Hebrew Voices #145 – Decorative Doohickeys

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Marc: I once repaired lipstick off a Torah.

Nehemia: Are you serious?

Marc: I’m not! It’s in my Care of My Torah book. It says, “Please do not do this!”

Nehemia: We’re back here with Mordechai Pinchas, Marc Michaels, who is a working scribe. He's a senior scholar at Cambridge University working on his PhD, and he's now going to tell us about this book he published, this book he wrote that was published by Brill, a very respectable academic publisher, and it's about Sefer Tagay or Sefer Tagin.

Marc: Sefer Tagin. Well, Tagay is actually the original…

Nehemia: I have a confession here to make. In the last program we did a few years ago, in one of the episodes that we did, you mentioned Sefer Tagay, and we had a producer who works for me who contacted you and said, “I think this was a mistake. Do you want us to correct it?” And that person had based this on a Google search, and they didn't realize they're talking to one of the world's top experts on this Sefer Tagay! And you're like, “Well, actually the Aramaic form…”

Marc: Yeah. Well, officially it starts off with the introduction. It says, “This is the Sefer Tagay,” and it’s not Tagin, but it's become known as Sefer Tagin, because that’s the plural; tag is singular, tagin is plural.

Nehemia: I think tagay will be plural in some form of Aramaic.

Marc: Yeah, exactly.

Nehemia: In Hebrew it sounds like smichut, but it’s in Aramaic…

Marc: But I have now seen people calling them tagim, with a Mem, because it's the Hebrew, and that’s like, “No, no, no, no, that’s not acceptable.”

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: “That’s going too far, thank you very much.”

Nehemia: Well, tagim could be Hebrew in some dialects as well, like in Mishnaic Hebrew you’ll have the Yud-Nun ending instead of Mem. Alright, so, what is Sefer Tagin, Sefer Tagay, that you wrote a book about?

Marc: Sefer Tagin. So, there’s a book, it’s called Sefer Tagin Fragments from the Cairo Genizah, and it's about this Masoretic manual that has…

Nehemia: In the interest for full disclosure, I was one of the peer reviewers on the book.

Marc: He was one of the peer reviewers. So, there you go!

Nehemia: But I had some feedback, and it was revised, and it’s a wonderful book… now that I gave the feedback!

Marc: Absolutely. He's so modest! And so basically, it's a Masoretic manual which shows certain letters that are to be decorated. Now it's called Sefer Tagin, but actually not all the letters have Tagin. In the Christian Bible, they refer to them as tittles.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: And they’re decorations.

Nehemia: Jots and tittles, okay.

Marc: Jots and tittles, which is from Matthew, and I think Luke repeats it. And nowadays they are sort of like sticks with balls on the end, earlier they were sticks and stuff like that. But not all the letters are in fact decorated with these tagin.

Nehemia: So, these little things are… look I’m from the Midwest in the US, we called them doohickeys.

Marc: Doohickeys! I think you called them doohickeys last time.

Nehemia: Did I? Okay. They’re little doohickeys, that's what we call them; little squiggles and doohickeys that are added to the letters.

Marc: Yeah. So, they are decorative, and they have meaning, and people have invested kabbalistic and spiritual meaning in them over time. All of the manuscripts are corrupt, and…

Nehemia: That’s quite a statement! Let’s start out with what the manuscripts are of, let’s start with that.

Marc: So, they are various manuscripts of this book that have survived over time, and the one I found in the Cairo Genizah is in fact probably the oldest, so that was the one that was the core of the book. Then I found different fragments that connected to it.

Nehemia: So, the book itself, basically… I think it's important to explain - it's not that every Dalet is decorated, it's a specific Dalet, which might be decorated in a specific way.

Marc: Yes. But different scribes, over time, because the book became corrupt, at one point there must have been a pristine copy of the original Sefer Tagin that was written in alphabetical order, and everybody used.

Nehemia: And that book for example, it might have said, “The Peh in this certain word in Exodus 15 always has a little swirly in it.” And then you're saying over time there were differences in what those lists were, where to put the swirly, and in which letter.

Marc: What happened is that over time - and I’ve got an article coming out on this, on the transmission of Sefer Tagin and how it became…

Nehemia: Where is that coming out?

Marc: In The Review of Rabbinic Judaism. At some point, you never know quite when things are going to come out.

Nehemia: Yeah, isn’t that interesting? I have articles that I wrote like three years ago that still haven’t come out.

Marc: So, I have no idea, I won’t say... it's going to come out, I don't know when. But certainly, the first shift was away from the alphabetical format, so it got shifted to Parashah, so by section format, so the whole integrity of Sefer Tagin kind of broke down. And then, the first manuscript that took it to Parashah format, which is in the British Library, he left out ones because he missed entire Parashiot.

Nehemia: What do you mean he took it to Parashah format? Tell us about that; we had this conversation this morning.

Marc: They moved it from alphabetical, so you’d get all the Alefs, all the Bets, all the Gimels, all the Dalets…

Nehemia: Oh, okay!

Marc: And then they said, “No, no, no, that’s much harder for the scribe. I'm going to make it easier; I'm going to list them now by Parashah.” So, they appear in order…

Nehemia: By Torah portion.

Marc: …as they appear in the Torah. So, you’ll get an Alef, a Gimel, a Hay, a Zayin, all the different letters all mixed up. So all of the words suddenly become in Parasha order.

Nehemia: Isn’t that easier for a scribe to work with?

Marc: In theory. But in the transmission, because it wasn’t in an alphabetical list, he left some out. So, there were errors in copying, but also, he literally left out the odd Parashah, where there were maybe one or two instances, and he just forgot them.

Nehemia: Okay, I want to explore that just for a second. Today we were looking at this Torah scroll, talk about how you just stumble into things! I went into this certain part of Cambridge University Library, and I asked to see one thing, and discovered how there was this Torah scroll no one had ever looked at, as far as I know, certainly not since the 1980s. And they ended up bringing it out and you were looking at it with me, and we were looking for a certain passage, and you said, “This is Parashah such and such.” And I said, “This is Numbers such and such,” and you made a profound statement to me.

Marc: Yes. I said, “You think of things in terms of verses, and I think of things in terms of Parashiot.” In sections.

Nehemia: Torah portions. So, there must be some functional reason for that as a scribe.

Marc: It’s more to do with the laining in the synagogue that we mentioned in the past.

Nehemia: Oh, okay. Fair enough.

Marc: You read the weekly portion, so you learn the weekly portion. And there are seven aliyot, so seven people get up to read the portion.

Nehemia: So, when you think of a certain pasuk, a certain verse, you think, “Oh this is Parashat Balak,” and I think, “This is Numbers 32,” or whatever.

Marc: So, you said, “Oh, it’s the Priestly Blessing.” And I said, “Naso, that’s my son Arie’s bar mitzvah portion.”

Nehemia: And I said, “Numbers Chapter 6.”

Marc: And you said, “Numbers Chapter 6.” And I said, “I have no idea! It’s in Naso.”

Nehemia: That’s so interesting!

Marc: “It’s at the end of my sons bar mitzvah portion.”

Nehemia: That's profound! So that explains… it's almost what we call… not almost, that's what they call the Sitz im Leben.

Marc: Yeah.

Nehemia: The context within life of the communal life, or cultural life, of why they would break it up by Parashah instead of by word. That’s so interesting! So, the first version…

Marc: The verses were a Christian invention anyway.

Nehemia: The verse numbering you might say.

Marc: The numbering, yes.

Nehemia: Not the verses themselves, those were...

Marc: Well, the verses were there because of the notations, the ta’amim.

Nehemia: Right. There is a sof pasuk.

Marc: There is a sof pasuk, but the actually numbering, there’s differences. And I find that really difficult, the difference in the numbering systems between…

Nehemia: Where it’s especially confusing is the Ten Commandments, because there's two sets of ta’amim, of accent marks, on almost every word, and so there's different ways of breaking up the verses and numbering. Even different Jewish editions in Hebrew of the Tanakh…

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: …have different numbering systems. Exodus 20, and Deuteronomy chapter 5, that's confusing, I’ll admit that. Alright, yeah, of course the chapters were numbered by… with some exceptions, for example, like Psalms, those have numbers in some of the early Hebrew manuscripts. But yeah, I think it was Bishop Stephen Langton in the 13th century who broke it up into chapters.

