The Torah’s Hidden History: 5 Fascinating Facts About Judaism’s Sacred Scroll
This blogpost is devoted to fun facts about the Torah, its text, the scroll we read from during ritual public readings in synagogue, and some fun facts about the Torah's text written on the scroll.
It's easy to look up most of these facts in any synagogue Bible or on Sefaria.
Fun Fact #1
The first translation of the Bible into Aramaic is perhaps the second oldest Jewish text after the Torah itself. It is the product of Babylonia's Jewish communities in exile since 586 BCE. In the following 70 years, they integrated into Babylonian society enough to need an Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Torah read out loud to them in the Synagogue. The translation used then and still published in many Bibles today is known as Targum Onkelos or the Aramaic Targum of Onkelos. Targum means translation. Aramaic was almost a universal language in the ancient Near East. Onkelos, tradition says, was a convert to the Jewish community. He composed an accurate, beautiful and sensitive translation that is properly revered. The translation is mostly very literal, following the Hebrew almost slavishly. Where Targum Onkelos does stray from the literal text, his 'translation' provides a window into the interpretation of the Torah from as early as 500 BCE. That's several hundred years before the creation of the Septuagint translation into Greek, which the Church adopted.
Fun Fact #2
The familiar chapter organization of the Hebrew Bible, which we see in the modern Tanakh, is not the product of Jewish scholars. This organization of the text was adopted into the Jewish Bible tradition from a system implemented by Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury around 1200 CE. It had become very important in this period for Jews and Christians to find and debate specific verses of the Bible each in his own language. Necessity is the mother of invention! This chapter organization was popularized in the early Rabbinic Bibles published by Daniel Bomberg, a Christian entrepreneur, in Venice starting in 1518.
Talmudic Sages said (Kiddushin 30a) that the middle letter of the Torah is the 'vav of gachon' i.e., the hebrew letter 'vav' in the word 'gaḥon' in Leviticus 11:42, shown below. But, in the modern text of the Torah, it is clearly not. Please note the enlarged 'vav' in the middle of the first line in the image below. The tradition mentioned above and a textual tradition to enlarge this letter because of its 'significance.'
Fun Fact #3
There are ten places in the Torah text where we find dotted words and letters. These dots are known as Puncta Extroaordinaria, Latin for 'Extraordinary dots' (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puncta_extraordinaria). Tradition has it that the dots are in places where the ancient Sages, Ezra the Scribe amongst them, were unsure of a word or its proper spelling. One of the more famous instances, when Esau and Jacob reunite after many years of absence, dots appear above the text 'He kissed him.' Tradition has it that the question of whether we were supposed to be informed of this aspect of this emotional moment will be decided by Elija the Prophet sometime in our future.
Fun Fact #4
In the scroll of the Torah, surrounding the text of Numbers 10:35-36 you will usually find markings which are called 'inverted Nuns'.......not the Catholic ascetic women......but the Hebrew letter 'Nun.' These are likely very ancient markings which mark this text as misplaced (Shabbat 115b-116a). Theoretically, the next scribe to copy this scroll should have removed the markings. There is a long history to the design and placement of these markings. Similar markings appear in Jewish texts from Qumran, near the Dead Sea, and were used for the same purpose in many ancient Greek documents. They were then called because of their shape, sigma, or 'reversed sigma.'
Fun Fact #5
The Torah scroll is written on parchment according to specific and ancient traditions. The earliest Jewish Torah scroll fragments we have discovered from Qumran also show a 'page layout' (upper and lower margin depth and columns) exactly the same as any Torah scroll in use today. That's a tradition which demonstrably dates from no later than 250 BCE, 2290 years!
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