Shavuot Redux~ How Many Letters are in a Sefer Torah?

In honor of shavuot that celebrates the giving of the torah, a repost from the talmudology archives.

קידושין ל, א

לפיכך נקראו ראשונים סופרים, שהיו סופרים כל האותיות שבתורה, שהיו אומרים: וא"ו דגחון חציין של אותיות של ספר תורה, דרש דרש  חציין  של תיבות, והתגלח של פסוקים

Therefore the early sages were called "counters" - soferim - because they counted all the letters of the Torah. They used to say: the letter vav of the word Gachon (Lev.11:42) is the half-way point of the letter of a Torah. The words "darosh darash" (Lev. 10:16) represent the half way point of the number of words in the Torah. The verse that begins with the word "Vehitgalach" (Lev.13:33) is the half way point of the number of verses in the Torah...

This page of Talmud covers some important material for those interested in the way in which Judaism and science interact.   The business of counting the letters in the Torah was apparently taken very seriously - so much so that one of the names by which the rabbis of the Talmud were known  - soferim - means "those who count."  To this day, the person who handwrites a Sefer Torah is called a counter (סופר), and not a writer (כותב). The Talmud emphasizes that this counting exercise was taken so seriously that the letters, words and verses were counted, and counted again. 

קידושין ל, א

בעי רב יוסף וא"ו דגחון מהאי גיסא או מהאי גיסא א"ל ניתי ס"ת ואימנינהו מי לא אמר רבה בר בר חנה לא זזו משם עד שהביאו ספר תורה ומנאום

Rav Yosef asked a question: This letter vav of the word Gachon, is it part of the first half or part of the second half of the letters of the Torah? They said to him, "let us bring a Torah scroll and count! For didn't Rabbah bar bar Channah say in a similar context: "They did not move from there until they brought a Torah scroll and counted all its letters"...

The View of Tradition, And OF the Journal Tradition

Writing in Tradition in 1964, the late scholar Louis Rabinowitz (d. 1984) asked how Orthodox Jews should regard the text of the Torah , "...upon which depends the whole enduring magnificent structure of the Oral Law and the Halakhah, in comparison with those texts which show variants from it?"  Here is his reply:

“The answer is surely simple and logical. “The early scholars were called Soferim,” declares the Talmud (Kid. 30a) “because they were wont to count (soferim) all the letters of the Torah.” The meticulous manner in which they carried out this task is sufficiently indicated in the same passage by the information which it elicited to the effect, for instance, that the vav of gachon (Lev. 9:42 - [sic]) marks the half-way mark of the letters of the Torah, the words darosh darash of Lev. 10:16 the dividing line between the words...


With what loving care and sacred devotion, then, did they jealously guard every letter of the text! What exhaustive and detailed regulations they laid down in order to ensure that the copying of the scrolls should be completely free from human error! There has been nothing like it in the history of literature or religion, and in this respect the Massoretic text stands indisputably in a class by itself.”

— Louis Rabinowitz. Torah Min Ha-Shamayim.Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought, 1964-5: 7;1: 34-45

Leaving aside the ironic typographic error that mis-references the location of the vav of Gachon, was the late rabbi Rabinowitz correct in remarking on the "loving care and sacred devotion," with which "they jealously guard every letter of the text"?

So how many letters are there in a Torah?

There are varied counts given for the number of letters in the Torah, but a couple of results seem to be most popular.

• 304, 805 From here, and here and here, and from Even-Shoshan (see below).

• 304,801 From here.

One website shares the source code used to count the words and letters in Torah; its results are shown below, and are off by four when compared to others who claim to have counted.

Letters and Words in the Torah
	Words	Lettlers
בראשית	20,614	78,063
שמות	16,714	63,527
ויקרא	11,950	44,790
במדבר	16,408	63,529
דברים	14,295	54,892
TOTAL	79,981	304,801

And How Many Verses Are There?

The same website gives a count of 5,844 verses in the Torah.  Rabbi Yair Chaim ben Moses Bachrach (d. 1702), author of the Chavot Ya'ir, notes that there are 5,845 verses in the chumashim he used. But today's daf of Talmud records that there are 5,888 verses. And here is the count from Even-Shoshan's קונקורדנציה חדשה (New Concordance of the Bible):

From Even-Shoshan (ed.) A New Concordance of the Bible. Kiryat Sefer, Jerusalem 1987.

Side-Bar: From Where did Even-SHoshan Get his word count?

