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Nelson: What we're doing and what we're bringing to them is the opportunity to, metaphorically speaking, go under the hood to see all of the working parts and all the mechanics that go behind our printed Bibles, the manuscripts, and all of the technical aspects that go along with those manuscripts.

Nehemia: Shalom, we’re here today with Nelson Calvillo, who is a research assistant at the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research, and he joined me at the World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, where on August 8th, 2022, I gave a lecture to some of the top scholars in the world.

Now, just to give you an idea, we've done a program before which we called SBL Reactions, or Society of Biblical Literature Reactions, which is an annual conference every year here in the United States on biblical studies, and in American terms that would be called like the World Series of Biblical Studies or the Superbowl of Biblical Studies. The World Congress of Jewish Studies is like the Olympics - it's like every four or five years or something like that, and it really is, in some sense, a much higher level of lectures because it’s not every year. I had the opportunity there, for the first time, to speak about the topic: A Newly Identified Tenth to Eleventh Century Oriental Torah Scroll in the National Library of Russia, in Saint Petersburg. And boy, I could unpack all of these phrases there…

What we're going to do is we're going to play the video of my lecture, and then Nelson and I are going to discuss it, because we decided that… well let's be honest, it's a really technical and complicated topic.

Nelson, I actually had somebody walk up to me at the end of my lecture, and this was a very intelligent, knowledgeable scholar, he said, “Nehemia, you have this incredible skill to take something really boring and make it interesting.” And he said, “Most people here at this Congress are taking something really interesting and making it boring.” And I said, “I think this is actually interesting.”

And it is interesting, but I had very little time, technically I had twenty minutes and I went on for twenty-five, so I overstepped my time for about five minutes. And so, I had to just rattle off the information as quickly as possible. What I didn't have time for was to explain what, for an academic scholar, would be considered basic concepts. I just assumed they knew what I was talking about. But for the audience, I want us to take the time and discuss those things.

Before we get started, I do want to explain this term “Oriental;” it's somewhat of a misnomer. In the United States “Oriental” would imply East Asia. That's not at all what it means in biblical studies, at least. In Jewish studies, “Oriental” is a stand-in for the Hebrew word Mizrachi which is “Eastern.” And even that's not really an accurate term, because what Mizrachi really means are Jews who lived in Muslim countries. So here you have this ironic thing where a Jew who lives in Morocco would be considered Mizrachi, “Oriental”, whereas a Jew who lived in… well, my ancestors came from Lithuania, which is far to the east of Morocco, would be called “occidental” or “Western”. Well, what's Western about it? It's actually far to the east. So, it's a very strange term, and I think it's a term that has more to do with frankly Britain, and maybe Germany, who coined these terms, but that's the term Oriental.

So, here's what Oriental really means. It doesn't even mean Moroccan. In this context Oriental is a category that was established by the Hebrew Paleography Project. They went around the world, and they identified Hebrew manuscripts with dates in them and they broke up the Jewish world of manuscripts to five regions. They called them five geo-cultural regions, and one of those regions is Oriental, and Oriental refers to Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and then Yemen becomes its own category later on, but in the 10th-11th century Oriental would still include Yemen. In this case, Oriental almost certainly means Egypt, or it could have been written in Israel, but it was found in the Cairo Genizah, which is in Egypt. And then it made its way to Saint Petersburg, Russia, where I saw this Torah scroll in the year 2019.

Anything to add there Nelson? Any thoughts, comments, questions?

Nelson: Really Dr. Gordon, I just want to say thank you, thank you for inviting me on again, it's a pleasure to be here. But it was just as much a pleasure to be there in Israel with you as you were presenting for the first time at the World Congress of Jewish Studies. And really, my initial comment is, I think this is going to be the beauty of why the audience will need your expertise and your commentary during your presentation, because here we are the very beginning and already what you just expounded upon is essential for scholars to know. And I would say the audience has the luxury of being able to have their Bible, being able to read it, but what we're doing and what we're bringing to them is the opportunity to, metaphorically speaking, go under the hood to see all of the working parts and all the mechanics that go behind our printed Bibles, the manuscripts and all of the technical aspects that go along with those manuscripts.

As excited as I was to hear you present, I’m probably just as excited to hear you comment on your presentation.

