James S. Diamond - Scribal Secrets: Extraordinary Texts in the Torah and Their Implications

W hen we read something, whether printed or written by hand, what is happening?

We look at the letters and the words and we begin to try to make some sense of them. We piece together from those letters and words the elements of a story or some kind of meaning. We construct this meaning out of the combination of various letters into words, and the assemblage of those words into sentences, and the organization of those sentences into whole passages.

But alphabet and phonetics are not the only means by which we construct this meaning. There are also things on the page that more subtly influence and guide our interpretation of what we are reading: periods, commas, semicolons, question marks, quotation marks, parentheses. This is as true when we are reading Newsweek or The New York Times as it is when we take in hand something like Moby Dick or Harry Potter . It is also true when we read the Torah or the Pentateuch, whether in a book with the Hebrew original and perhaps a translation beside it or from out of the Torah scroll itself.

This book is about some of the subtle devices that operate within and upon the writing in the Torah to impart to it a meaning or meanings beyond the textual surface. Let me be clear though: in the Torahs case I am not talking about punctuation marks. The signs that are my subject here are not found in every line or on every page of the Torah. They show up only occasionally, and when they do, they do so in quite unexpected ways. The aim here is to show you what these devices are, how and where to find them, and how to use them in your own encounter with this text that has served as the wellspring of Jewish religious expression since Judaism anchored itself in the written word.

Let me give a famous example of what Im talking about: the words of the Shema as they are written in a Torah scroll in their original place in the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy and as they are printed in virtually all Humashim (Pentateuchs) and siddurim (prayer books) :

Hear O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.

(Deut :)

Do you seeits hard not tohow two letters here, the ayin and the dalet, are written larger than the others? They have been written that way for a very long time, possibly as much as two thousand years.

Why?

Attempts to answer this question are as many as they are profound. They break down into two schools of thought, about each of which I shall have a lot more to say in this book. One school holds that the reason the two letters need to be written large is to make sure that they are not mistaken for another letter that may look alike, or for another consonant that may sound alike. This will ensure that one is reading exactly the right words with the right theological intentions, and not near-homographs or near-homonyms that have other meanings with insidious and even heretical implications. Thus: