I’ve talked a bit about how it’s okay to fix mistakes, in most circumstances.

The sages were well aware that when you copy a document, and then copy from the copy, and so on, mistakes are likely to creep in over time. This is why we have a rule that even one mistake in a Torah scroll renders the entire scroll invalid for use until the mistake is fixed – zero-tolerance is really the only policy you can have if you want to ensure that your document will be absolutely unchanged.

This, incidentally, is also why we have the rule about copying from a copy. The scribe simply isn’t allowed to write the scroll down from memory – he may have it more or less accurate, but in a culture where each letter has the status of being divinely dictated, even a variation of one letter can’t be accepted, and recall from memory might meaan whole words or phrases were a little bit off.

Relatedly, the roles of scribe and editor were pretty much interchangeable throughout much of history, and in most other documents, the occasional variation here and there doesn’t matter much, or is even expected (for further reading on this subject, see for instance Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible). But the Torah’s integrity was, for rabbinic Judaism, a theological principle, and as such, deviation from the text could not be accepted.

So it is that when you write a Torah, you have to proofread it extremely carefully.

You have to go through the scroll and check that each and every one of the 304,805 letters is there and has its proper form. Ambiguity in form can be a bit of a disaster, since it can turn one word into a completely different word rather easily. More about that later.

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(Meant to post this last week, sorry.)

Leviticus 19:23–And when ye shall come into the land, and shall have planted all manner of trees for food, then ye shall count the fruit thereof as forbidden; three years shall it be as forbidden unto you; it shall not be eaten.

Except in our sefer it’s more like this:

Kind of as if the text read …plAnted…, or:

I just like that.

That kind of ayin doesn’t always indicate growing, I don’t think; later in the same paragraph (19.28) we have Do not put soul-cuts in your flesh, and do not make tattoo-writing in yourselves…:

and I don’t think that’s talking about growing. Unless it’s hinting at a meaning which involves growing, i.e. scarification rather than tattooing, but that is most unscientific, so don’t quote that.

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Something you do not need to see when you open tefillin: BUGS.

The vacated exoskeletons of bugs, I grant you (note the hole in the centre one where the bug burst its way out), but still, ick. At least a dozen of them.

Perhaps surprisingly, the klafim were ok, once I’d brushed the crumbled bugs out of the folds (ick).

I’m swapping out the batim, though. Ick.

Fortunately this was a donated set so I have no idea whose head was wearing all those bugs. Not something I would want to know.

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We reached a halfway point this week; 122.5 columns of 245.

As it happens, 245 is also the number of words in the Shema (full text here). The Shema is the cornerstone of the liturgy; the Torah is the cornerstone of the religion. The Shema says, bring God into all your doings; the Torah is the guide as to how. The Shema declares faith in God; the Torah symbolises God’s presence. 245 words; 245 columns.

We could leave it there, and that would be very nice. However, the Shema in liturgy has an interesting peculiarity, thus: when praying as individuals, we precede it with the three words , God truthful King. When as a community, three words are added after its silent recitation – the last two words ’ the-Lord your-God are repeated aloud, and the word , emet, true added.

Why’s this?

Well, 245+3=248, and 248 in the rabbinic narrative corresponds to the number of pertinent parts of the human body. Proverbs 3 says of the Law It shall be health to thy navel, and marrow to thy bones; how better to map the fundamentals of the Law onto the fundamentals of the body than by reference to the Shema? One word for each body part, says Rav Nehori,** and everything will be good above and below.

248 is also the number of positive commandments in the Torah, as it happens. 248 imperatives, 248 vital body parts, and 248 words in the vital liturgical element.

245 columns in the Torah seemed jolly nice a few paragraphs ago, but now it seems we’ve got three bits missing.

Well, the Torah lives on a pair of rollers. Some call them spindles, some call them atzei hayim, trees of life – and some call them amudim, columns.

Recall that the three words added to the 245 in the Shema are , God truthful King or ’ the-Lord your-God [is] true. Both times, it’s two words and emet, truth. With our Torah, we’ve got 245 columns of words, 2 wooden columns, and…and something.

What is it, this final something?

Our clue comes from another “column,” the amud, the desk from which the Torah is read. Torah reading is, after all, the link between the scroll and the life of the community, both now and in all the generations before. The Torah does not mean much if it is not part of people. The Shema is only 247 mumbled words without the emet. The 248 body parts aren’t much without the spark of life.

* Not all Torahs have 245 columns. Column height and width can vary, and therefore so can the total number of columns. People are often surprised to learn this.

** Midrash Ne-elam (Zohar Chadash to Ruth), via the Mishnah Berurah on this aspect of Kriat Shema (61:6), see also Virtual Beit Midrash.

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Heres a section of parashat Shemini, from Leviticus 10:16: And Moses he inquired diligently concerning the goat of the sin offering, and, behold, it was burnt. See how the scribe has stretched out the first words of the verse so dramatically? Whats going on there?

An early masoretic note, preserved in the Talmud (Kiddushin 30a) says that the words , he inquired diligently, are the middle words of the Torah.

By the time of the 1525 Mikraot Gedolot, we see the masoretic note in the form Half of the Torah in words. Darosh from here, and Darash from here. You might well see this version in your printed chumash. The Masoretes are concerned with arithmetical questions: whats the middle letter, the middle verse, the middle word? This note makes it plain that finishes one half of the Torah, and starts the second half.