Nehemia: So, I do want to jump in with this, there's this concept today with the young people, TLDR (Too Long Didn't Read). So, here's the TLDR – so, I stumbled upon, identified really, the oldest, almost complete Torah scroll in the world in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in the Russian National Library. Now, they knew they had this Torah scroll, they just, even now, don't have any idea when it's from because they're not Hebrew paleographers. And I originally called the lecture, Two Newly Identified Tenth-Eleventh Century Oriental Torah Scrolls, because I discovered two of them there that are from the same period, but we didn't have the time. I knew I wouldn't have time to talk about both of them.

I do want to really quickly share… there is this map from this book by Malachi Beit-Arie, he is really the top Hebrew codicologist in the world. Codicology is where you study how manuscripts are constructed. And so, he has a map where he identifies the different regions. So here we have the five geo-cultural regions that are identified for Hebrew manuscripts.

You have here Ashkenaz, and this is again misleading because Ashkenaz in medieval times means Germany, so they’re distinguishing between Ashkenaz and Tzarfat, which is France. But for the purpose of Hebrew manuscripts, this green area is Ashkenaz, the yellow area is Orient, or Oriental, which includes Iran today. We have Byzantium, we have Sefarad. Sefarad means Spain, but for the purposes of Hebrew manuscripts there's no major difference between a manuscript written in Kairouan, which was a major Jewish center of learning in Tunisia, and the ones written in Lisbon or in Toledo, in Spain itself.

And there are differences; there’s differences between Soria here in northern Spain and Toledo. I could see a codex of the Bible written in Soria and identify immediately what workshop that was made in, because they're very distinctive. But in general, the shapes of the letters and everything are… this is the region, Sefarad. So, what we're dealing with here is Orient. So, we say it's from Cairo because it’s from the Cairo Genizah, but it could have been written in Israel, we have no idea.

Nelson: I was going to pose a question - why were you in Saint Petersburg?

Nehemia: Okay, well let's answer that question now. I was in Saint Petersburg to study these manuscripts. That's when I had the opportunity to examine the Leningrad Codex, and I also wanted to look at the Torah scrolls because we have this problem in Jewish studies – or biblical studies -where we have… it's really Hebrew manuscript studies in general. So, they went around the world for decades photographing all the Hebrew manuscripts they could get their hands on. This is the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts (IMHM) in Jerusalem, today it's part of the National Library of Israel. And when they came to Torah scrolls, they didn't photograph them because they said, “All Torah scrolls are the same, why would we photograph them?” And I… not just me, over the last decades people have started to realize, “Wait, that was a mistake, we should have photographed them.”

And so, we're trying to get our hands on Torah scrolls to study, and not that many have been photographed, so you end up having to go to these places to look at them. And the ones in the National Library of Russia have been cataloged only in a very basic way, where it says, you know, “This is number 3” in this case, “Parchment Scroll Number 3.” But what's in that scroll? Nobody knows; nobody's looked at it. Somebody looked at it like in the 19th century, a guy named Avraham Harkavy. And since then, nobody who understands Torah scrolls, at least, has had an opportunity to look at it.

I went there and I asked something very bold. I said, “You have 250 Torah scrolls approximately,” we'll give the actual number in the lecture, “I want to see all of them.” And they let me see nine while I was there, and of those nine, three turned out, or maybe even four, turned out to be really important. I'm speaking about another one of them at SBL, the Society of Biblical Literature, in November of this year. Alright let's play the video!

I was in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 2019 with Viktor Golinets, who… I’ve seen around him around here but he's not here at the moment, and I asked to see the Torah scrolls they have. And just to give you an idea, Viktor Golinets recently had an article in which he documented what there was, they've got a total of 275 Torah scrolls. There is a catalog of one of the collections, of 36 of the scrolls, or 35 of the scrolls, Evr. 1A Collection. Well, what about the other 240 or 30 scrolls? Who knows? So, I asked to see them when I went to Saint Petersburg. I was there for two weeks, and they let me see nine of them. Three of them were very interesting; I'm going to talk about one of them today.

I had just finished a class with Judith Schlanger, and in the class, she actually brought an example of a Torah scroll, of a fragment from Oxford, where we were having the lectures, and she says, “This is what the script of the year 1000 looks like.” And then I go to Cambridge, and I spend a couple weeks there, and I see a script that looks very similar, and I start to think, “Not only is it similar, I think this is the same scribe.”

