The Counters of the Torah and the Three Scrolls of the Temple Court

Somewhere in Babylonia, among the sages of the Talmud, a teacher named Rav Yosef asked a question that sounds at first like a riddle. His teachers had handed down a set of numbers about the Torah. The vav of the word gaḥon, “belly,” in the list of creeping things in Leviticus 11:42, was the middle letter of the whole scroll; the words darosh darash, “diligently inquired,” in Leviticus 10:16 were the middle of its words; and the verse that begins “Then he shall be shaven,” Leviticus 13:33, was the middle of its verses.¹ Rav Yosef wanted to know on which side of the line the vav itself fell. Did it close the first half of the Torah or open the second? His colleagues gave the obvious answer: “Let us bring a Torah scroll and count the letters.” Had not Rabba bar bar Ḥana once reported that the men of old “did not move from there until they brought a Torah scroll and counted”?²

Rav Yosef refused. The old counters, he said, had known which words were written with the silent letters vav and yod and which without them, the “deficient and plene forms of words,” and so they could count precisely. “We are not experts in this regard,” he said, and a count made by his own generation would settle nothing.³ When Abaye suggested that they could at least count the verses, Rav Yosef refused again, because a visitor from the Land of Israel, Rav Aḥa bar Adda, had reported that in the West one verse of Exodus was divided into three.⁴

The Talmud tells this story to explain a name. The first sages, it says, “were called: Those who count [soferim], because they would count all the letters in the Torah.”⁵ Soferim is the ordinary Hebrew for scribes, and the pun turns writers into counters. Behind the joke is a real history: a guild of copyists, teachers and correctors who were remembered, more than a thousand years before the Masoretes of Tiberias, as the first guardians of the letter of the text. What follows traces what the sources say they did, what they were paid for, and what one remarkable story about three Torah scrolls in the Temple court suggests about how a single text came to be chosen.

Ezra at the Water Gate

The Bible gives the type of the sofer in one man. Ezra, says the book that bears his name, “came up from Babylon, a scribe expert in the Teaching of Moses that the ETERNAL God of Israel had given.”⁶ The book of Nehemiah sets him in a public square. On the first day of the seventh month, the people gathered “in the square before the Water Gate” and asked Ezra the scribe to bring the scroll of the Teaching of Moses.⁷ He read from it “from the first light until midday,” standing “upon a wooden tower made for the purpose,” with thirteen named men beside him; when he opened the scroll all the people stood, and when he blessed God they answered “Amen, Amen,” with hands upraised.⁸ Then the Levites moved among the crowd: “They read from the scroll of the Teaching of God, translating it and giving the sense; so they understood the reading.”⁹

The rabbis read that verse as a charter for everything the scribes would later be credited with. In the Babylonian Talmud the words are parsed phrase by phrase. “They read in the book” is the Bible itself; “distinctly” is the Aramaic translation; “and they gave the sense” is “the division into verses”; and “caused them to understand the reading” is the punctuation of the text with cantillation, or, as some say, “the traditions that determine the proper vocalization of the Bible.”¹⁰ In one exegetical sweep the scene at the Water Gate became the origin of the Targum, of the verse division and of the accents.

The Jewish Encyclopedia, summarising this tradition at the beginning of the twentieth century, explained that the main object of the scribes was “to teach the Torah to the Jewish masses, and to the Jewish youth in particular,” and that their method was the one described in Nehemiah: they read the Hebrew, translated it into the vernacular, and explained it by dividing it into verses.¹¹ The same article dates the period of the soferim proper from Ezra to Simeon the Just, and it records a rabbinic tradition that in Ezra’s time the Torah was rewritten in the square script, called ketav ashuri, leaving the older Hebrew characters to the Samaritans.¹²

An earlier prophet had already used the scribes as a byword. “How can you say, ‘We are wise, And we possess GOD’s Instruction’? Assuredly, for naught has the pen labored, For naught the scribes!”¹³ Jeremiah’s complaint shows that before the exile there were already men whose profession was the written Teaching, and that a prophet could accuse them of serving it badly. After the return the profession acquired a hero, and a long memory.