Even-Shoshan lists his reference as Rabbi Chaim Mordechai Brecher, who published a Yiddish translation of the entire Hebrew Bible. (Brecher was born in what is now the Ukraine in 1880 and died in New York in 1965.  His Yiddish translation was published in New York in 1941, and was republished six times, the last in 1957.)  At the end of the second volume of his translation (p. נא), R. Brecher addressed the thorny question of the letter and word counts in our Torahs, and had this to say:

The truth is, this [question of how many words there are in a Sefer Torah] is astonishing, and I couldn't rest because of it. So I decided to count them, and I, myself, counted all the words in the entire Torah. In order to make it clear to the reader that I didn't make a mistake in my count, I am here providing a list of all the verses in all the chapters as they are currently divided...My count is correct. As the ancient wise men say: Love Plato, love Aristotle, and love the truth most of all.

R. Brecher's total word count is 79,976 (although this count actually comes from here) - and so his half way point in the Torah is word #39,988. 

The Misplaced Middle of the Torah

Now back to today's page of Talmud. According to it, the middle letter of the Torah is the Vav of the word Gachon, (גחון) found in פרשת שמיני. However this claim is way off. Since there are about 304,805 letters in the Torah scrolls in use today, (I say about because of what we have just noted regarding the precise count,) the middle letter would be letter # 152,403, the first word of this verse (Lev 8.29):

ויקרא פרק ח פסוק כט 

ויקח משה את החזה ויניפהו תנופה לפני יקוק מאיל המלאים למשה היה למנה כאשר צוה יהו–ה את משה 

However the Vav of the word Gichon, is letter #157,236 - off by 4,833 letters. Oy.

It's no better regarding the words. If we go with the actual word count as being 79,980, then the middle words are # 39,990 and #39,991. These are the words יצק אל in verse below (Lev. 8:18):

ויקרא פרק ח פסוק טו 

וישחט ויקח משה את הדם ויתן על קרנות המזבח סביב באצבעו ויחטא את המזבח ואת הדם יצק אל יסוד המזבח ויקדשהו לכפר עליו

But the middle words of the Torah, according to Today's daf, are דרש דרש found over 900 words later (Lev.10:16):

ויקרא פרק י פסוק טז 

ואת שעיר החטאת דרש דרש משה והנה שרף ויקצף על אלעזר ועל איתמר בני אהרן הנותרם לאמר

That's a lot of letters to miscount, especially if your name is "the counter." Several suggestions have been made to address these discrepancies:

1.  The text of the Torah that the rabbis of the Talmud were using was significantly different to the one we use today.  This is possible, but then why does the Talmud never cite of any of these extra words and verses? The discrepant count is about 3% - that's a lot of missing text.

2.  The rabbis in the Talmud were not good at math. Again, possible, but the Talmud claims that they took the counting so seriously that they were called COUNTERS. It also claims that they undertook the counting exercise on several different occasions.  Were they really that bad at math?

3. The rabbis in the Talmud didn't mean this count to be taken literally. While many apologists like this answer, it is at total odds with the text. The Talmud states: they counted.

4.  The rabbis guesstimated the count. Perhaps the rabbis never really counted, but guessed at where the middle of the Torah lay: somewhere in the middle of the middle of the Five Books. After that, the letter vav of the word Gachon became the official midpoint, even though it was not accurate.  The problem with this suggestion is again, that the Talmud states that the soferim actually counted, and counted again. Not that they guessed, and guessed again.  

Science, Math and Judaism

Of all the scientific disciplines, it is mathematics that is first introduced to us. We teach toddlers to count, sometimes before they can even walk, and we all pursue some kind of mathematical training through high school.  Unlike medicine or physics or biology or astronomy, mathematics is something we all do, to some degree.  And we all understand what counting means.  This passage in the Talmud is the most readily understandable example of a conflict between science and Judaism. It is a conflict in which the basic text of rabbinic Judaism declares a fact that is, well, just not a fact. Some  find this conflict to be so intellectually troubling that their only path is to reject Jewish practice. Others, equally aware of the conflict, are comfortable with their intellectual position in which the scientific inaccuracies of the Talmud require no wholesale rejection of Jewish practice. Where do you fit on this spectrum, and, perhaps more importantly, what can you do to engage in a respectful dialogue with those whose opinions on these matters are not your own?

May you be blessed with a meaningful Shavuot.