And then I go to Russia, and they bring out some of the scrolls and I look at one of them, and I said, “No, I know this is the same script, and maybe even the same scribe.” And I wrote to Mordechai Weintraub, and he said, “You're right! This is the same Torah scroll, it’s the same copy.” So, there were seven sheets of a Torah scroll of which there's also pieces and sheets in Oxford and Cambridge, and how did it end up in Russia? Clearly Firkovitch went to the Cairo Genizah, and he probably took the stuff that was on top, or the good stuff that was easily accessible.

I'm not going to talk about that scroll today, I'm going to talk about his brother, because the other scroll that I am going to talk about, it's called Evr II [B], and I put the B in brackets because in Golinets’ article he doesn't call this Collection B. But when I ordered photos of the scroll, I had to indicate that it was B, so they think it’s called B, I guess. Parchment Scroll 3, and why “Parchment Scroll?” So, this collection has 159 leather scrolls and 33 parchment scrolls, and you see there’s a number missing, and that's because those are Esther Scrolls. So, these are Torah scrolls we’re talking about today.

So, this is an important point. What’s the difference between parchment and leather? If you go on eBay right now and you buy a Torah scroll and you get one that's parchment, usually it's relatively young, and if you get one on leather, at least people think, they're much older. And definitely the Dead Sea Scrolls are in some sort of a leather. I say “some sort of” because it's not actually that straightforward. The type of leather they use is different than the leather that was used in this period, which was the Middle Ages.

But the interesting thing is, the leather scrolls I looked at were actually younger than these parchment scrolls, so this idea that leather has to be older than parchment is not necessarily the case. And what seems to have happened is sometime around the 14th-15th century there were people, especially in the Sephardic countries and what we call the Oriental countries, where they decided that it’s more archaic to have a leather scroll. And so they started making leather scrolls, even though earlier they had actually made parchment scrolls. So you end up with this thing that’s kind of upside down, where the parchment scrolls sometimes are older than the leather scrolls, and that's definitely the case here. This is a Torah scroll from around the year 1000, and it’s written on parchment.

Nelson: Nehemia, you had mentioned about a minute ago how this scroll possibly came here from a man named Firkovitch.

Nehemia: Right.

Nelson: Are you referring to Abraham Firkovitch?

Nehemia: Yeah. Abraham Firkovitch was this Karaite who was given a mandate by the Russian czar to go and investigate the history of the Jews, and particularly of Karaite Jews. And he traveled around the world looking for manuscripts and bought them, and eventually he sold them, or his estate, in some cases, sold them after he died, to what became the Russian National Library in Saint Petersburg. And the largest collection of, let’s say, old Hebrew Bible manuscripts in the world today is in the Russian National Library in Saint Petersburg. It’s called the First Firkovitch Collection and the Second Firkovitch Collection.

Now one of the things that Firkovitch is notorious for having done was… he's accused of having doctored the dates on some of these manuscripts. Hebrew dating is… or it’s really the Rabbinical system of the creation of the world, but Karaites used it too. And for example, right now we're recording this in 2022, but the Hebrew year is 5783.

Now, when you write those dates in Hebrew, the 5000 is written by a Hey with a little chupchick, a little line over it or next to it, and it’s really easy to change a Hey, “5000”, into a Dalet, “4000”. And Firkovitch is accused of having done that. And what he did, if it's true that he did that, he then took, let's say a manuscript… remember that was a Codex, not a Torah Scroll because Torah Scrolls don’t have dates written on them, you're dating it based on the style of the writing. So, what he did apparently, or what he's accused of having done, is taking a year, something from the 15th century and made it the 5th century, by just scratching off the left leg of the Hey. That’s one thing he's accused of having done.

The other thing he’s accused of having done was really just manufacturing colophons; that is, little inscriptions in the manuscript that says, “This was written in such and such a year.” And particularly, one example is the Derbent Scroll, which is a Torah scroll, which strangely has a colophon. And this, I have to say, is one of the unusual things about these Torah scrolls in the Saint Petersburg collection of Firkovitch – some of them have authentic colophons. And again, a colophon is when the scribe finishes writing, he says, “I finished this on such and such a date, and such and such a year, in such and such a place.” So, they’re really important information. Normally, Torah scrolls don't have them, and the Torah scrolls that do have them, those colophons are fake. Except… the Firkovitch Collection isn’t the only exception, because there's other ones that I've seen that are authentic, but probably the largest concentration of authentic colophons in Torah scrolls in the world is in the Saint Petersburg collection. I asked to see those and wasn't allowed to see those. I wasn't given those. I was given nine… honestly, I was given… I won't go into it. It wasn't exactly what I asked for, but I was happy to get what I could get.

