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Nehemia: And here you can see something’s different about God’s name. It looks like, to me, that it’s even in a different hand. It’s certainly smaller in the second instance; in the first instance it’s big. So, it started to seem to me that these were filled into blank spaces.

Nehemia: What I’m going to present today is actually a chapter in my PhD dissertation that I did under Professor Yosef Ofer. It was published as an article in the Journal of Jewish Studies, and I’m only going to get to a small amount of what’s in that article, because it’s 9,000 words or something.

I started to notice when I was looking at the Torah scrolls… and let me back up. I was looking at the name of God for my PhD dissertation. It has all kinds of special halakhot around it, some of them very ancient, and I noticed that I had gone through all the photographs of the Russian National Library, something like 90,000 pages, looking for anything with God’s name. And I realized I had hundreds, actually thousands, of shelf marks of codices, and I only had two Torah scrolls. So, I started scouring the world, before the pandemic, looking for Torah scrolls.

Here is a fragment from the Cairo Genizah, from the Lewis-Gibson Collection, 10th-11th century, Oriental, unless Judith tells me otherwise, and here you can see something’s different about God’s name. It looks like, to me, that it’s even in a different hand. It’s certainly smaller in the second instance; in the first instance it’s big. So, it started to seem to me that these were filled into blank spaces. That was my hypothesis.

Here’s another example, and here I think it’s definitely… could be a different hand. It’s always difficult to know, because we have three letters… it’s four, but there’s two Heys, so that doesn’t help you. So, you have three letter forms; one of them is Yud, one of them is Vav, which is pretty generic. How do you know if it’s different handwriting or the same handwriting? And that’s where my interaction with Ira, and Zina, and Greg with the BAM was so important, because we could actually look and see, “Wait a minute, is this ink the same as this ink?” And it’s not just speculation; we can actually get scientific answers.

So, this is an Ashkenazi Torah scroll, the other ones were Oriental. This is 14th century, Rotolo duo at the Vatican, and here you can see… you actually can’t see in the photo that there’s a slightly… and I have to be careful not to use the word color because color has a technical meaning in science, but this is actually a different hue when you see it in person. Hue, that’s more safe! But clearly, God’s name was squeezed into a blank space. I say clearly, but I don’t know, maybe not. Maybe when it came to God’s name, he said, “I have two more words left in the line. I’m going to squeeze it in and then write Elohim afterwards.” It’s possible. This isn’t the only instance, though.

Here, clearly this is, I think… Judith, by the way, discovered this, if I’m not mistaken, in Krakow, am I right? Another Ashkenazi Torah scroll. Here, I’m quite certain, it’s a different hand. Meaning, it wasn’t the main scribe who wrote it. Certainly, he used what appears… appears is an important word as well, what appears to be a different ink. I can’t say it’s a different ink without, as I say, “zapping it with X-rays”, or “Zina zapping with X-rays”. To me it looks like a different ink, based on visual observations. That’s the safe phrase.

Here, a Sephardi Torah scroll. When we say 16th century or later, we really have no idea when it’s from. We just mean it’s after the period of 1540, when the Hebrew Paleography Project and other projects had their cut-off time. So, this could be from the 19th century for all I know, unless somebody tells me otherwise. God’s name is clearly different, and in this case it’s very interesting. There is the inseparable preposition, which is the same as everything else, and when they get to God’s name it looks like it’s written in a second phase. I mean, the spacings are kind of ridiculous. There’s this big space after it; it even looks like it was written with a different writing implement.

Now, here in The Cairo Genizah is an example that was apparently a writing exercise. Why do I say it’s a writing exercise? Because he didn’t finish. This isn’t a complete Torah scroll, and he didn’t write God’s name. What’s really beautiful here is, in the second from the top there you can see, he has the Lamed of the inseparable preposition. That he wrote, because that’s treated completely differently than the letters of God’s name, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey.

By the way, in the last example, or two examples ago, it wasn’t just Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, it was also the word Elohim, or Elohichem in this instance. And that’s actually a debate in Rabbinical literature; do these rules apply only to the Tetragrammaton, the Shem Ha’meforash? Or does it apply to all the titles of God, which includes Eheyeh asher Eheyeh, and Shaddai, Elohim, et cetera? I say et cetera, but there are only seven of them.

So, here is a really beautiful example from The Cairo Genizah. Here, he filled in God’s name, and then up there and down here he didn’t. So, at a certain point he stopped. So, that proves, I think, the hypothesis that I had before, that God’s name was filled into blank spaces.

