Visit a synagogue today and you may see the Torah scroll taken from the ark, unrolled, and read aloud. That scroll was written by hand by a trained scribe, following rules that are more than a thousand years old. A single missing letter would make it unfit for public reading.
These rules are one of the most remarkable examples in history of a community trying to pass a text on without change. This article sets out what the rules are, where they come from, and what they can and cannot tell us about the accuracy of the Old Testament.
Where the rules are written down
The rules grew over centuries. The main sources are:
- The Mishnah and the Talmud. The Mishnah, edited around 200 CE, and the Babylonian Talmud, completed around 500–600 CE, discuss how sacred scrolls are to be written, especially in tractates such as Megillah, Menahot, Shabbat and Gittin.
- Soferim (“Scribes”), a short tractate compiled after the Talmud, probably in the eighth century CE, which gathers the scribal rules in one place.
- Maimonides (1138–1204), the great Jewish legal scholar, who codified the rules in his Mishneh Torah, in the section on the laws of tefillin, mezuzah and the Torah scroll.
It is important to be clear about the dates. These are rabbinic rules written down in the early centuries of the Common Era and later. Some reflect much older custom, but they do not describe how every scribe worked in the time of the prophets, and the Dead Sea Scrolls show that practice in the Second Temple period was more varied (Tov 2004). The rules tell us how the text was guarded from late antiquity onwards: the period in which the Masoretic text, the basis of our Old Testament, was copied.
The rules themselves
Here are some of the main requirements for a Torah scroll, as the Talmud and Maimonides describe them.
The materials. The scroll must be written on the prepared skin of a ritually clean animal, sewn together with sinews from a clean animal. The ink must be black and durable. The writing surface must be ruled with guidelines (sirtut) before writing begins.
Copy from a written text, never from memory. The Talmud says that it is forbidden to write even a single letter of scripture except from a written copy (Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 18b). However well the scribe knows the text, they must look at the exemplar for every word. This one rule protects against the most natural error of all: writing what you expect the text to say instead of what it says.
Say each word before writing it. By custom, the scribe reads each word aloud from the exemplar before writing it, so that eye, mouth and hand all attend to the same word.
Every letter whole and separate. Each letter must be correctly formed and must not touch its neighbour; each must be surrounded by blank parchment. A letter that is broken or that could be mistaken for another letter makes the scroll unfit until it is fixed. Hebrew has several pairs of letters that look alike, and these rules exist to keep them distinct.
The layout is part of the text. The Torah is divided into sections by two kinds of gap, “open” sections, which start a new line, and “closed” sections, which leave a space within a line. Maimonides lists all of them, book by book, and a scroll that places them wrongly is unfit. Some passages have a special layout: the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15) is written in a pattern that looks like bricks laid in a wall, and the Song of Moses (Deuteronomy 32) in two columns.
The divine name. Before writing the name of God, the scribe is to pause and consciously intend to write the holy name. Once written, the name may not be erased (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Foundations of the Torah 6:1–2). If a scribe makes a mistake in a divine name, that part of the scroll cannot simply be scraped and corrected; the sheet must be replaced.
One letter matters. Maimonides rules that a Torah scroll lacking even one letter, or with one extra letter, is unfit for public reading until corrected (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Tefillin, Mezuzah and the Torah Scroll 7:11).
Correction has a limit. Ordinary mistakes may be corrected. But the Talmud discusses how many errors a column may contain and still be repaired, and says that beyond that point the scroll must be put away rather than corrected (Babylonian Talmud, Menahot 29b). A scroll that cannot be used is not destroyed; it is stored in a genizah, a storeroom for worn-out sacred texts, or buried. The famous Cairo Genizah, discovered in the 1890s, held hundreds of thousands of such fragments, including Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible from the tenth century onwards.
Counting letters
The Talmud gives a striking explanation of the word soferim, “scribes”: the early scribes were called that because they counted (the same root) all the letters of the Torah. It notes that the letter vav in the word for “belly” in Leviticus 11:42 is the middle letter of the Torah, and that the repeated word “diligently inquired” in Leviticus 10:16 is its middle word (Babylonian Talmud, Qiddushin 30a).
The Masoretes, the scribes and scholars who worked from about the sixth to the tenth centuries CE, took this further. In the margins of their manuscripts they noted how many times unusual words occur, and in the notes at the end of each book they recorded the number of verses and the middle verse. Some printed Hebrew Bibles still carry these counts. Counting does not catch every possible error, but it is a powerful check: a scroll whose totals do not match has gone wrong somewhere. More about the Masoretes is in The Masoretes: guardians of the Hebrew text.
Did it work?
The best test of a copying system is to compare copies made far apart in time and place. Two comparisons are especially telling.
Medieval manuscripts against each other. Hebrew Bible manuscripts from the Middle Ages, copied in different countries, agree with each other to a remarkable degree. In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Kennicott and Giovanni de Rossi collated hundreds of Hebrew manuscripts. Most of the differences they found were matters of spelling, especially whether a vowel letter was written or not, and very few affected the meaning. As Ernst Würthwein summarises, the medieval manuscripts essentially transmit one textual tradition.
Medieval manuscripts against the Dead Sea Scrolls. Until 1947, the oldest complete Hebrew Bible manuscripts came from around 1000 CE. Then the Dead Sea Scrolls supplied copies a thousand years older. Many of them, especially those from after the first century CE, such as the scrolls from Masada and Wadi Murabba’at, are almost identical in their consonants to the medieval Masoretic text. The scrolls found at Qumran are more varied, a point explored in What the Dead Sea Scrolls show about the Bible’s text. But a large group of them, which scholars call “proto-Masoretic”, already has the text that the rabbis and Masoretes would guard so carefully.
In other words, the rules did not create the Masoretic text; they preserved a text that already existed. From about the first century CE onwards, the transmission of that text was extraordinarily stable.
What the rules cannot do
It would be wrong to claim more than the evidence supports. Careful copying keeps a text from changing; it cannot correct mistakes that were already in the text before the rules took hold. Textual critics have identified places in the Masoretic text where an early error seems to have entered and then been faithfully copied ever after. For example, 1 Samuel 13:1 gives Saul’s age and length of reign in a form that seems to have lost a number, which is why modern translations handle it differently. In such places the ancient translations and the Dead Sea Scrolls can sometimes help.
So the rules for a Torah scroll are not a guarantee that every letter is as the author wrote it. They are something more modest and more real: proof that for more than a thousand years, generation after generation of scribes treated each letter as important, and that the text they received is the text they passed on.
Sources
- Babylonian Talmud, tractates Megillah 18b, Menahot 29b, Qiddushin 30a.
- Maimonides. Mishneh Torah, Laws of the Foundations of the Torah 6; Laws of Tefillin, Mezuzah and the Torah Scroll 7–10.
- Higger, Michael, ed. Masekhet Soferim. New York: Debe Rabbanan, 1937.
- Kennicott, Benjamin. Vetus Testamentum Hebraicum cum variis lectionibus. 2 vols. Oxford, 1776–1780.
- Reif, Stefan C. A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo: The History of Cambridge University’s Genizah Collection. Richmond: Curzon, 2000.
- Tov, Emanuel. Scribal Practices and Approaches Reflected in the Texts Found in the Judean Desert. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
- Tov, Emanuel. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. 3rd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012.
- Würthwein, Ernst, and Alexander Achilles Fischer. The Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Biblia Hebraica. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014.
- Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article gives its own literal rendering.