So, this was collected by Firkovitch, but he didn't get all of the pieces of the other scroll that we talked about because they were smaller fragments that some ended up in Oxford and some ended up in Cambridge. And now we can reunite those pieces into a single scroll. In this case, that's not what happened. In the case of Parchment Scroll 3, it’s intact, meaning there’s like little chunks that are missing, but other than that the scroll is almost entirely intact; 97.2% of the verses. I should point out that Nelson is the one who actually painstakingly counted the number of verses that were missing! So based on that, it’s 97% complete.

Nelson: I thoroughly enjoyed it, so maybe it wasn’t as painstaking as maybe it should have been!

Nehemia: Okay! So, we have a phrase in Hebrew, to say something is Sisyphic, it comes from the Greek legend about Sisyphus. We’re like pushing something up a hill, and every time he got to the top of the hill it came back down. So Sisyphic work in Hebrew means to do something that’s extremely detailed and almost never-ending. So, you did a wonderful Sisyphic job here, Nelson!

Nelson: Todah rebah, Nehemia! I just want to say to you, maybe without knowing it, you teased our audience, because a couple of minutes ago you described how easy it is to change the date from a Hey to a Dalet.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Nelson: And our audience will actually see an example of that very thing in this manuscript later on.

Nehemia: Okay, but there it wasn't to corrupt the date, it was to fix a scribal error.

Nelson: No, no, no. But what you described, changing a Hey to a Dalet, we’ll be able to see something like that.

Nehemia: Exactly. Very cool. Alright.

So, it's 53 centimeters high, the text height is 40 centimeters. I actually wanted to verify those numbers by going back to Saint Petersburg, but… and a bunch of details I wanted to verify, but events got ahead of me, so that was not possible.

This Torah scroll is nearly complete. The Torah has approximately 5,853 verses, according to my Bible search program, and this has completely preserved 97.2% of the Torah. There are another 79 verses that are partially missing, meaning maybe there's a letter missing or maybe there's half the verse missing. And then, completely missing are 83 verses.

So, a few years ago there was the discovery of the Bologna Scroll, and it was a major discovery. It was very important discovery and there’s a whole book about it because it’s the oldest complete Torah scroll. Well, this isn't complete; it's 97.2% complete. But according to what I learned from Judith Schlanger, it's maybe 200 hundred years or older, meaning if it's from the 11th century it could be 250 years older.

So this one I mentioned, now the second time, professor Judith Schlanger of the EPHE, Ecole Pratiques des Hautes Etudes, which I'm sure mispronouncing, which is part of the PSL University in Paris. It's one of the top universities in the world. And she is one of the top Hebrew paleographers in the world. She's kind of like the EF Hutton of Hebrew paleography. If she says, “This is from the year 1000,” there is a very, very, very good chance it’s from the year 1000. She would say, “Look, you’ve got to take different lines of evidence as well.”

But you could almost take that to the bank, let's put it that way. That's as close to a solid date as we could possibly have without doing a carbon-14 test. And even the carbon-14 test is sometimes a bit iffy.

In any event, the fact that she was able to date this script before she even saw the scroll, she’s basing it on the fragments in Oxford, that lends a great deal of weight to the date of this scroll, let’s put it that way.

Nelson: Wow.

Nehemia: Maybe more, so I think it's an important scroll.

It has 57 sheets of 250 columns, three to seven columns per sheet except the final sheet is two columns, which you would expect. Sheets 43 and 56 are one-column replacement sheets in later hands, and I wanted to talk about those, but I’m not going to have time to today. Sheet 55, that I'll just mention, we’ll look at it real quick, is a two-column replacement sheet with a 13-line patch in the third hand.

So, the original sheets are 49 to 52 lines per column, which is actually quite significant, because one of the ways that I thought you could identify pieces of the same scrolls was to count the number of lines. But if there's a range of between 49 and 52 lines, then you could have two different pieces of fragments in the Genizah with different numbers of lines and they could be from the same scroll.

Forty-three, 55, and 56 are replacement sheets between 51 and 52 lines per column. This is what the uncomplete sections look like. You can see here is a sheet, and this might actually be a replacement sheet, I'm not entirely sure. I discussed it with Mordechai Weintraub, and he agrees that it might be, but we need to do some more… we probably need better photos, actually, as well.