What are the reasons for doing this? I looked through Rabbinical literature, and what I found were three different reasons. Number one, the scribe is distracted, and we’ll get to why that’s important… and this is why he isn’t writing God’s name and comes later. Number two, he is ritually unclean. And number three, which is very surprising, certainly not something I would have expected, he needs a quorum of ten. He needs something like a minyan in order to write God’s name in their presence.

We’ll start with Gittin 54b, “any Torah scroll in which the divine names,” and here’s where the debate comes in the Middle Ages, what are azkarot? Are azkarot only Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey? Or is it all of the seven unerasable names of God - Shemot sh’aynam nemchakim? It’s a machloket. “In which the divine names were written without proper intent,” “lishman”, “is not worth anything.”

And there’s a whole case there in the Gemara where a scribe comes and he says, “I wrote this Torah scroll, but I wasn’t thinking that God’s name is holy when I wrote it.” And that’s the whole idea of lishman, that when you write God’s name, you have to be thinking, “I am writing a sacred word.” And over time that actually evolves, what that means.

In later times, you have to actually say some kind of verbal formula. Originally apparently it meant, “I am writing Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey as God’s name,” as opposed to something else. Well, what else? So, in Masekhet Soferim, in the story of Micah in Judges, at the end of Judges, there are three instances where it has the letters Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, but it refers to an idol. And so those names can be erased, they’re not sacred.

So, when I write it somewhere else, what am I thinking about? Am I thinking about the idol of Micah? Or am I thinking about the Creator of the Universe? Or am I thinking about a fight I had with my wife this morning? Seriously, if I’m distracted in some way… although I never fight with my wife! But in principle.

So, Soferim says, “[A scribe] who was writing the [divine] name, even if the king greets him, he must not respond.” So, you’re doing an important thing, you’re writing God’s name, even if it’s a king, where you could be killed, later they said, “Okay, don’t get killed.” So, they change it to, “a king of Israel”, because he’ll understand. A non-Jewish king, if you don’t respond you’ll be murdered, executed. “[If a scribe] was writing two or three names at once, he should stop between them and respond [to the greeting].” So, this is in two places in Soferim, in the Sefer Torah, this part of Soferim is based on the Masekhet Sefer Torah.

So, what is this, “writing two or three names at once?” Beautiful, this is my practice. He wrote a whole sheet of the Torah scroll and he left the blank spaces, and he came to fill them in. And this is a relatively early source; Soferim is dated to the 8th century, Masekhet Sefer Torah. Some say the core of it is from the Tannaitic Period, possibly. So, this is beautiful. I found my practice. I didn’t find examples from this period because we don’t have Torah scrolls, but it could be referring to my practice.

But “writing two or three names” really could be interpreted two different ways, and it is, as everything in Jewish sources is. It could be filling in blank spaces, which is what we’re talking about, but maybe it’s two or three names in a row. And you say, “What’s three names in a row?” “Sh’mah Israel Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey Eloheinu Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey echad.” Well, you say, “Wait a minute, Eloheinu?” Yeah, according to one opinion azkarot includes the word Eloheinu. Or it’s in Exodus 34 verse 6, it’s “Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey El rachum v’chanun.” That’s three names in a row. So how do we know which one it is? I obviously want it to be the first one, because that proves my practice goes back to Tannaitic times.

The Jerusalem Talmud is what I wrote most of my article about because of the words here. So now it’s presented as a baraita; what we saw in Soferim is a baraita. This king who was writing the name, same thing here, “two or three divine names”, and then it says, “ke’gon el Elohim Ha’shem”. So, it’s two or three names in a row, clearly, unless that was added.

So that’s what my article’s about. I’m not going to get into it, I don’t have time. But it’s okay if it’s added because I have Tosefta, Berakhot, where it doesn’t matter what it says in Yerushalmi. Meaning, there’s a version of the baraita in Yerushalmi which stands on its own, but there’s also one in Berakhot. It says, “he must not respond. [If a scribe] was writing five [or] six [divine] names at once,” so now you can’t say it’s Sh’mah Israel, it doesn’t work.

There are instances of six names, but not in the Torah. It’s later in the Tanakh, and that’s if you include things other than Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey as azkarot. So even if the Yerushalmi is talking about writing names in a row which the words, “ke’gon el Elohim Ha’shem” seem to indicate, although maybe that’s an interpolation… I come from Biblical studies. You can always say something’s an interpolation, that’s our bread and butter. So here it doesn’t matter. Here five or six divine names are clearly scattered throughout the page, because you don’t ever have that in a row in a Torah scroll.