In Masechet Sofrim, we see this note listed in chapter 9. Chapter 9 concerns itself with layout ideasbig and small letters, tagin, line breaks. Its not a chapter about arithmetical concerns at all, so what is our arithmetical masoretic note doing here? It seems that the editor of Sofrim interpreted the masoretic note not arithmetically but spatially; Half of the Torah in words; Darosh from here [the end of the line], and Darash from here [the beginning of the new line].

Sofrims words are , – Darosh darash are the half[way point] of the words in the Torah; Darosh at the end of a line, and Darash at the beginning of a line. The verse must contain a line break! A layout rule has been created by interpretation.
This rule is not authoritative. Many Torah scrolls do not have a line break between and . But many do, and some scribes will stretch their letters, as above, to accomplish it.

But this is not the end of the story. After being interpreted arithmetically and spatially, our idea undergoes another transformation and is interpreted homiletically, by the 18th-century polymath R Hayyim Joseph David Azulai. He says:

Darosh at the end of a line, and Darash at the beginning of a line

This means when you have expounded (darosh) the Torah to the point that you think you have exhausted all its meaning, and you think that you are at the very end of the line not the line of layout, but the line of enquiry and scholarship you should realize that you are really only expounding the beginning of the line.

Our sefer has something extra–both instances of look like this:

With profuse thanks to Gabriel Wasserman.

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Following on a bit from last week’s post, here are a few of the other things this sefer contains. Descriptions are mine, not hallowed by tradition.

Nuns pointing their feet backwards

Samekhs with tails and crowns

Letters with all kinds of tagin, top and bottom

Winged reishes

Vavs growing leaves and tendrils

Exuberant ayins and tzaddis

Mini peh-inside-a-pehs

Pehs with beards

Nuns trailing scarves

Lameds flying banners

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The main thing about Torah ink is that it has to be black and it has to stay black. If it changes colour within fifty years, it wasn’t kosher to begin with.

Generally, Torah ink (, in Hebrew, like dye) is what’s called an iron gall ink. Iron gall inks have been used in a great many places during a great many periods in history. They last a long, long time (think Dead Sea Scrolls kind of longevity). They have an unusual property among pigments in that they form chemical bonds with the parchment, which makes them symbolically very appropriate for use on Torahs. They are lightfast, the ingredients are cheap, and they are very indelible.

I don’t make my own; making good ink is hard, and I don’t have anyone willing to share their recipe. Anyway, it’s supposedly rather a pain, so I buy it in bottles, as shown. I don’t know if it’s also available in cake form – cake is much easier to transport, of course, and lasts longer, and is entirely traditional. I suspect perhaps not, because I have a feeling that buying ink like this is kind of For Dummies, and real hardcorers, the kind who would want cake ink, probably do make their own.

As you might expect, there are hundreds of different recipes for this kind of ink. However, they have some things in common, viz.: gallnuts, iron (II) in solution, something runny, and something sticky. The following descriptions are indebted to an excellent article by Cyntia Karnes.

Gall nuts

See the Wikipedia entry, but basically gallnuts (also called oak-apples) are a sort of arboreal tumour. A gall wasp comes along and lays its egg on the tree, and the tree goes “whoa” and swells up around the egg, into this little hard ball. The larva sits inside the swelling, munching away, and when it grows up it eats its way out and leaves the ball on the tree.

The balls have to be turned into a gloopy solution. This basically involves grinding, dissolving, and fermenting, and there are about a zillion ways of accomplishing this. Depending how it’s done, what you end up with is a liquid containing tannic acid, gallotannic acid, or gallic acid.

Iron (II) sulphate</p>

This is where the iron comes from. It tends to be known as copperas, or coppervasser if you are the Mishnah Berurah, because iron sulphate and copper sulphate tended to come out of the ground together, but the copper isn’t important and the iron is.

This is why some recipes call for boiling up nails with the gallnuts. In an acidic solution, you get the right sorts of reactions. It’s apparently quite dangerous if you do it properly.

Runny and sticky

Fairly obviously, ink needs to be runny, but it also needs to stick to the page. Gum arabic, the sap of certain sorts of acacia tree, dried, ground, and dissolved in water, is commonly used as a binder in all sorts of things – ink, paint, food – and has been for centuries. It stops the ink being too runny, and helps stick it to the parchment when it dries.

Runny can be distilled water, but it can also be wine (including idolatrous wine, isn’t that interesting?) or vinegar, or presumably most other sorts of liquids. Vinegar helps to make the ink shiny, I am told (the gum arabic goes on shiny, and the vinegar helps keep it shiny, something like that), and indeed one of the shiniest brands of ink out there smells very vinegary indeed.

Chemistry

This is the fun bit. You mix all these things up, apply them to parchment, and let the oxygen in the air do its thing. It’s incredibly complicated and I don’t understand it all, but basically what goes on is: the gallotannic acid bit reacts with the parchment; part of it grabs onto the parchment, and part of it floats about. The floaty bit reacts with that iron solution, and iron (II) oxide gets precipitated. Iron (II) oxide is black.

Iron-gall ink made like this is pale grey in colour, and it gets darker when these reactions have had time to happen – about a day, I understand, but I’ve not tried it.

Incidentally, iron (II) oxide isn’t terribly stable, and over time it tends to turn into iron (III) oxide. This is the same stuff rust is made of, and it’s red. This is why letters in old Torahs go brown or orangey-red, as the black iron (II) compound oxidises to the red iron (III) one. They’re just starting to go brown in the picture here.

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