Marc: It’s one of my footnotes in the book!

Nehemia: Is it? But do you know the reason why Jews adopted that?

Marc: I've no idea.

Nehemia: So, in the 15th century, I believe it was, they printed the first… it might have been the early 16th century, don’t hold me to it, they printed the first Concordance. I believe it was called Meir Nativ, and they had no choice.

Marc: Oh, okay!

Nehemia: They couldn't say for every single word in the Torah, Tanakh, they couldn't say, Parashat Naso, that's not going to work in Jeremiah, so they had to give the chapter number. I don't think they actually give the verse number at that point, if I remember correctly.

Marc: Right.

Nehemia: But they gave the chapter number, and after that we were done. Jews couldn't help it; they would then have to print the Bibles with those chapter numbers to correspond to it.

Marc: Yes, it’s very confusing.

Nehemia: Yeah. But the Concordance, the first Hebrew Concordance, is what cemented that within the Jewish world.

Marc: So, going back to your story on that Torah.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Marc: It was missing.

Nehemia: Yeah, there was a sheet missing, maybe more than one sheet. We didn't spend that much time counting how many letters and words.

Marc: But it was a crucial sheet, the bit I was looking for in particular!

Nehemia: So, what’s in that sheet that you were looking for?

Marc: It's the Nunim Ha’afuchim, which are the upside down, or reverse Nuns. Not nuns, a very important distinction.

Nehemia: There is a story about nuns though that you…

Marc: I have a story about nuns which we will get to. But the letter is Nun, and I’ve got a book on this as well.

Nehemia: About the letter Nun, or the nuns?

Marc: Well, both actually!

Nehemia: Nice!

Marc: And you do have to make a real big distinction. And in fact, I did once have, thinking, upside down nuns - that’s not a good thing, that’s not a good thing! So, the Nunim hafuchim, they are in effect brackets round two verses, which is Numbers 10:35 to 36. See, I’m doing it! It’s good that I’m doing it.

Nehemia: You can Google it.

Marc: No, no, no, I know these two verses particularly well.

Nehemia: Oh, so you know that one. Fair enough.

Marc: Because I wrote per se a book about literally those two verses called Sefer Binsoa.

Nehemia: And I wrote about Numbers 6 in the Priestly Blessing, that’s how I know that one.

Marc: There you go! Yeah, excellent. So, Sefer Binsoa, and it's the Song of the Ark, and it's basically when the Ark went forward, Moses said, “Ve’eyhi binsoa ha’aron va’yomer Moshe.” And they are the opening and closing verses of the Torah service as well on a Shabbat.

Nehemia: Explain that, because most - I don't know that most - some of our audience has never been to a service. Tell us what happens.

Marc: So, in the synagogue, in the middle of the service, you have all the opening prayers, and opening psalms and songs. And then you have the Shema, which is the doxology, the key, core prayer. Then you have the Amidah, which is the standing prayer, and then you have the Torah service, which is the center of the service.

Nehemia: There is a part where every Shabbat, where they take the Torah out of what's called an ark.

Marc: Aron Ha’kodesh.

Nehemia: Aron Ha’kodesh, which is interesting, “the Holy Ark”, maybe that’s a separate conversation. And before they bring it up to the bima where they read it, what happens?

Marc: So, they process it round in a circuit.

Nehemia: They parade it around, basically.

Marc: They parade it around and you kiss it, which is you take your tallit, the tzitzit, which are the cords on the tallit, and you press it to the Torah mantle, or the tik, and then you kiss it as it’s passing you. In some communities who are less Sephardi, they’ll bow. If they are more Ashkenazi…

Nehemia: What do you mean they’ll bow? Tell me what you mean.

Marc: They’ll bow to the Torah.

Nehemia: I don’t think I’ve ever seen that.

Marc: Yeah, they do, they bow to the Torah.

Nehemia: Which communities do this?

Marc: Some are Reform communities; some are Ashkenazi communities.

Nehemia: They bow to the Torah?

Marc: Yeah, they bow to the Torah.