Now we jump forward to the Middle Ages, and we have Rabbi Yonathan of Lunel. Lunel, I believe, is in Southern France, and it’s a commentary on the rif, on Halakhot, who is incorporating the baraita. He explains, “he skipped many [divine] names on the sheet. He did not want to write them” “sh’hiyah tarud” “because he was troubled,” he had a fight with his wife that morning, “he was troubled at that time. So, he left them blank, and now he has returned to write them all at once.” So maybe you don’t always do it; maybe you only do it if you wake up and you have a cold, and you’re like, “I can’t think about God’s name, but I have got to do my job, or my family doesn't eat.” Now, pay attention to the word “tarud” there, that’s important.

So here is Rabbi Yoseph Haviva, who I believe is Catalonian, and he says, “For example, he skipped many [divine] names on the sheet. He did not want to write them because he was not ritually clean at that time. So, he left them blank, and now has returned to write them all at once.” So, both are commentaries on the rif, Halakhot, which is then incorporated into the baraita, so both interpretations exist.

And he says, “Sh’lo hayah tahor”. And of course, coming from Biblical studies, the first thing that jumps out at me is that tahor and tarud are graphically nearly identical. And it’s hard for me to believe that one of these is not a scribal error for the other. Of course, I have no way of knowing which is the original and which is the scribal error, but maybe not; maybe both are authentic.

Now, the thing about “troubled”, where does that come from? We saw in Gittin that if you don’t write a name lishman, for the sake of it being a divine name, then the scroll isn’t valid, so that’s the “troubled” part. Ritually clean? Why would you need to be ritually clean? Well, this is something that to this day, in the 21st century, I’ve spoken to scribes who say, “Before I write God’s name, that morning I go to the mikvah.” Do you do that?

Speaker: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, there’s actually a modern work dispute about this, and it involves seamstresses. In the 21st century there was a modern work dispute, and they cited a 20th century work dispute where a scribe was hired to write a Torah scroll. And although it’s not required that he go to the mikvah to write the name, it’s just a custom; everyone agrees on that as far as I know, he agreed that for this Torah scroll he would go to the mikvah each time and write the names. And then the mikvah broke down and he had to travel several miles away, and he says, “I want more money. I want the time it takes me to travel.” So, they asked the shilah and the determination was, because it’s not an actual requirement when he agreed to write the names, based on the given price, that was assuming he didn’t have to travel because he had a nearby mikvah. And then they cited this in the 21st century in a work dispute about seamstresses, that if they have to travel far then you have to pay them for their travel time. So, this is something that’s still around.

I found an Ashkenazi manuscript from the 13th century of Soferim, where it says, “[If a scribe] was writing two or three,” and the scribe originally wrote “places”, and then he realized that’s a mistake, because why did he write places? He’s thinking of blank spaces, and he realizes it’s supposed to be “names.” This is what it looks like; it’s beautiful. So how did he erase it? He put dots over it, as he’s writing. It’s not that he figured it out later. “Mekomot” he writes, and then he changes it to “shemot”. And that makes sense because we have Ashkenazi Torah scrolls from this period where they were leaving blank spaces.

Rabbi Abraham ben Isaac of Narbonne, “We have heard that there are currently many scribes who do not [initially] write the [divine] names but leave blank spaces for them.” Okay, so that’s what we found in practice, and here he’s talking about it. “When they finish writing the entire Torah scroll, they purify themselves and [then] write all the [divine] names. There are also some of them who convene a prayer quorum,” he doesn’t say “prayer”, I added that, “when they write [the divine names]. … We do not know, and it is not clear to us,” nor to me, “the reason for this custom, for we have not found it in the Talmud.”

So, the idea of, “you have to concentrate,” that comes from Gittin 54b. Where does this come from? I don’t know, it’s a custom that’s just around.

And then Hilkhot Sefer Torah… here he tells you the purpose; the gathering of ten men is to focus his intent. And then here in Sefer Hasidim he talks about, “the ancients used to write Torah scrolls by inscribing the [divine] names in the presence of ten righteous men.”

Now, this morning I read a blog post by Annette Martini, who talks about this passage as well. I think it just came out in May and she interprets this instead of… and if this is wrong, during the Q&A you’ll correct me, “in the presence of ten righteous men.” From what I read, at least in the blog post, she interprets it as “by ten righteous men”. Which, from what I understand is, maybe the ten men each have to write one of them. I don’t know, it’s possible. It sounds crazy, except I’ve seen Torah scrolls from a few hundred years ago, early Modern Torah scrolls, that had parts of it that seemed like they were written by patrons. You had the scribe write most of the scroll, and you’d get to the end of a section, or a book, or something, and then someone who is not a professional scribe is finishing the last line. And that’s a way of involving people in the process.