Why They Were Called Counters

The pun in Kiddushin was not the only rabbinic etymology of the name, but it became the most famous. The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that the rabbis derived soferim from the verb “to count,” and lists the passages in the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds where the derivation appears.¹⁴ It also records the modern argument, associated with Zacharias Frankel and Nachman Krochmal, that the scribes of the Persian period were the same body as the Men of the Great Assembly, and points to a phrase in First Maccabees, a “company of scribes,” as possible support.¹⁵

The Great Assembly appears at the head of the Mishnah’s chain of tradition. “Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be patient in [the administration of] justice, raise many disciples and make a fence round the Torah.”¹⁶ The Jewish Encyclopedia’s article on the Great Synagogue read the saying as a programme for teachers rather than for the people: caution in judgment, care for schools and pupils, and protective rules around the Law, a programme that the Pharisees inherited.¹⁷

The scribes left a legal category behind them. Rulings that the rabbis regarded as theirs rather than as explicit Scripture were called divre soferim, “the words of the scribes.” The Mishnah, discussing a rebellious elder, makes a startling claim about them: “There is greater stringency with regard to traditional rabbinic interpretations of the Torah than with regard to matters of Torah.” An elder who denied the duty of phylacteries outright was exempt from punishment as a rebel; one who taught that the head phylactery should have five compartments instead of the four established by tradition was liable.¹⁸ The scribes’ tradition, being unwritten, needed more defence than the text it served.

The tradition also gave the scribes credit for changes to the text itself. The Jewish Encyclopedia lists among their works the tiqqune soferim, eighteen places where the scribes were said to have altered a wording thought disrespectful to God, such as Genesis 18:22, where “the Lord stood yet before Abraham” was said to have become “Abraham stood yet before the Lord,” and it notes the dots placed over certain words whose meaning seemed doubtful, ascribed to Ezra himself.¹⁹ Those emendations have their own essay on this site, Tiqqune Soferim, the eighteen corrections of the scribes. Here the interest is in the counting.

A Verse Divided in the West

Rav Yosef’s refusal is the most honest moment in the passage. He did not doubt the numbers of the old soferim. He doubted himself. The question of the vav could not be settled by a count because the scrolls of his own day could differ in exactly the letters that made the count possible: the vav and yod that Hebrew spelling could add or omit without changing a word’s sound or meaning. The same was true of verses. The baraita that followed gave the total as 5,888 verses in the Torah, with the book of Psalms eight more and Chronicles eight fewer, but Rav Aḥa bar Adda’s report from the West showed that Babylonians and Palestinians did not even divide the verses in the same places.²⁰ The verse he cited was Exodus 19:9, “And the Lord said to Moses: Lo, I come to you in a thick cloud,” which in the Land of Israel was split into three.²¹

They were experts in the deficient and plene forms of words and therefore could count the letters precisely. We are not experts in this regard.

Rav Yosef, b. Kiddushin 30a, trans. William Davidson Edition²²

The modern reader can do what Rav Yosef declined to do. In 2007 three authors, Sheldon Epstein, Bernard Dickman and Yonah Wilamowsky, published a quantitative study of the Talmud’s counts in the journal Ḥakirah.²³ Their figures are sobering. A standard Ashkenazic Torah scroll has about 304,805 letters, of which 30,509 are vav and 31,522 are yod; a Sephardic scroll has 304,801.²⁴ The true middle letter is therefore letter 152,403, which falls at the start of Leviticus 8:29. The vav of gaḥon, by contrast, is approximately letter 157,225, so that the Talmud’s middle letter “differs from our middle letter by over 4,800 letters.”²⁵

The authors tested Rav Yosef’s own explanation. If the whole gap came from uncertainty over vav and yod, the scrolls would need to differ in at least 7.7 per cent of those letters, a minimum, since random changes on both sides of the middle would cancel each other; “it is difficult to assume that such an error rate is a realistic possibility.”²⁶ The verses tell the same story. A count of the verses in printed Bibles gives 5,845, which makes Leviticus 8:8 the true middle verse; the soferim’s middle verse, Leviticus 13:33, is the 3,082nd, an undercount in the first half of about 160 verses.²⁷ They note too that the vav of gaḥon is written large in Torah scrolls, and that Tractate Soferim gives the reason in so many words: it must be tall because it is half of the letters of the Torah.²⁸

What, then, were the soferim counting? The authors observe that the numbers cannot simply be the letters of the present text, and that the old scribes “seem to have been practical people and/or codifiers, not theorists.”²⁹ Whatever the answer, the passage preserves something rarer than a precise count: the memory of a moment when sages in Babylonia knew that their scrolls were no longer identical in the smallest letters, and said so.