Aaron Levy of London, Long Zanvil of Australia, and the 27,000 Mile Mission to Obtain a Get

גיטין ב,א

המביא גט ממדינת הים צריך שיאמר בפני נכתב ובפני נחתם

If an envoy brings a Get to Israel from abroad, he must declare "it was written in my presence and signed in my presence" (Gittin 2a)

The Neptune, a convict ship that brought prisoners to Australia.

In the first chapter of Gittin, we have been addressing the laws that apply to an envoy (שליח) who is charged with bringing a Get, a Jewish Bill of Divorce, to a woman living overseas.  Such cases were clearly prevalent, so much so that they open this tractate, devoted to the rules of divorce.

For many hundreds of years, these messengers carried out their religious duties and delivered the Get, but did so without much recognition in our literature.  Today, one such envoy will be recognized for perhaps the most arduous trip ever undertaken to deliver a Get. That trip, which began in 1830, was from London to Sydney, Australia, and back again. It covered over 27,000 nautical miles and took close to thirteen months. The trip is detailed in Jeremy Pfeffer's book From One End of the Earth to the Other, from where the following information is taken. 

Rabbi Aaron Levy of Lissa

The envoy who undertook this daunting trip was Aaron Levy, born in 1795 in western Poland. He arrived in London in 1811, where he taught in cheder and worked as a calligrapher and sofer. At the time, many convicted of crimes were sentenced to exile in Australia. Of the Jewish population of Australia, which numbered about 1,550, about 44%  - some 684 (!) - were convicts. Rabbi Levy was to find one of those convicts - a serial counterfeiter who used many aliases - by the name (or rather a name) of  Samuel Levi. Levi had been sentenced to death in London for repeated crimes of  counterfeiting, but the sentence had been commuted to transportation for life in 1808.  Samuel had left behind his wife in London, and now, after some 29 years of marriage, she wanted to obtain a Get and divorce him. Here is the charge to Levy, as recorded in the notes of the London Bet Din:

On 23rd Menachem Av 5590 [August 12, 1830] there appeared before us...a woman Mindela who is commonly known as Minka bat Yehuda Leib, and she appointed R. Aaron ben R. Yehuda of Lissa to be her agent to receive a Get from her husband Samuel who is commonly known as Long Zanvil ben Mordechai ben Meir who lives in Sydney on the sea coast in the State of South Wales...And let it be known that after discussing the matter the Gaon, Head of the Bet Din, and the Bet Din determined that the above R. Aaron, who is the agent for receipt (שליח לקבלה) of the above woman, will first affect the Get as an agent of acceptance before a Bet Din and witness to the handing over [of the Get].  And after he has received the Get from him with the intent of receiving, he will instruct the man to appoint him as his agent of delivery (שליח להולכה) and execute the Get as is required for an agent for transmission.

The kind of agency that Rabbi Levy used was not common. Usually the envoy was acting on the husband's behalf to deliver a Get to his wife. Here however, Levy was acting on the wife's behalf to receive the Get from her husband. Once Levy received the Get, it would immediately take effect, even if the good rabbi never made it back to London. In addition Rabbi Levy would have to act as a Sofer and write the Get, and convene a Bet Din in Australia to verify the procedure.  But first he would have to find Long Zanvil.

R. Levy left for Australia on August 17, 1830 and arrived some three months later, on December 21, 1830.  While there, he managed to track down Long Zanvil and convinced him to give a Get to his estranged wife. He then wrote the Get, and found five Jewish laymen: three to to act as a Bet Din and two to witness the handing over of the Get from the husband to the Rabbi. Rabbi Levy stayed in Sydney for five months, during which time his skills as a Sofer were put to good use. He sold a new Sefer Torah to the community, which he likely wrote himself, and repaired mistakes in several others.  

In early May 1831, Levy set sail to London, with a cow, a gift from the Jewish community of Sydney, which would provide him with fresh milk during his long voyage.  He arrived home after four months at sea, and a couple of weeks later the London Bet Din convened a session to formally hand over the Get to Minka. Here is what happened, as recorded in the notes of the London Bet Din: 

On the 27th of Tishrei 5592 [October 4, 1831], further to what is written above, the Gaon, Head of the Bet Din, executed the Get in accordance with the law of an agent for transmission...And when the agent gave the Get to the woman Mindela, who is commonly known as Minka bat Yehuda Leib, he declared "I wrote the Get with intent (לשמה) and the witnesses also signed it before me with the intent for the purpose of divorce.