So, I don’t know. Now I’ve got to keep my eyes open, I’d never thought of that interpretation… It says, “b’asarah tzadikim”, I understood that as “with asarah tzadikim”, but maybe it means they actually write it. So now I’ve got to keep my eyes open for Torah scrolls where I’m seeing different hands writing God’s name. I’ve never seen that, but it could be out there.

So, Erfurt 7, and I’m almost done here. I don’t know if you can see it here, but God, “Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey Elohim,” and here you can see the space after “Elohim”, looks different. Based on visual observations it looks different. I did a study with Ira’s team, and we wrote a couple of papers about it. Here’s the Dead Sea Scrolls; somebody ask me about this in the Q&A.

So here, Erfurt 7, some sheets weren’t original. They were replaced, three of them, and on those we had God’s name. Now in the original sheets of Erfurt 7, God’s name is only different in the first column and a half. The rest of it, God’s name is written as the scribe is writing, not afterwards. How do I know that? I demonstrated it in my article based on some of the errors that were made. I can see from corrections of errors that he’s writing God’s name and the rest of the scroll as he’s writing the rest of the text. But only in the first column and a half does he write God’s name separately. But in the replacement sheet you can see God’s name. The headline is lower, and it has a slightly different orientation, and the letters are smaller. And what I noticed is that there are two corrections on the same sheet that look awfully a lot like… now it’s only three letters, Yud, Hey, Vav, because the Hey is twice, but it looks awfully a lot like Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, these two corrections.

So, I asked the question to Ira’s team, “Is this ink of God’s name different than this ink? And is it the same as this ink?” And Greg will talk about that. I think it’s one of the most exciting things I’ve ever been part of. And we ended up writing a really important paper about it, which was cited in the journal, Nature, which is pretty cool.

And that is it. So, any questions?

Host: …in making it in Nature!

Nehemia: Yeah.

Host: That’s absolutely amazing. Thank you, it was wonderful. There are probably questions. Mark?

Mark: I think you didn’t mention about… rabbis writing why not to do this, that they leave out many…

Nehemia: Ah, so it’s very important.

Mark: … from 19th century, he says it’s good to go to the mikvah before every name, or sometimes some soferim do it not every single name but leave out, as you said, the first sheet.

Nehemia: Right.

Mark: But he says that you shouldn’t for a long text like the whole Sefer…

Nehemia: So, this is an excuse to talk about the Dead Sea Scrolls, thank you so much. So here in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we have a quote from Isaiah, and God’s name is missing.

Mark: So, after a long time, a year, he goes to the mikvah, and then his ink, that he made new, is different, and that is what we see.

Nehemia: Exactly. So, there is an issue in the Talmud which is specifically talking about writing God’s name without the proper intent. And it says, “Okay, just trace over it. Every time there’s Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, write over it with intent, and then you don’t have to start from scratch.” And then they say, “No, then the scroll will be menumar,” which means “brindled” or “speckled” like a namer, a “leopard”.

And so, this is really important. In the Dead Sea Scrolls we have, for example, 11Q Psalm ͣ , where God’s name is written in Paleo Hebrew letters. And the intention, the goal here is for it to stand out and look different, no question about it. Why? That’s a whole different question. But the goal is for it to stand out and look different, that’s why it’s written in a different script. In Rabbinical literature that’s forbidden. It’s not supposed to stand out and look different. Now, I showed you all the examples at the beginning where it looks different and that was not the intent, that was a by-product. That was actually a bad thing from their perspective.

Now, one of the things I learned from Ira’s team is, we looked at some of the examples and the ink was a different hue; but maybe when it was written it was the same identical shade as all the words around it, and they just decayed differently over time.

This morning Lior showed me a Torah scroll from Spain where he thought God’s name was erased, scratched out. But no, it was clear to me that it was just written in a separate stage. You could see from the spacing, probably by a different scribe, he used different ink, and over the centuries it decayed differently, so it looks very pale and the words around it were preserved much better.

So, this is an ancient practice of writing God’s name in the second stage, but it’s done in a very different way. For example, we have this story in the Tannaitic sources, a baraita about the Torah scroll of the Alexandrians, that they wrote God’s name in gold ink and the rabbis said it should be put in a Genizah. Why should it be put in a Genizah? Because it stands out, and you’re only allowed to write in black ink. But here, and we actually have one Dead Sea Scroll that Daniel Stökl Ben Ezer, if he’s here, I don’t know… he just discovered another fragment where the word Elohim is written in red ink in Paleo Hebrew letters. So, they wanted it to stand out, whereas in the Middle Ages they weren't allowed to have it stand out. If they did it was unintentional and undesirable. So, although it’s a very ancient practice, it has a different way of doing it.