Three Scrolls in the Temple Court

The most famous rabbinic story about scribal collation is set further back, in the Temple itself. It survives in several versions. The Sifrei on Deuteronomy, the shortest, attaches it to the phrase “The Primordial God is a refuge” in Deuteronomy 33:27: three scrolls of the Torah were kept in the Courtyard; in one scroll the word was written one way and in two another, and “Sages suppressed the one version and preserved the other two.”³⁰ The Jerusalem Talmud tells it as a discovery: “Three scrolls were found in the Temple courtyard, the Meone scroll, the Zaatute scroll, the hee scroll,” and after each variant, “They confirmed the two and annulled the one.”³¹

The fullest version is the one in Tractate Soferim, in the name of Rabbi Simeon ben Laqish. One scroll read maʿon in Deuteronomy 33:27 where the other two had meʿonah, “a dwelling place,” “so they adopted the reading of the two scrolls and discarded that of the one scroll.” One scroll said that Moses sent the zaʿaṭuṭe, an unusual word, of the children of Israel to offer sacrifices at Sinai in Exodus 24:5, where the other two had the familiar naʿare, “young men.” The third difference concerned the pronoun spelled hiʾ, with a yod, for “she”; in the Sifrei and the Jerusalem Talmud one scroll had it nine times and the other two eleven, while Tractate Soferim frames the variant as eleven cases of huʾ against eleven of hiʾ.³² Each time the majority won.

Read quickly, the story describes a committee of scribes collating three manuscripts and choosing the reading of two against one, a procedure that would not look out of place in a modern critical edition. In 1962 Shemaryahu Talmon, in an article in the Hebrew University Bible Project’s journal Textus, read it more carefully. He began from the many signs in rabbinic literature that “Bible MSS current in the period of the Second Temple differed from each other textually in varying degrees,” and from Saul Lieberman’s division of the manuscripts of the Temple period into three kinds: authoritative books kept in the Temple, popular books in general use, and inferior texts surviving in small communities.³³

Talmon showed that the three statements, about meʿonah, about the young men and about the spelling of hiʾ, had no essential relation to one another. He concluded that they had been joined because of “a custom of the scribes to assemble guiding rules for the accurate transcription of Torah scrolls in accordance with a text accepted by them as standard,” and he called the result “a very early case of massoretic-type or proto-massoretic notation, the kind which constitutes the core of classical massoretic works.”³⁴ The story of the three scrolls, in other words, is not only about the Masorah’s prehistory. It is already written in the Masorah’s form, a numbered list of spellings.

The third statement mattered most to him. The Masoretic Text of the Torah spells the pronoun hiʾ with a yod in exactly eleven places, which the Masorah counts and lists, and Talmon argued that the discarded scroll with nine reflected an earlier stage in “the uncontrolled, unsystematic, and unequal penetration of a new phonetic spelling” into manuscripts of the Pentateuch.³⁵ The two medieval recensions of Avot de-Rabbi Natan that list the eleven cases agree on only nine of them, which suggested to him that the traditionists had first authorised a nucleus of nine.³⁶

A Peg on Which to Hang a Decision

Talmon’s conclusion was cooler than the story. The rabbis, he wrote, were not creating a textus receptus by collation. They were confirming a reading they had already accepted, and banishing alternatives “current among the adherents of dissident groups,” which is why the losing codex was not corrected but discarded.³⁷ The aim was “to create a stable textual tradition in those parts of the O.T. which were used as proof-texts in the religio-social controversies of the time.”³⁸ As for the vote of two against one, “the authorization of a reading on the strength of a fortuitous majority of two codices against one out of three found in the Temple Court was a mere formality, a sort of expedient peg on which to hang a legal decision.”³⁹