But from here all the way until the end of the Torah, with the exception of three sheets, is the complete Torah. Well, there’s actually another lacuna, or couple more lacunae. But other than these, what do we have here? One, two, three, four chunks that are missing. And by the way, here it's a significant amount that’s missing. We're missing all of the first column and then almost the entire complete third, fourth, and fifth columns, and there could be another column we're missing, I don't remember. But other than that, it's almost a complete scroll.

So, look what happened here, it's very like… because this is so well preserved. A lot of the time, when you're dealing with a piece missing like this, you’ll look at it and you're like, “Okay, it was consumed by mold or something like that,” and you’ll see traces of the mold all over the scroll. That’s not the case here. This was eaten by a rodent. Almost certainly, this was eaten by a rodent; he was chomping on that thing, and you can kind of even see where… maybe it was a group of rodents. It’s kind of sad, but the rest of the scroll is complete except for little holes in other places. But here, it looks like at the beginning of the scroll the rodents went to work. And now that I’m thinking about it - I hadn’t thought about this before - but go back to the previous image. If you look at the third column there, the entire left half of the third column is missing. How did they know to attach this to the fourth column?

It just occurred to me that these rodents might have been in Saint Petersburg, not in the Cairo Genizah, and that’s how they knew. Because if this was pulled out of the Cairo Genizah, which was a synagogue in Cairo where this stuff was stuck for 1,000 years; I don’t know if that piece on the far right would have even been attached… it wouldn’t have been attached, right? So how would they have known to connect it to the rest of it?

So now I wonder if this happened in Saint Petersburg sometime in the 1800s and they were like, “Oh, okay, this piece is lying next to that piece, and they’re obviously in a very similar handwriting and it’s a continuation of the same scroll.” I don’t know that for sure.

The white sheet that's been put in the background, that definitely was restored in Saint Petersburg.

Nelson: Wow.

Nehemia: I guess I don't know that for sure either. Maybe it was restored by Firkovitch or somebody who bought it from Firkovitch, I don't know. In any event, most of the scroll is much better preserved than this.

And here I just want to jump in with a comment. So, people are like, “Well, wait a minute Nehemia, don't we have the Dead Sea Scrolls that have the Torah?” Yeah, but we don't have a full copy of the Torah from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Our earliest complete copy of the entire Tanakh is the Leningrad Codex. What is our earliest complete copy of the Torah? I don't know the answer to that question. That’s a good question; we should find that out.

And this is incomplete, its missing little pieces, but this might be the earliest complete… and here, I'm talking about not just Torah scrolls, I’m talking about Torah scrolls and Codexes. Codexes are in book form. So, is there a codex that's earlier than this that has the complete Torah? I don't know the answer to that question. It's a good question. I don't think there is, I think this is the earliest complete Torah, or almost complete Torah, of anything, not just of scrolls. But I could be wrong, I don't know.

Now, we have fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls, pieces. It might be a few sheets; it might be parts of a few sheets. There, you definitely had mold and all kinds of problems. You had bat dung that was falling on them from the caves and stuff like that, so they were damaged. So, it's a really good question. I don't know the answer here, if this is the oldest Torah.

Nelson: So, Nehemia, a few minutes ago during the presentation, you had mentioned that there's a consensus that a scroll called the Bologna Scroll is the oldest complete Torah scroll. Have you had a chance to look at that?

Nehemia: So, I’ve looked at photographs of it. I was in Ravenna, which is near Bologna, and I asked to see it and they said no. But hopefully in the coming months I will be able to examine the Bologna Scroll directly and carry out some scientific tests on it. That is one of the objectives of the research that we're carrying out, the Institute of Hebrew Bible Manuscripts Research.

Nelson: Part of the reason why the Bologna Scroll comes to mind for me is also because it had a very interesting phenomenon with the name of God, the Tetragrammaton, that you spoke about in your PhD dissertation.

Nehemia: Right. So, what happened there is… well, in general it had an interesting phenomenon, which is that somebody forgot a word, and when you forget a word there’s actually… So, here’s an important point; the Torah scroll was used for rituals, and so it had to conform to a very specific set of rules. Whereas that wasn't necessarily the case in the codex, sometimes they were used for rituals, but the people who usde them for rituals weren't holding them to the same set of rules as a Torah scroll.