Host: There was one question before…

Mark: There’s something you might want to consider, because you mentioned it might be a different hand. My teacher’s teacher would do this; he would go to the mikvah and he would leave the spaces, but he would also have a separate Ha’shem quill.

Nehemia: Ah!

Mark: And, because it was a separate one, whenever you transfer, it’s never exact, exact. So quite often you’d work your way to the bottom of the other one, you don’t want to cut, you don’t want to cut, because you know it’s going to be slightly different… you cut it and trim it. But he would do that, and I had problems with that because… you shouldn’t really do that because it stands out. But it might be that it’s the same scribe but with a different implement that he’s keeping separate.

Nehemia: Okay, that’s very possible. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, Hartmut Stegemann proposed this idea of a special God’s name writer. He said there was a certain person in the Dead Sea Scrolls community… he just made this up, he has no evidence whatsoever. But he said, “There was a separate person who came along who was qualified to write God’s name,” and he proposed this as a possibility. And this is an important difference between what we do and what they do. Everything that we do is, “this is a possibility”, “we think”, “it seems”. And what they do is, “we determined”. And we have a lot of conflicts over this because I always want to talk about scribes, and they always want to talk about inks. If I have a different apparent handwriting and it’s added, and it’s a different ink, to me that’s almost certainly a different scribe. And I’m comfortable with “almost certainly”, and they’re not.

Speaker 2: And you have to take into account that Hartmut Stegemann is a German, so… to make the story plausible.

Nehemia: No, but it’s very possible.

Host: Who knows. Leo.

Leo: I just have a bit of a comment, I guess. The requirement for a quorum, for writing the divine names…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Leo: What’s puzzling, I think, with the folks expressing their amazement at this is that there doesn’t seem to be any source, as you said, for requiring a quorum for writing the divine name. But the places that we find the requirement for a quorum, for a minyan, ten men, are in prayer. But in the prayer, you don’t need a quorum of ten men for the entire time of prayer. There are only selected parts within the prayer where you’re actually required the quorum of ten men, and those are referred to by the Talmud and the Poskim as devar sh’b’kedusha.

Nehemia: Okay.

Leo: That’s what you’re required. So, it seems to be quite clear that this is an extension of that, that since the writing of the divine name is perceived as devar sh’b’kedusha and the Talmud says that you need a quorum for a devar sh’b’kedusha... I think must be the logic for the extension…

Nehemia: Think about the practicality. When you’re sitting and doing your work, can you have ten people around you all the time? And so that’s what I suspect happened with… and here I’m making stuff up, but what I suspect happened with Erfurt 7 in the beginning, where it’s only the first column and a half where God’s name is written separately, and the rest he’s writing it toch keday, “as he’s writing”. So maybe as he’s dedicating the beginning of writing the scroll, he gets a bunch of people together and he says, “Alright, we’re going to fill in God’s name while you’re standing here. But I can’t do that for the entire Torah scroll.” It’s 50 sheets, 150 columns in this case. They’d have to be sitting there for a year, unless he’s doing it in a Beit Midrash, I suppose.

Speaker 4: It’s possible that in the first one and a half columns he still had the original ink, and then it was finished.

Nehemia: By the way, the ink there is darker, but it’s the same ink with an almost identical elemental composition, although through semi-quantitative analysis… don’t ask me what that means, it was determined that it was a separate batch.

Speaker 4: A separate batch, alright.

Host: The last, last question…

Speaker 5: Thank you. In the Cairo Genizah and especially the early Palestinian traditions, some of them used the Shem Ha’meforash in the prayerbooks, some always, some only in Biblical passages, and… they don’t tend to do that. So, I was wondering how common this phenomenon is?

Nehemia: Very uncommon. So, I only found it in 2% of the Torah scrolls and fragments that I looked at.

Speaker 5: Okay.

Nehemia: So, it’s relatively uncommon. Now, it could be that in 50% it was done, but they were so skilled that I can’t tell. I can only tell when they’re not all that skilled, or maybe they didn’t care that much, and they’re squeezing it in, and they didn’t calculate how big it needed to be. But it was only clearly detectable, easily detectable in 2%. Yeah, very small. Alright, thank you.

Host: Thank you very much, Nehemia.

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