Half a century later Gary Rendsburg returned to the story in the same journal. Talmon’s article, he wrote, “remains unsurpassed in its treatment and remains valid unto the present day.”⁴⁰ He noted that no one familiar with the scrolls from Qumran and with the Samaritan Torah would have trouble imagining a scroll that read maʿon in Deuteronomy 33:27, or one that spelled hiʾ with a yod nine times instead of eleven. The real puzzle was the word zaʿaṭuṭe in Exodus 24:5.⁴¹ Rendsburg also recorded a dissent: Solomon Zeitlin, in the Jewish Quarterly Review in 1966, denied the historicity of the rabbinic tradition altogether.⁴² For Rendsburg, the answer lay in the peculiarity of Exodus 24 itself, a chapter in which the young men of Israel, “who are they?”, offer sacrifices, blood is sprinkled on the people, and the elders see the God of Israel; a chapter “riddled with linguistic peculiarities” might well have carried a rare word in one witness.⁴³

Whatever the historical core, the story fits what the scrolls themselves have shown. Emanuel Tov summarises the evidence: before the first century of the Common Era “we witness a textual plurality among Jews, with multiple text forms conceived of as ‘the Bible’”; around the turn of the era the consonantal proto-Masoretic text was accepted by the proto-rabbinic movement, and after the first century it became the only text used by organised Judaism.⁴⁴ The soferim of the Temple court, real or remembered, stand at the hinge of that change.

Proofreaders Paid by the Temple

If there was a standard text in the Temple, someone had to look after it, and the Talmud preserves a note about their wages. In a list of Temple employees paid from the public funds of the chamber, Rabba bar bar Ḥana reports in the name of Rabbi Yoḥanan: “The proofreaders of the Torah scrolls in Jerusalem would take their wages from the collection of the chamber.”⁴⁵ They are listed beside the scholars who taught the priests the laws of slaughter and of the handful of flour, and the women who wove the curtains of the sanctuary: people whose work the Temple needed every day.⁴⁶

The same concern for corrected copies runs through the sayings Talmon gathered. Rabbi Akiva charged Rabbi Simeon bar Yoḥai to teach his son “from a corrected scroll,” and a later sage explained why it should be a new one: “for once an error has entered, it remains.”⁴⁷ An uncorrected scroll, said Rabbi Ami, could be kept for thirty days; after that it was forbidden, “because it is said: ‘Let not unrighteousness dwell in thy tents.’”⁴⁸ The Jewish Encyclopedia’s article on the Torah scroll repeats the rule that a scroll with errors must be corrected within thirty days or put away.⁴⁹ The scribe’s duty did not end when the scroll left his hands.

Rules for the Hand

Much of what the soferim were remembered for survives as practical law, collected in the post-talmudic Tractate Soferim. Its first chapter begins with materials and script. A sacred scroll may not be written on certain skins, nor with coal, shoe-black, gum or vitriol in the ink; it may not be written in the old Hebrew characters, nor in Aramaic, Median or Greek, “since they must be written in the Assyrian [script].”⁵⁰ It defines the spaces that separate sections. An open section is one that does not begin at the beginning of a line; a closed section is separated by a space in the middle of the line; and in each case the space must be wide enough for “a name of three letters.” A scroll in which an open section was written as closed, or the reverse, “must be stored away.”⁵¹ Those divisions have their own history in open and closed sections in the Hebrew Bible.

The rules on decoration are as firm. “[The sacred scrolls] may not be written in gold. It is related that in an Alexandrian scroll of the Torah all the divine names were written in gold, and when the matter came before the Sages they decided that it should be stored away.”⁵² The Babylonian Talmud gives the same list of disqualifications: a scroll written in the layout reserved for poetry, or poetry written as prose, or a text written without ink, or with “the mentions of God’s names in gold,” must all be suppressed.⁵³ The Jewish Encyclopedia takes the story as evidence that Alexandrian scribes were noted for their skill in illumination, and that the rabbis of Jerusalem would not let that skill touch a scroll for public reading.⁵⁴

Tractate Soferim also preserves lists of the text’s peculiarities, the kind of lists the Masoretes would multiply. Its sixth chapter counts ten places in the Torah marked with dots: the dot over the second vav in Genesis 19:33, the dots over the whole of the word “and kissed him” in Genesis 33:4, the dotted ʾet in Genesis 37:12, the dotted word Aaron in Numbers 3:39, and others, ending with the dotted ʿayin in Deuteronomy 29:28, “the secret things belong unto the Lord our God.”⁵⁵ The three scrolls of the Temple court appear immediately after that list.⁵⁶ Their position supports Talmon’s view that the story was handed down among the scribes as one more rule for copying.⁵⁷ Other peculiarities, such as large and small letters, are treated in the unusual letters of the Hebrew Bible.

