The story
A Torah scroll is a handwritten copy of the Five Books of Moses on parchment, read aloud in synagogues on Sabbaths, festivals, fast days and Monday and Thursday mornings, and kept at other times in the ark facing Jerusalem. Writing one fulfils one of the 613 commandments. Written entirely in biblical Hebrew, a scroll contains 304,805 letters, every one of which must be reproduced precisely by a trained scribe, or sofer, a task that can take about a year and a half.
The rules are exacting. The scroll must be written with a quill or other permitted pen and special ink on kosher parchment, prepared from animal skin. The scribe scores guidelines with a ruler and hangs the letters from them; most modern scrolls have 42 lines to a column. Very strict rules govern the shape and position of each letter, and an error can make the scroll pasul, or invalid, until it is corrected. A mistaken letter can be scraped away, but if a name of God is written in error the whole sheet must be replaced, and the old one is buried or stored in a genizah rather than destroyed. Even worn-away ink can make a scroll unfit for use. Readers follow the text with a yad, a pointer shaped like a hand, so that skin does not touch the parchment.
This devotion to exact copying has deep roots. Attention to the minute details of words and spellings reached a height with Rabbi Akiva, who died in 135 CE, along with the principle that a single wrong letter could invalidate a Torah scroll. Between the seventh and tenth centuries scholars known as the Masoretes added vowel signs and accents and recorded counts of letters, words and verses in the margins of their manuscripts, notes that helped later scribes check their copies.
Archaeology shows how well this worked. A charred scroll found in the ark of an ancient synagogue at Ein Gedi, radiocarbon-dated to the third or fourth century and possibly older, was read using non-invasive virtual unwrapping technology. Its passage from Leviticus is identical to the Masoretic Text, which it precedes by several centuries.
The Masoretic Text, whose oldest complete copy is the Leningrad Codex of 1009, is the basis for most Protestant translations of the Old Testament, including the King James Version, the English Standard Version and the New International Version, and since 1943 for some Catholic Bibles as well.
Why it matters
Generations of careful Jewish scribes kept the Hebrew Bible remarkably stable for well over a thousand years, giving translators and readers worldwide a faithful text.
Sources
- Sefer Torah Wikipedia
- Masoretic Text Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.