One of the rules is that if you make a mistake, you write the mistake above the line, unless the mistake is at the margin, then you can write it in the margin. Well, what if you make a mistake in the middle of the line? Are you allowed to put the word in the margin like we do today when we correct things? And the answer is 100% no, you're not allowed to do that. And in the Bologna Scroll he did it repeatedly. And he not only did it for regular words, he did it for the name of God, which is a double no-no. There are sources going back to the time of the Talmud that say you're not allowed to do that, or even earlier than the Talmud. Tannaitic sources that say you’re not allowed to do that.

Yet the scribe of the Bologna Scroll, who was in the 13th century, did it. And why did he do it? Because he wanted to, or that was his tradition to do that. So, we have a bunch of rules, but people didn't always follow the rules, which is one of the major themes of my PhD dissertation. Alright, let's watch some more.

And I'm going to share some of the characteristics of this scroll. Like I said, I wanted to do two scrolls, and I realized I don’t have time to show everything for this scroll, so I'll do my best here.

So, we've got pricking marks with ruling lines that you can clearly see.

So, one of the rules for writing Torah scrolls is that it has to have what's called sirtut, which is ruling lines, and ruling lines are… we get a notebook today, and it's got those lines that are printed on it. Well, what did they do back then? First of all, they didn't have pencils. Pencils didn't exist, certainly not around the year 1000, to the best of my knowledge. Certainly not in the Western world, or maybe they did, and I don’t know if it existed in China or not, but in this part of the world they didn’t exist.

And so, Torah Scrolls were required, even today, to be written with ruling lines. And the ruling lines, they take a sharp instrument, and they scratch the line along a ruler; they literally have a straight edge, and they scratch it to make a straight line. And then in some writings, they write with the base of the letter on the line - that's what we do in English; that's not what they do in Hebrew. In Hebrew writing, the letters hang from the line, and you can actually kind of see that even in this photo, that there's almost a straight line with the top of the letters, and that lines up with the ruling line.

And what's the pricking mark? Well, how do you know where to hold the ruler? You need two lines to hold the ruler between, or two dots, and so they would make a hole in the parchment at regular intervals, and they would do it on the other side of the parchment. And then they would scratch, incise, sometimes with the back of the… they didn't use a quill, they use something called a kulmus, “a reed.” With the back of the reed or with some other sharp instrument, they would scratch in this ruling line, these vertical ruling lines. You can see the vertical ruling lines there. The horizontal ones you can't see so well; you kind of see them, I can see them, but you can definitely see the pricking marks.

And we don’t always see the pricking marks, because the pricking marks are considered ugly, so they would usually do it way at the edge of either side of the sheet of a Torah scroll, and then they would cut that part out, or they would fold it over when they sewed the two sheets together. A Torah scroll is made of pages, or really sheets, we call them, yiriot in Hebrew, sheets that are sewn together. And a lot of times, usually they were either trimmed off, the pricking marks, or they were folded over and hidden by the sewing, by the seam. But in this case, you can actually see them, which is kind of cool.

Nelson: Thank you Nehemia, I was actually going to ask about “a sheet.” What is a sheet? So, you answered that question for me before I even...

Nehemia: “Sheet” is a translation of the Hebrew term; there’re really pages, but in Hebrew we called them sheets. Some libraries called them membranes. I'm not a fan of that term, but it's just as good as any. Yiriot, “sheets,” is the Hebrew term.

And it's interesting, let's think about it for a minute - there's some interesting thing about “the sheet.” It's been argued that… the Tabernacle uses the same word - sheets - for the tent around the Tabernacle, or not the tent, the outer courtyard. And then those sheets were held up with hooks, and the word for that hook is Vav, as in the letter Vav, because Vav actually means “a hook”, not a tent peg. It’s actually “a hook”.

So, some people have argued… Dr. David Moster, who’s been on this program, has argued that when they would begin each column of the Torah scroll with the Vav, he calls it a “visual Midrash.” I don't know if I’ve mentioned that in this lecture or not. But it's the idea of, “Okay if we have these yiriot, these sheets, let's take another piece of terminology from the Tabernacle, which is the Vav of the column…” Oh, and then each column is called “the column”.

So, it's a play on words there, because the word “column” is something that holds up a sheet or a pillar. We say “pillar” in English, but in Hebrew it’s the same word - column, pillar, amud - but it's also a column of text. And so the sheet is broken up into several columns, and then each column at the top is held up by a Vav, and in this case it's literally the letter Vav. So that’s kind of cool.

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