A Fly on the Crown of a Letter

Behind the rules stood a professional ethic, and the Talmud preserves it in a handful of vivid exchanges. Rabbi Meir recalled coming to study with Rabbi Ishmael, who asked him his trade. “I am a scribe [lavlar] who writes Torah scrolls,” he answered. Rabbi Ishmael told him: “My son, be careful in your vocation, as your vocation is heavenly service, and care must be taken lest you omit a single letter or add a single letter out of place, and you will end up destroying the whole world in its entirety.”⁵⁸ The Talmud’s explanation is the difference between emet, truth, and met, death: one letter. Rabbi Meir answered that he was an expert in deficient and plene spellings; what worried him was that “a fly might come and land on the crown” of a letter and smudge it, and so he put iron sulphate into his ink.⁵⁹

The scribe was also forbidden to trust his memory. Rav Ḥisda once found Rav Ḥananel writing Torah scrolls without copying from a written text, because he knew it all by heart. “It is fitting for the entire Torah to be written by your mouth,” Rav Ḥisda told him, “but this is what the Sages said: It is prohibited to write even a single letter of the Bible when not copying from a written text.”⁶⁰ Even a perfect memory, on this view, was not a substitute for an exemplar, and the chain of copies was the only guarantee of the text. The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that the model copy from which a scribe worked came to be called a tiqqun soferim, “which must not be confounded with tiḳḳune soferim,” the emendations.⁶¹

When a letter was damaged, the test was not learned at all. Rami bar Tamrei found that the leg of the vav in the word “And the Lord slew” in his phylacteries had been severed by a hole. Rabbi Zeira told him: “Go bring a child who is neither wise nor stupid, but of average intelligence”; if the child read the word correctly, it was fit.⁶² The same page tells how Moses, ascending on high, found God “tying crowns on the letters of the Torah,” the ornaments that a later sage, Akiva, would interpret.⁶³ The scribe’s craft was framed between those two scenes, a heavenly ornament and an ordinary child reading.

Virtuosity was not admired for its own sake. The Mishnah and a baraita remember a man called Ben Kamtzar who “would take four quills between his fingers, and if there was a word consisting of four letters that he wanted to write, he could write it simultaneously.” He refused to teach the technique, and unlike other Temple craftsmen with family secrets, he could give no reason except his own honour; to him the sages applied the verse “But the name of the wicked shall rot.”⁶⁴ A scribe’s skill, on this view, belonged to the community.

Nor was the craft expected to make anyone rich. Explaining why the wages of scribes of sacred books bring no blessing, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said that the Men of the Great Assembly had observed twenty-four fasts so that scribes who write Torah scrolls, phylacteries and mezuzot “will not become wealthy from their craft, as were they to become wealthy, they would no longer write these sacred items.”⁶⁵ The Jewish Encyclopedia, writing in New York around 1905, added drily that “even to this day the vocation of the sofer is the worst paid of all Jewish professions.”⁶⁶ The detailed laws of that vocation, as later codified, are the subject of Halakhot Sofer STaM and of Meiri’s Kiryat Sefer.

Seventy-Two Elders in Seventy-Two Rooms

The scribes’ suspicion of translation appears in the same first chapter of Tractate Soferim, in two stories that sit uneasily side by side. The first is bleak: “It once happened that five elders wrote the Torah for King Ptolemy in Greek, and that day was as ominous for Israel as the day on which the golden calf was made, since the Torah could not be accurately translated.”⁶⁷ The second is the familiar legend of the Septuagint. Ptolemy “assembled seventy-two elders and placed them in seventy-two [separate] rooms without telling them the reason,” and asked each to write him the Torah of Moses; “the Omnipresent inspired them and the mind of all of them was identical,” so that each wrote the same translation, with the same thirteen alterations.⁶⁸

The list of alterations is a list of places where a word-for-word Greek rendering might have suggested something theologically awkward to a Greek reader: “God created in the beginning,” so that “In the beginning” would not be taken as a power beside God; “I shall make a man in image and likeness,” without the plural “us”; God “finished on the sixth [day] and rested on the seventh.”⁶⁹ The story is not history, but it records a scribal judgment. A translation was only acceptable to the soferim when its departures from the Hebrew could be counted, named and justified, in the same way as the dots, the large letters and the readings of the three scrolls.