Some Questions about the Voyage

A number of questions remain about the trip.  Here are a few of them:

1. Why did Mindela wait for over twenty years before asking for a Get?

2. Who financed the voyage, which cost about 100 pounds, which is over $15,000 today?

3. Why did Rabbi Levy undertake the voyage without knowing where Long Zanvil was living, and whether he was prepared to give a Get? 

Jeremy Pfeffer, the author of the book that details the trip, believes that there had to have been some communication between the couple, and that the voyage was likely financed by Rabbi Levy himself. Pfeffer writes:

To the best of our knowledge, he was not related to any of the parties involved nor did he receive any great monetary remuneration for the mission. Putting our contemporary cynicism aside, we may believe that his motives were simply altruistic; there was a wrong that needed to be corrected and he alone could do so. And so we may fairly conclude that he undertook the mission to Australia simply for its own sake and for the sake of Heaven, לשמה ולשם שמים.

Two years after his return from Australia, Rabbi Levy was appointed to the London Bet Din where he served as Dayan and Secretary. His mission, now all but forgotten, is a wonderful example of a rabbi doing the right thing to help a women obtain a Get. יהי זכרו ברוך.

Gittin ~ On Divorce, Then and Now

From Salon.com

Today, those learning in the one-page-of-talmud-a-day daf yomi cycle begin a new tractate, called Gittin. As its title suggests, it is focussed on the laws of divorce. So let's look at divorce in the western world.    

Divorce in the Western WOrld

As you can see in the chart below, the current average rate of divorce in the countries that make up the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is about two per thousand people; in the US the figure is almost three per thousand, while in Israel the figure is just below the OECD average. As you can see, in many countries the rate is lower than it was in 1995, but in nearly all it is much higher than it was way back in 1970.

Crude divorce rate, 1970, 1995 and 2012. From OECD Family Database.  

THE CHANGING RATES OF DIVORCE IN THE US

 In the 1970s there was a surge in the divorce rates in the US (and throughout the industrialized world), and in 1977 the sociologist Amir Etzioni issued a dire prediction. If the rates of divorce continued to rise as they had done over the preceding years, "not one American family" would be left intact by the 1990s. But by 1981 the divorce rates levelled off (and more couples were choosing to live together without getting married). By 1998 the divorce rate was 26% lower than it had been in 1979. (This data is found in Marriage, A History by Stephanie Coontz.)

“No party can oblige continuance in contradiction to its end and design.”

— Thomas Jefferson, in Norma Basch, Framing American Divorce. University Of California Press 2001.

In the US, statistics on rates of marriage and divorce are published by the National Center for Health Statistics, which is a branch of the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention.  The latest data for the US were published in 2021. These point out that the probability of divorce depends on the length of the marriage. Sadly the probability of divorce increases as the duration of the marriage increases.  The probability of a marriage of five years or less ending in divorce is about 20%; the probability of a marriage of twenty years ending in divorce is a massive 48%.  And second marriages fare a little worse: by ten years of marriage 32% of those married for the first time will have divorced in the US, compared to 46% of those in their second marriage.

In 2019 the US divorce rate dropped to its lowest rate in 50 years. But 2019 also saw the lowest rates of marriage in the US, which also reached a 50 year low. Perhaps the two go hand in hand.

Divorce rates in the US. Source: The New York Times.

Divorce in Christianity, The UK and the Colonial US

The Church essentially forbade divorce for most of its history, basing itself mostly on Mark 10:9: "what therefore God has joined, let no man put asunder." This left its mark on attitudes towards divorce. (We came across one example of the difficulty in obtaining a divorce when we examined King Henry VIII and his plight to get one of his marriages annulled.)  In the United Kingdom of 400 years ago, a divorce required a special Act of its Parliament; this, and its cost made it available only to those with money and privilege. It was only in 1857 that a new law was passed that removed divorce from the control of the Church and made it a civil affair. But husbands and wives were treated very differently by this new law. A husband could obtain a divorce on the grounds of his wife's adultery. But for a wife to obtain a divorce, she had to prove both adultery and an additional "matrimonial offense". The early colonists in the US had similar laws; divorce was allowed only in cases of adultery, habitual drunkenness, desertion, cruelty, or impotence. What we call today "no-fault" divorces have only been around since the 1970s.

