Hatam Soferet

I wanted to do you a post about why there aren’t any vowels or musical notation-marks in a sefer Torah, but when I came to study the subject, I realised it’s a good deal more complicated than can fit into one post. It seemed to require a brief history of vowel-marks, which in turn required a brief history of the alef-bet, which in turn required a brief history of writing in general.

So we’re going to start with a brief history of writing, and then we’ll do the alef-bet, and then we’ll do vowel-marks, and then we’ll be sorted.

Let’s get into it by way of Yosef. This week’s parsha and last week’s, Vayigash and Miketz, tell us about Yosef, employed in a high administrative position tracking and controlling food supplies for an enormous region through fourteen years of plenty and famine.

This kind of activity is how writing was invented, we think. People wanted to keep track of how many things they had (or were owed), so they used tallies, with one-to-one correspondence between the number of marks and the number of things; tally marks have been in use since the Stone Age, a matter of some forty thousand years.

Writing seems to have evolved independently in various areas. We’re ultimately interested in the alef-bet, so we’re going to take that route, but it’s worth remembering that this isn’t the only history of writing out there.

Between 8000 and 4000 BCE people used a token-based kind of abstraction for record-keeping: pebbles or clay tokens representing quantities. One pebble in a jar means one goat in the field; two pebbles in a different jar represents two baskets of grain, and you’d better remember which is which. During these four millennia, the level of abstraction expanded somewhat, such that instead of sixty-three pebbles in a jar meaning sixty-three I-think-it-was-goats-or-is-that-the-grain-jar-damn, you had one sixty-goat token and three one-goat tokens in your jar, and maybe some grain-tokens too, if you had any grain.

Keeping your goat record in a jar leaves you a bit open to your accountant hooking some of your goats, though, so people developed the habit of sealing their tokens in clay containers. Very nice and secure, right?

But a bit tiresome when you want to check up on how many goats you’ve got, that being the whole point of this record-keeping business anyway. Rather than keep on breaking open and resealing the clay containers, around 3500 BCE people started marking the containers while the clay was still wet, using a stylus to carve representations of the contents’ type and quantity.

The next step was to realise that once you have those marks in the clay, the tokens inside the jars are obsolete. The marks are now fully representing real-life objects, without the intermediary stage of tokens; they are no longer mnemonic but pictographic.

Once you’re writing things like “60 goats,” you might also want to convey “Belonging to me” or “When I counted them in the springtime”. Marks come to convey not just objects but ideas and situations.

The next step in the history of writing is using marks to represent sounds. You’ve read the Just So Stories, I take it? If not, go read the one under the link, and then come back.

Say a culture has a symbol :) okay? It starts out representing someone with a smiley face, so when you see it, you think of someone smiling. How do you speak it? :) also stands for the sound which comes out of your mouth when you say “smileyface.” Eventually, we might abbreviate :) to be the sound “sm”.

This is how alphabetic writing systems are born. More about that next week.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

You’re merrily checking through a sefer Torah, one in which the scribe tends to underestimate his lines, and has to stretch at the ends to compensate (lines 1, 2, 6, 7). And you see a chunk (lines 3, 4, 5) of squishied-up writing. Why?

This usually happens when you accidentally leave words out. Calligraphers have various ways of dealing with missing lines; here’s a particularly sweet example from the St John’s Bible, where the missing words are written in the margin and flown into place by a little bird:

Homoioteleuton in St John's Bible

Torah scribes don’t have such luxury. No writing words in the margin for us.

We do, technically, have the option of writing the missing words above the line, but a) that’s Not Done these days b) if there are a lot of words, that’s not going to work.

So what options remain? Either start the sheet over, or erase words from the surrounding text, and make enough space that we can squish the extra words in.

Note that the second item in line 3 is an obligatory space. The space has to be in the middle of a line. I expect he started erasing after the space because repositioning the space would have been even more tiresome than not.

Also, note that the second item in line 6 is a Divine Name. These can’t be erased. So the scribe erased the two-and-a-bit lines of 3, 4, and 5 to write in the proper text, unless he realised his error before he got to the divine name.

So what was his mistake?