What the Counters Left

Rabbi Yitzḥak, in the Babylonian Talmud, listed the scribal elements of the text that he held to be as old as Sinai: “The vocalization of the scribes, and the ornamentation of the scribes, and the verses with words that are read but not written, and those that are written but not read are all halakha transmitted to Moses from Sinai.”⁷⁰ The examples he gives are the pausal forms of words like ʾereṣ and shamayim at the end of a verse; a handful of expressions with ʾaḥar, “after,” that the scribes understood in their own way; and words such as “Euphrates” in 2 Samuel 8:3 that are read aloud but not written in the scroll.⁷¹ Every one of those categories reappears, centuries later, in the margins of the Tiberian codices.

That is the deepest sense in which the soferim were counters. The Masoretes of the ninth and tenth centuries inherited from them not only a consonantal text but a habit of mind: the conviction that the text could be described by number, that its oddities could be listed, and that the lists themselves protected the text from drift. Tractate Soferim’s ten dots, its three scrolls and its tall vav of gaḥon are early specimens of the same genre as the Masorah parva and magna, and Talmon was right to call the Temple-court story proto-Masoretic.⁷²

The counters were also honest about their limits. The Talmud preserves both the numbers of the first sages and Rav Yosef’s admission that his generation could no longer verify them. It preserves the story of a majority vote of scrolls and, in the stringency of divre soferim, the recognition that a tradition needs guarding precisely because it cannot be checked against a written page.⁷³ The modern count by Epstein, Dickman and Wilamowsky puts numbers on Rav Yosef’s doubt; Talmon and Rendsburg put a history behind the three scrolls.⁷⁴ Neither undoes the achievement. The text that the soferim chose and counted is, letter for letter, very close to the text still copied by hand today, and the habit of counting it never stopped.

The hub page on the soferim gathers the wider subject: the scribes as teachers, the divre soferim, and their place between Ezra and the Masoretes. Related essays on this site follow the scribal tradition into the songs of the Torah and how scribes set them out, into the Dead Sea Scrolls, which show what the text looked like before the counters’ choice prevailed, and into the medieval nakdanim, who inherited both the counting and the care.

