watching these scribes, some of them correcting their own mistakes, as this one did, or some scribe come, who knows when, later on in time and corrects what he perceives to be a mistake, whether it was a legitimate mistake or not, is just how innovative they were. They had to be. Along with trying to stay within the confines of Jewish laws that dictate how they’re supposed to write these holy books. And it reminded me, and it still does remind me, of your PhD, which focused on the name, and how innovative scribes had to be to make corrections involving the name.

Nehemia: Right. And it’s interesting you say Jewish law. I’ll be more precise, and I’ll say Rabbinical law. But then, where things get complicated is, there isn’t one Rabbinical law; there are many Rabbinical laws that disagree with each other, right? People say, “Well, the Talmud says this horrible thing.” Well, there’s one opinion in the Talmud that might say a horrible thing, and there’s another opinion that disagrees with it, right? The Talmud is full of disagreements; Rabbinical law is full of disagreements. And sure, there are some things they agree upon, but there’s a whole lot they don’t. And there are a lot of Rabbinical legal treatises that will say, “Well, you know, you asked this question. And I asked the scribes, and here’s what they told me.” Right?

So, there’s kind of this assumption that the scribes are these artisans. They’re… you know, they’re experts, right? They know how to do stuff. And maybe we don’t find that written in our legal texts, our Rabbinical legal treatises, but the scribes, they have a tradition that they were taught by a previous scribe, who was taught by a previous scribe, who was taught by a previous scribe, and de facto, that’s what we’re supposed to do. That’s one view, at least, within the Rabbinical literature. If this was a Torah scroll, most people would reject it; but for a codex, this is okay.

So, here’s an example in Sassoon 1053, where the original scribe… this is the one that sold a couple of years ago for $38.1 million, the most expensive book, I believe, ever sold, and one of the most expensive documents ever sold; originally, the scribe wrote this word mikhtav. He wrote it here. And then, as he was writing, before he wrote the next line, he said, “Oh, no! There was supposed to be a blank space here.” And so, he scratched out his own word and wrote it here. How do I know, Nelson, that it was the original scribe?

Nelson: So, how do we know it was the original scribe? I think it’s because, well, one…

Nehemia: Maybe… how do I know it wasn’t done, like, a hundred years later by a different scribe? That’s really my question.

Nelson: I think because when we do see the next line of text, it’s consistent with the same hand.

Nehemia: That’s number one. Number two is, there’s nothing scratched out on this line, right? Meaning, if the original scribe had written “Mikhtav le’Chizkiyahu melekh Yehuda”, and they realized, “Oh, no, there’s supposed to be a space here,” all of this would be scratched out. And then he’d rewrite mikhtav here. The fact that he only scratched this out means he wrote one word and realized his mistake and fixed it.

Now let’s see an opposite example. We’re going to see that in a minute. Here’s a new discovery. This is an amazing discovery, Nelson. So, here the scribe wrote the letter Vav, and then he realized there’s supposed to be a space. And he wrote “va’yomer”. That’s explanation number one. Meaning, at first he thought there was no… he’s copying as if there’s no open and closed section. This is a direct continuation of the previous text without any pause or anything, so he just left the Vav; he was kind of lazy. That’s possibility number one.

Possibility number two is he wrote “va’yomer,” this is what I thought at first, but then you proposed possibility number one, and I think you’re probably right, but I still don’t know for sure… so, maybe he wrote “va’yomer”, he wrote all of this, left a closed section and then realized, “Oh, there’s supposed to be no section.” And so, he removed the section by putting the Vav there. Maybe. We don’t know here. So, it’s either none to closed, or closed to none, and we still don’t know, right? It’s ambiguous. And there are ambiguous things in the manuscripts.

Here’s a beautiful example from Evr. II B 17. This is a manuscript written by the same scribe that wrote the letters of the Aleppo Codex, Shlomo ben Buya’a. And this we have a date, 929. The Aleppo Codex was either written just before or just after this… is what we think, at least. And here there was a section, and he removed it by putting in these… he just filled it in, right? There was a closed section and he’s like, “No, there should be no section here.”

Aleppo Codex. In the Aleppo Codex… remember, we quoted before Menahem Cohen, who said it wasn’t important to Aharon Ben Asher whether it was an open or closed section. Right? There was no authoritative list. You know, whatever was in his source, he copied, and he wasn’t too concerned about it. That was the opinion of Menahem Cohen.

Here’s what it says in the dedication inscription of the Aleppo Codex itself, which was written about a hundred years after the codex itself was written. It says, “If any man from the seed of Israel wants, on any day of the year, to see in it matters of full and deficient spelling, or these other things,” that we won’t go into, what that means, “or closed or open [sections], or any accent from among these accents, they shall bring it out to him to see and to become knowledgeable, but not to read and study.”

So, in other words, the policy in Jerusalem in the 11th century for the Aleppo Codex was, you can use it as a reference if you want to verify what it says in the Bible, but you can’t sit there with your manuscript and check everything. You know, it’s too important, right? If you don’t have an accurate enough manuscript, go find an accurate manuscript. Then you can check specific things. To see, is this verse supposed to be open or is it supposed to be closed; they were kind of being restrictive with it at the time. Far less than they were later, when they didn’t let anybody see it when it was in Aleppo. There, you had to bribe, basically, someone to be allowed to see it. Until the 40s.

