The title probably leads you to think that I'm somehow going to show the historicity of some portion of the Bible. Nope. This is about the accuracy of the text which is our Torah. What can the documents of history reveal about our the textual integrity of the Torah text?

When the Jews are called 'The People of the Book,' this primarily refers to the Torah, or to be very exact, the text written on the parchment, the contents of the Five Books of Moses - otherwise known as the Pentateuch. Our relationship with The Book, and then the books about the Book is now thousands of years old. The contents of these texts and library of these texts is vast. It's for good reason that our literature is called 'the Sea of Torah.' Some parts of Jewish History are known to us only because of the books created in those days, which survive until today.

Looking at Jewish History through the books which reflect the history of the Torah and its text is fascinating simply because our existence and survival are so intrinsically bound up with the contents and intentions of these literary creations. Preserving the integrity of text of the 'official' Torah, the letters and words and paragraph divisions became a priority of the ancient Sages.

The origin of the Torah 'at Sinai' is lost in antiquity. We do know that by the 5th Century BCE (before the Common Era, i.e. the year 1, 2900 years ago), there was a text known as the Torah amongst the Jews in exile in Babylonia. The Biblical Book of Ezra tells us of Ezra, who led the Jewish People back to Israel. Ezra, a priest, is also known as Ezra the Scribe, an expert at his work, which was relevant to establishing the text of the Torah as central to all of Judaism. His unique authority to edit the text of the Torah is mentioned in Rabbinic texts. Tradition tells us that he placed dots over questionable words of the Torah. These dots are included in Torah scrolls today. One day in the future, we are told it will be revealed whether to remove the dots if the words are correct or remove the words and the dots if the words are to be removed.

It's likely that in this very early period, the Jewish communities of Babylonia already had the Aramaic Targum (translation) of the Torah called Targum Onkelos. It is named after the author, translator Onkelos, who, the Talmud mentions, was descended from a convert to Judaism. While primarily a very literal translation, where Onkelos deviates from the text with more of an interpretation, it is a window into the legendary material popular in the Babylonian community.

Since the Torah is considered the word of God, there was an obvious need to develop systems to preserve the text and reproduce it accurately. The various challenges were met with genius systems to insure accurate preservation and reproduction of the text. The following 1,500 years until approximately the 10th century provide no physical evidence to teach us about the state of the Torah. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Judean Desert Scrolls in the mid-20 century changed everything.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a vast trove of documents which include small and large portions of biblical texts included in our Bible. As well, there are many texts foreign to our tradition that we knew nothing about until those discoveries. Some of these unknown texts are interspersed with texts known to us, on the same scroll. It's as if scribes were working on different editions of our biblical text. Ultimately, we accept only some of those ancient texts as divine. Our Torah looks different. We now know that the Qumran Community was not the mainstream branch of ancient Judaism which produced our Torah, but the evidence they left is fascinating and fundamental to understanding how our 'official' Torah might have developed. At least, in those texts, we see how texts from the Torah appeared 3,000 years ago!

The evolutionary processes which produced our Torah were primarily completed by the year 70 CE at the destruction of the Second Temple. We know this from the discoveries of texts in the Judean Desert, which date from the 100 BCE until the Bar Kochba revolt of 135CE. Amazingly, the text of the Torah, which is 'codified' in the 9th and 10th centuries CE in the Muslim world, is effectively exactly the same as the text from the first century BCE. Emanuel Tov, a historian of the text of the Torah, has calculated that over that span of 1000 years, there is only a minor 2% deviation between the Aleppo Codex (10th century) and the Judean Scrolls. This is astounding! Over 1000 years of text copying, exile, wandering, and subjugation of one kind or another, as Christianity was adopted by the Roman world, followed by the rise of Islam, we preserved our Torah text almost perfectly. Many boys and girls who learn to read from the Torah for their Bar and Bat Mitzvah celebrations today can read from the Judean Desert scrolls almost as easily as from a contemporary scroll! You can stand in the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, which houses the complete Isaiah scroll from 1st century BCE Qumran, and read it clearly. That just boggles the mind.

In future blogs, I'll tell of some of the organizational systems the Sages used to manage the preservation of such a large text.

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