Nehemia: I've literally never seen that. I've seen people who don't just kiss the thing, they’ll actually directly kiss the…

Marc: Yes, and in fact once…

Nehemia: Which maybe isn’t the most hygienic thing to do these days.

Marc: I once repaired lipstick off a Torah.

Nehemia: Are you serious?

Marc: I’m not! It’s in my Care of My Torah book, it says, “Please do not do this!”

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: People do try to fix stuff with packing tape, and masking tape and staples.

Nehemia: I’ve seen that, I’ve seen masking tape.

Marc: And Biros.

Nehemia: I’ve seen scotch tape.

Marc: But one of the worst ones was literally lipstick on the Torah.

Nehemia: That’s because they had kissed it?

Marc: I mean, you’re supposed to love the Torah. Somebody went a bit too far and kissed the Torah.

Nehemia: Okay. So, they kissed the Torah, some people bow to it - I'm a bit disturbed by that, but let’s leave that.

Marc: Yeah, yeah. It’s weird.

Nehemia: And then they… why are we talking about this? I forget.

Marc: Because we’re in the service so they go around…

Nehemia: Oh! So, they recite the words when they open up the ark. That’s the part we’re trying to get to.

Marc: Yes, so basically, at the start of the service they'll say, “Ve’eyhi binsoa ha’aron.”

Nehemia: Let me read it, it’s Numbers, like you said, 10:35 to 36.

Marc: 36.

Nehemia: And this is interesting. So, it says, “When the ark was to set out,” this is JPS, “When the ark was to set out, Moses would say, 'Advance, O LORD, may your enemies be scattered, and may your foes flee from before you.' And when it halted, he would say, 'Return, O LORD, you who are Israel’s myriads of thousands.'”

Marc: Yes. “Uvenucha yomar.”

Nehemia: So, before those two verses, there's an upside-down Nun, and after the two verses there’s an upside-down Nun.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: And there are varying forms of that.

Nehemia: So, it's not always just a simple Nun that's upside down, sometimes it has some decoration.

Marc: Some have decorations, some look more like a Zed, sometimes, as well, they put the Nun not in the brackets…

Nehemia: Like a Zed? Or a Zayin?

Marc: Like a Zed.

Nehemia: Like an actual Z.

Marc: Like a Z or an S.

Nehemia: Oh, really? I don’t think I’ve seen that.

Marc: It’s interesting. In the Zohar they kind of... In the book I’ve got loads of different variants of it.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: But in some of them a different tradition arose where they started putting them in the words. Not as brackets between the verses, they put them in the words.

Nehemia: Oh wow!

Marc: They put them in Binsoa.

Nehemia: Oh wow!

Marc: And Kimitonanim, which was later.

Nehemia: That’s so interesting!

Marc: And then there was another one which they put in as well.

Nehemia: So, the normal way to do it is there's a space before the section and after the section, and you're saying some of them they are actually interjected.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: They put the Nun backwards in some of the words.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: Wow. That’s cool!

Marc: In fact, there’s a picture of one of those from a 700-year-old Torah on the front of the book that happened to be in a scribe… so, my scribal teacher’s colleague went to visit him, and in his room, behind him, there was a massive frame with a sheet of just that bit where it had upside down Nunim in the…

Nehemia: Wait. And this sheet was 700 years old?

Marc: This sheet was 700 years old.

Nehemia: Where is this sheet today?

Marc: Probably in his or his descendants… I think he may have passed away.

Nehemia: We need to find this sheet. There's not that many 700-year-old sheets.

Marc: Well, I’ve got photos. It's on the front of the book.

Nehemia: Oh okay, I can see that. Wow. Maybe that’s the missing sheet from the Torah scroll this morning.

Marc: It’s possibly… I don’t think it is, but certainly we need to find that as well. Missing sheets are not good. But people unfortunately used to do that sometimes, they would cut out… In fact, I had a go at a particular person who used to buy old sifri and cut them up and put them in frames and sell them to different people. And that’s not a good thing.

Nehemia: I once bought a sheet from a Torah scroll and I put it in a frame, and I went to Rabbi Goldstein, at the OT Institute in Jerusalem.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: And I asked him, I said, “I want to make sure… I'm not Orthodox. I want to make sure this isn't disrespectful towards Orthodox people.” He said, “No, I've got one like that right over there on my wall.”