All right. So, closed or open sections was one of the things that was considered authoritative in the Aleppo Codex. Maybe not by Aharon Ben Asher, but a hundred years later.

Nelson: Nehemia.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Nelson: Touching upon that, the fact that the open and closed sections are mentioned here in this dedication inscription about 1050, what significance do you think, if any, that plays, in relation to Maimonides…

Nehemia: Oh, there’s no question that Maimonides saw this inscription. So, Maimonides has this statement. He says, “The reason I trust this manuscript, or we should trust the manuscript, is because people used it to proofread their manuscripts as has been transmitted by tradition.” So, he was told by somebody, “This was used to proofread manuscripts.” Now, this actually contradicts that, right? If it was used to proofread manuscripts, it was either a significant time after this or before this, right? Could be true. But it was probably before this.

And it seems like at some point they said, “You know, this is too important a manuscript. We’ve proofread enough manuscripts against the Aleppo Codex. Now, if you need to check something, you can check some specific points.” Which is, by the way, really interesting, because there’s something called the Hebrew University Bible Project, which has been going on since the 1960s, and literally they had these photographs of the Aleppo Codex, and they would create a text based on the photographs. And then, when there was a specific point they weren’t sure about, they were allowed to come in for a few hours and check the actual original pages of the Aleppo Codex.

So, literally, what was described in the 11th century was going on in the 1960s, 1970s. In the early 2000s, I was around when this was done. I didn’t get to go in myself, but I spoke to the people who got to go in. Later, I got to go in myself. Right? And again, it was like… for nine hours I was allowed to do it, which is probably more than anybody else has been allowed, to check the details… maybe since the 11th century, I don’t know. Well, no. In the 1940s, there was someone who spent several days with it. So, I’m wrong about that, right? But maybe since the 1940s, since Cassuto went in and checked it. Maybe.

So, in any event. So, yeah, so, there was some kind of shift, it seems. So, Maimonides was aware that people were using it for proofreading because somebody told him that there was a tradition. And it seems like later they kind of shut off that spigot and didn’t allow people to do it anymore, and you could only check specific things. And then there were lists. There were lists that would say, “Well, according to Ben Asher, this is the reading. And according to others, here’s the reading.” Right? So, people apparently went in and then they produced these data points that say, “Well, you know, Ben Asher reads it as “li’yerushalayim”, and Ben Naphtali reads it as “le’Yerushalayim”, or something to that effect, right? Like, there are famous differences between Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali, and they probably come from people like Mishael Ben Uziel, who wrote a list like this, maybe checking these things themselves.

All right, let’s go on and look at what you found in the Aleppo Codex. And this… Nelson’s… How long do you think you spent going through the Aleppo Codex, looking for these?

Nelson: Just the Aleppo Codex, I’d say probably close to a month.

Nehemia: Guys, that’s, let’s just say something like, I don’t know, we’ll call it over 100 hours. Well, I mean, maybe over 150 hours. Wow. That’s impressive. So, here, Nelson found this, and this is beautiful… in the Aleppo Codex itself… right? And here’s why this is so important. We’ll say, “Well, the Masoretic Text says.” And what we really mean, or what most people mean by the Masoretic Text, is the Aleppo Codex. That’s what most scholars mean. There’s another definition from Mordechai Breuer that we won’t go into.

And then here, within the Aleppo Codex, we have the original scribe himself is correcting himself as he’s writing. Originally, he wrote the letters Vav–Quf-Lamed, and then part of the Hey. How do I know that? From the shape of the erasure, right? Here’s the top of the Lamed that was erased. Here’s the bottom of the Quf that was erased. And then he realized, “Oh, wait a minute; there’s supposed to be a closed section here.” So, he erased these letters and then rewrote them here, as he was writing. And what’s so interesting about this is, this is a piska, or a parasha really… is the… well, piska we saw as well. This is a piska in the middle of the verse, right? So, that’s why he made the mistake. He’s in the middle of a verse, and he’s reading the verse, either out loud or in his head, and he knows there’s this type of break. And he’s like, “Okay, we’re still in the middle of the verse,” so he starts to write Vad-Yud-Quf-Lamed, part of the Hey. And then he realizes his mistake, and he erases it and corrects it, as he’s writing. So, this is Shlomo Ben Buya’a, who was the scribe who copied the Aleppo Codex, the same one that we saw one of his manuscripts in black and white: Evr. II B 17.

Okay. Here’s another correction by Shlomo Ben Buya’a himself; at least, I believe it’s him. Here he starts to write this… he writes three-and-a-half lines, and when he gets to here, he realizes, “Oh, no! I left out the closed section.” And so, he scratches off three-and-a-half lines and then rewrites them. How do I know three-and-a-half lines? Because here there’s no erasure. So, it had to be done as he was writing. Otherwise, all of this would have been erased.

Now, this part’s a bit complicated, and I think I’m going to skip it for this audience, but… No, I don’t know. It’s one of… I’m not. It’s very cool…

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VERSES MENTIONED
Isaiah 42
Babylonian Talmud, Sabbath 103b

RELATED EPISODES
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OTHER LINKS
Nelson’s lecture

The post Hebrew Voices #221 – Section Breaks in Hebrew Bible Manuscripts: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.