From the shadows, I can sort of see where some letters used to be:

But whatever did he write first? I’m stumped by those apparent two kufs. Maybe we’ve got two rounds of erasing to contend with? Certainly that “et” is on a double erasure – maybe it’s actually on a triple erasure?

Real scribal archaeologists have UV lights and all sorts of toys for reading the underneath writing on palimpsests. If this was actually important we could use some of those toys, but it isn’t really – just fun. So – any thoughts?

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

What happens when you let the nose on your dalet get out of control: it turns into an elephant.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Places where ink has popped off and only the shadows are left. Clicky to see bigger.

The shadows don’t count, by the by, so if your letters look like this, they are pasul and need fixing.

These kinds of pesulim are funny. They really do just pop off. Pop! and they’re gone. Sometimes if it’s very bad you can look at the floor of the aron and see all these little flakes of popped-off letters.

I’d write more, speculating about how and why and so on, but I’ve been on my feet all day checking through nine sifrei Torah to see what they need by way of repairs, and I’m about wiped out.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Little Letters in Eicha, part 1

3:36
לעות אדם בריבו אדני לא ראה	To subvert a man in his cause, the LORD approveth not.

Tzvi Ron in Sefer Katan u-Gadol again (trans. G. Wasserman): “The small ‘ayin in the word לעות (verse 3:36) is explained as a reference to the numerical value of the letter, namely seventy. This verse says that God did not agree with the perversion of justice, and the number 70 is associated with this if we relate it to the seventy judges of the Sanhedrin, or the seventy years of Babylonian exile which God’s justice decreed for the Jewish people.”

Now call me a sceptic, but this sounds a bit forced to me. Surely there’s more to it than that? But if so, we’ve forgotten what it ever was (or Tzvi Ron didn’t find it yet, anyway). By way of compensation, someone more recent (like, in the last 1000 years) came up with this one. Numerical symbolism is a tool in the interpretative toolbox.

2:10
טבעו בארץ שעריה אבד ושבר בריחיה מלכה ושריה בגוים אין תורה גם נביאיה לא מצאו חזון מיקוק	Her gates are sunk into the ground; he hath destroyed and broken her bars: her king and her princes are among the Gentiles: the law is no more; her prophets also find no vision from the LORD.

The numerical symbolism here is a date – Tet is 9, and “In Midrash Haseroth Vi-yetheroth, it says the allusion is to the destruction of the Temple, which took place on the date 9 (i.e., ט) Av; this explanation appears also in the Minhath Shai and in the book Yesod Ohel Mo‘ed.” Okay, very nice, but it gets much better.

A whole big collection of mouseover interpretations follows. Choose your mouseover, really.

Other commentators have explained the small teth as being a reference to some particular smallness in the sinking of the gates. Thus, in Mesoreth Ha-berith Ha-gadol, it says: “The reference here means that they did not sink very deeply, but only a small sinking.”

In the book Em La-miqra ve-la-Masoreth, it says that the small teth is an allusion to the word טוב, good: “It hints that their sinking was not to their disadvantage, but for their own good – it was so that the enemy’s hands would not have control over them.” In the same book, it lists a number of allusions associated with the word טוב – the goodness which was decreased at the time of the Destruction, the good Torah which the Jews had abandoned, and more.

In Sefer Elyashiv, it says that the reference is to טוב רואי, the one good in appearance, i.e., the handsome King David, in whose merit the gates were not destroyed, but merely sank into the ground. In the book Yesod Ohel Mo‘ed, the same connection to טוב רואי is mentioned, except that here, it is explained as referring to the fact that the gates, which now sank, had originally been made by King David.

So – a small letter tet, with all kinds of allusions about the destruction of the temple floating around it. In the next post, we’ll see how this isn’t just a mouseover tet, it’s actually a hyperlink tet, connected to a tet in Kohelet.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Occasionally I dip my pen, by accident, into my tea instead of into my ink.

When that happens, I wipe the tea off my pen, and dip the pen into the ink as per original plan.

But sometimes apparently I don’t get all the tea off my pen. A tiny drop of it lurks in the barrel, and when I’m not expecting it, it trickles down and lands in my writing.

Thus.

Tea and ink, not mixing

The three little dots are the gleams from my desk lamps, and the other gleam is the light from the window.

Blue sky and clouds.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.