Marc: Yeah, it’s better than them going in the garbage. But it’s still not… if it’s a fragment, that’s not a problem. If it’s deliberately cut up to do that, that is a problem.

Nehemia: Okay, well I didn’t cut it up. I don’t know if the person who sold it to me did.

Marc: That's the problem.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: There are people who will cut up… and they do it on eBay still now. You’ll see they've taken sheets out of old Yemenite sifrei Torah, sort of 300, 400 years hundred years old, and cut them up and sell them as this passage, that passage.

Nehemia: Okay. I’ve seen that on eBay, and I’ve bought a few of those. Now I don't know that they cut it up.

Marc: Yes, they do.

Nehemia: You're saying that, and you might be right. I actually bought one that was two sheets that I have in my living room from a Yemenite scroll, and I thought it was unusual, because normally you only see a single sheet for sale, and this was two sheets attached.

Marc: No, I think they take the old sifrei, and they cut them up.

Nehemia: Is that what they’re doing? Okay.

Marc: Because I've actually come across people who do that. I’ve even come across one where they were selling it as a Megillat Esther, the Book of Esther, and what they’d done is they cut out single amudim from a Torah, turned them the other way round, and attached them to rollers on the side, and pretended it was a Megillat Esther.

Nehemia: And they were just assuming whoever buys it doesn’t know any better.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: Wow! And that's on Ebay?

Marc: That’s on Ebay.

Nehemia: Wow.

Marc: And I had a real go at them.

Nehemia: Wow. That is… wow.

Marc: So, you have to be really careful.

Nehemia: And you’re sure those people who were selling it just weren’t that ignorant, that they didn’t know what it was?

Marc: No. They weren’t ignorant, they were just trying to make a quick buck.

Nehemia: Wow. That's disturbing.

Marc: It is.

Nehemia: Wow. Okay. Oh! So, where do these backward Nuns come from? You were explaining it this morning to one of the librarians, which…

Marc: So, Emanuel Tov, and actually I don't think he was the first person, because I think Ginsburg came up with it first. He said in effect that they are anti-Sigma and Sigma, so they’re brackets, because the Greeks used to use them as well to fundamentally say, “These verses are not in the right place.” So instead of putting dots over the letters, which is another way of doing it, they used to put them in brackets to say, “This has been mis-transcribed.”

Nehemia: So, there's two ways of looking at this. I want to be careful here. So, there are these bracket symbols in Greek manuscripts…

Marc: They were also in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Nehemia: And in some Hebrew manuscripts indicate an erasure.

Marc: Indicating… well, either that something shouldn't be there, or it's in the wrong place. It should be there, so these two verses should be there, but they should be somewhere else in the text.

Nehemia: They should be somewhere else in the text.

Marc: I'm working on that at the moment. I have a theory.

Nehemia: Okay. So, this isn't my theory, but this is a theory that I'm about to share, which some scholars have, which is that these functioned as an erasure, and the reason that the erasure was there was that somebody looked at this and said, “This is theologically problematic.” Why is it theologically problematic? Because the Ark comes out, and Moses doesn't say, “Advance, O Ark of the Lord,” he says, “Advance, O, Yud-Hay-Vav-Hay," “O, LORD”. And then when the Ark comes back, he doesn't say, “Return, O, Ark of the Lord,” he says, “Return, O, Yud-Hay-Vav-Hay.” And so, someone may have looked at this – again, this isn't my theory, but this is a theory that's out there among some textual scholars - that somebody a couple of thousand years ago looked at this and said, “This is theologically problematic, erase.” You know, delete, and the way they delete is they put the Sigma, and the anti-Sigma, what looked like backwards Nuns.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: And I'm not saying that's my explanation. What is important is that every copy of the Masoretic text either has this or is supposed to have it, and so, whenever it happened must have been at least around 2,000 years ago, if not more.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: That's the interesting thing. And every copy we have of the Torah - let's say outside the Samaritan text - every Jewish copy we have of the Torah descends from some master copy which had this notation in it.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: That's the key thing from my perspective, whichever of those explanations is correct.