Notes

1. Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 30a, trans. William Davidson Edition (Koren Noé Talmud), at sefaria.org. *
2. b. Kiddushin 30a. *
3. b. Kiddushin 30a. *
4. b. Kiddushin 30a. *
5. b. Kiddushin 30a. *
6. Ezra 7:6, trans. The JPS Tanakh: Gender-Sensitive Edition (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2023), at sefaria.org. *
7. Nehemiah 8:1–8, trans. The JPS Tanakh: Gender-Sensitive Edition, at sefaria.org. *
8. Neh 8:1–8 (JPS). *
9. Neh 8:1–8 (JPS). *
10. Babylonian Talmud, Nedarim 37b, trans. William Davidson Edition, at sefaria.org. *
11. Isidore Singer, M. Seligsohn, Wilhelm Bacher and Judah David Eisenstein, “Scribes,” Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901–1906), at jewishencyclopedia.com. *
12. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Scribes”. *
13. Jeremiah 8:8, trans. The JPS Tanakh: Gender-Sensitive Edition, at sefaria.org. *
14. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Scribes”. *
15. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Scribes”. *
16. Mishnah Avot 1:1, trans. Joshua Kulp, Mishnah Yomit, at sefaria.org. *
17. “Synagogue, the Great,” Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901–1906), at jewishencyclopedia.com. *
18. Mishnah Sanhedrin 11:3, trans. William Davidson Edition, at sefaria.org. *
19. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Scribes”. *
20. b. Kiddushin 30a. *
21. b. Kiddushin 30a; Sheldon Epstein, Bernard Dickman and Yonah Wilamowsky, “Symmetrically Designed Sifrei Torah: A Quantitative Analysis,” Ḥakirah, the Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought 5 (2007): 171–225, at hakirah.org, 172–173. *
22. b. Kiddushin 30a. *
23. Epstein, Dickman and Wilamowsky, “Symmetrically Designed Sifrei Torah”, 171. *
24. Epstein, Dickman and Wilamowsky, “Symmetrically Designed Sifrei Torah”, 177. *
25. Epstein, Dickman and Wilamowsky, “Symmetrically Designed Sifrei Torah”, 178. *
26. Epstein, Dickman and Wilamowsky, “Symmetrically Designed Sifrei Torah”, 178. *
27. Epstein, Dickman and Wilamowsky, “Symmetrically Designed Sifrei Torah”, 182. *
28. Epstein, Dickman and Wilamowsky, “Symmetrically Designed Sifrei Torah”, 178–179. *
29. Epstein, Dickman and Wilamowsky, “Symmetrically Designed Sifrei Torah”, 179. *
30. Sifrei Devarim, Pisqa 356:1, trans. Martin S. Jaffee, at sefaria.org. *
31. Jerusalem Talmud, Taʿanit 4:2, trans. Heinrich W. Guggenheimer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999–2015), at sefaria.org. *
32. Tractate Soferim, chapter 6, trans. A. Cohen, The Minor Tractates of the Talmud (London: Soncino, 1965), at sefaria.org; Sifrei Devarim 356:1; y. Taʿanit 4:2. *
33. Shemaryahu Talmon, “The Three Scrolls of the Law That Were Found in the Temple Court,” Textus 2 (1962): 14–27, at bibleproject.huji.ac.il, 14. *
34. Talmon, “Three Scrolls of the Law”, 19. *
35. Talmon, “Three Scrolls of the Law”, 21. *
36. Talmon, “Three Scrolls of the Law”, 21. *
37. Talmon, “Three Scrolls of the Law”, 27. *
38. Talmon, “Three Scrolls of the Law”, 27. *
39. Talmon, “Three Scrolls of the Law”, 27. *
40. Gary A. Rendsburg, “How Could a Torah Scroll Have Included the Word {he:זעטוטי}?,” Textus 26 (2016): 121–141, cited by the page of the author’s PDF at openscholar.huji.ac.il, 1. *
41. Rendsburg, “How Could a Torah Scroll Have Included the Word {he:זעטוטי}?”, 2. *
42. Rendsburg, “How Could a Torah Scroll Have Included the Word {he:זעטוטי}?”, 2. *
43. Rendsburg, “How Could a Torah Scroll Have Included the Word {he:זעטוטי}?”, 4–5. *
44. Emanuel Tov, “The Bible and the Masoretic Text,” TheTorah.com, at thetorah.com. *
45. Babylonian Talmud, Ketubot 106a, trans. William Davidson Edition, at sefaria.org. *
46. b. Ketubot 106a. *
47. Talmon, “Three Scrolls of the Law”, 15. *
48. Talmon, “Three Scrolls of the Law”, 15. *
49. “Scroll of the Law,” Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901–1906), at jewishencyclopedia.com. *
50. Tractate Soferim, chapter 1, trans. A. Cohen, The Minor Tractates of the Talmud (London: Soncino, 1965), at sefaria.org. *
51. Soferim 1. *
52. Soferim 1. *
53. Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 103b, trans. William Davidson Edition, at sefaria.org. *
54. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Scribes”. *
55. Soferim 6. *
56. Soferim 6. *
57. Talmon, “Three Scrolls of the Law”, 19. *
58. Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 13a, trans. William Davidson Edition, at sefaria.org. *
59. b. Eruvin 13a. *
60. Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 18b, trans. William Davidson Edition, at sefaria.org. *
61. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Scribes”. *
62. Babylonian Talmud, Menachot 29b, trans. William Davidson Edition, at sefaria.org. *
63. b. Menachot 29b. *
64. Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 38b, trans. William Davidson Edition, at sefaria.org. *
65. Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 50b, trans. William Davidson Edition, at sefaria.org. *
66. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Scribes”. *
67. Soferim 1. *
68. Soferim 1. *
69. Soferim 1. *
70. b. Nedarim 37b. *
71. b. Nedarim 37b. *
72. Talmon, “Three Scrolls of the Law”, 19. *
73. b. Kiddushin 30a; m. Sanhedrin 11:3. *
74. Epstein, Dickman and Wilamowsky, “Symmetrically Designed Sifrei Torah”, 178; Talmon, “Three Scrolls of the Law”, 27; Rendsburg, “How Could a Torah Scroll Have Included the Word {he:זעטוטי}?”, 1. *