Marc: And one of the explanations is that it was separated off because it's an entire book all by itself.

Nehemia: Right. And that's actually in some Rabbinical sources.

Marc: It’s in Rabbinical sources. And again, I cover that in the book, and that's the reason I wrote a book called Sefer Binsoa, because if it’s such an important book – why?

Nehemia: Although "book" back then could be any written document.

Marc: Exactly.

Nehemia: I remember when I studied paleography, well, Canaanite paleography; sorry, they called it epigraphy. I studied ancient Canaanite texts, and they would have a tombstone - not a tombstone, it was a sarcophagus - and on the side of sarcophagus it would say something like, “Zeh sefer such and such,” “This is the book of so and so, king of the Sidonians.” And you're like, “Book? It's like ten lines on the side of a sarcophagus!”

Marc: It's a record.

Nehemia: But anything written could have been called a sefer, a book, at some point. So, it could have just been a scroll, a single scroll. Well, look, I mean the Torah in general, I think Ibn Ezra suggests, or maybe it was Abarbanel, I don't know, one of these rabbis suggested, and I think he's right, the Torah was a series of these scrolls…

Marc: That were edited together.

Nehemia: That were maybe stuck in a jar, and they were sewn together, and then they weren't always sewn together in chronological order. And that's why Numbers chapter 1 has a date, famously, which is after Numbers chapter 9, which also has a date. So, Numbers chapter 9 had to have taken place - it doesn't mean it had to have been written, but it had to have taken place - before Numbers 1. And this is in the middle, well no, just afterwards, Numbers 10.

So where do you think this originally fit? Do you have a theory about that?

Marc: I do. I’m working on that.

Nehemia: Okay, you're not going to share that because it’s unpublished.

Marc: It’s unpublished.

Nehemia: Proprietary research! Just tell me, I won't tell anybody else.

Marc: You said that last time, and the whole world heard!

Nehemia: Here we go! So don’t make that same mistake twice!

Marc: I’m not going to do that again, no, absolutely not!

Nehemia: And so, people can read more about that on… tell us again what your website is.

Marc: It’s sofer.co.uk. And if they're interested in the books, it's kulmus.co.uk.

Nehemia: How do you spell kulmus?

Marc: K-U-L-M-U-S.

Nehemia: Okay. And what is a kulmus?

Marc: Kulmus is basically the quill.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: From kalamos, the Greek.

Nehemia: Which I think originally refers to a reed?

Marc: Exactly!

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: But now it’s a quill.

Nehemia: Okay, got you, beautiful. This has been a great conversation, thanks so much for joining me. Any final words for the audience?

Marc: If you ever come across anything on a manuscript that you think looks really interesting, please let us know.

Nehemia: How can they contact you to let you know?

Marc: Through the website. There's a form that you can fill in.

Nehemia: Now, I’m just going to warn you, there’s going to be people who… because I get this, where they send you all kinds of like, “Oh, my friend went on holiday, and they bought this thing, and they want you to…” Is it okay if people contact you with that?

Marc: Only if it's genuinely interesting.

Nehemia: Well, it’s interesting to them.

Marc: That's true. In fact, I read a story, and I’ll close with this.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: Because last time we were at the Holocaust Memorial Scrolls Trust.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Marc: I read a story about a guy who took, and I think it was in a book about Hebrew manuscripts by Mark Michael… I’ve forgotten his surname, but it's very similar to mine. Anyway, it’s about a guy who brought him a book, and I think it was a Siddur, and it wasn’t that old, and it wasn't special in any way from what he could tell. He was about to say, “Why are you bothering me?” And then the guy said, “This is the Siddur I kept in the Nazi death camp with me.”

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

Marc: “And I hid it, and made sure they didn’t see it.” And suddenly, yeah, okay, it wasn’t old, but it was special.

Nehemia: Okay, wow. That’s a great story.

Marc: And he learned that lesson, to not – not – jump to conclusions. And it’s as you say, some things might not be that interesting on the face of it, could be extraordinarily interesting.

Nehemia: Wow. Thank you so much, this has been a great conversation. Thank you for joining us.

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