JEWISH DIVORCE, THEN AND NOW

It is challenging to get a good count of the rates of divorce in the Jewish communities around the world.  One of the rare examples of such data can be found in Jeremy Pfeffer's book From One End of the Earth to the Other, which examines the London Bet Din in the first half of the nineteenth century, and its relationship to the Jewish convicts deported to Australia. (We will return to this fascinating book in our next post.) Pfeffer examined in great detail the marriage and divorce records of the London Bet Din, and discovered that between 1805 and 1855 there were 347 divorces. This turns out to be about one divorce per thousand married Jews, and he notes that the current rate of divorce is "an order of magnitude greater." In fact the current divorce rates in England and Wales are about twelve per thousand married persons, "and there is no reason to suppose that it is significantly lower amongst present day English Jews." 

“The indissolubility of marriage is a main principle of English law, asserted without any exception or reserve in the formularies of the Church, in which the parties pledge themselves, either to other, that they will live together so long as they both shall live, and until death shall part them.”

— Hector Davies Morgan (of Trinity College Oxford). The Doctrine and Law of Marriage, Adultery and Divorce. 1826. p214

Divorce Rates and Religious Committment

Another study published over 30 years ago reviewed the relationship between rates of divorce and levels of religious commitment. It was based on the 1981 Greater New York Population study which sampled over 4,000 Jewish households, and it made the following observation:

As one might expect, we see the lowest rate of divorce among the Orthodox. In comparison, we see a slight rise among the Conservative, a doubling among the Reform, and a quadrupling for those who do not identify themselves as members of the major denominations. It is the Orthodox community that is most frequently held up as the most effective transmitter of traditional Jewish family values, and these results are consistent with our thesis of a relationship between Jewish commitment and divorce. 

Further support for these findings can be found in more recent work from Focus on the Family ("a global Christian ministry dedicated to helping families thrive"). They report the following relationships between faith affiliation and divorce rates:

From Focus on the Family

Of course we have no idea about whether the lower rate of divorce among active Protestants, Catholics and Jews is because religious practice increases marital harmony or, as a cynic might claim, peer pressure makes those who are more actively religious are reluctant to divorce. Still, a 97% reduction in the divorce rate in those who are "actively Jewish" is pretty impressive.

As we have noted, it took many centuries for secular societies (even in countries that are deeply Catholic) and the church to allow for more equitable divorce laws. For most of that time, Jewish divorce law was in some aspects the most enlightened of any society.  It allowed for divorce on the grounds of incompatibility, but at the same time allowed only the husband to control the process. If he did not wish to divorce, no divorce could take place.   But the last great change to Jewish divorce law was over 900 years ago, when Rabbenu Gershom forbade a man from divorcing his wife against her will. It is probably time for orthodox Judaism to take another look at the issue. 

Sotah 45b ~ Talmudic Embryology

As we approach the end of Sotah, we turn our attention to a new topic: theories of embryonic development, and compare talmudic views with those of modern science. Here is what this page of Talmud - daf yomi - has to say on the topic:

סוטה מה, ב

מהיכן הולד נוצר מראשו וכן הוא אומר ממעי אמי אתה גוזי ואומר גזי נזרך והשליכי וגו' אבא שאול אומר מטיבורו ומשלח שרשו אילך ואילך

From where is the fetus formed? From its head, as the verse says (Ps.71:6): "From my mother's womb you pulled me out (gozi)". And it says later (Jeremian 7:29) "Pull out (gozi) your hair and throw it away.." [This second verse shows that the verb goz is used to describe the head. So the verse from Psalms must also refer to the head. According to Rashi the verse in Psalms should be read as "You formed me from my head."] Abba Shaul says that the fetus is created from its navel, and from there it sends out roots in all directions. (Sotah 45b)

Embryonic Development in Antiquity

In 1934, Joseph Needham, a British historian and embryologist, published A History of Embryology, in which he traced the history of how the embryo was thought to develop from antiquity to modern times. In this fascinating book we learn that Hippocrates (c. 460-370 BCE) believed that the fetus was formed by extracting breath from its mother, and that a series of small fires within the uterus gave rise to the bones and other organs of the embryo.  Aristotle (384-322 BCE) added some details about the role of the umbilical cord.  According to Needham, Aristotle understood that the role of the umbilicus was to nourish the fetus: The vessels of the umbilicus join onto the uterus like the root of a plant and through the cord the fetus receives its nourishment. Elsewhere, Aristotle claims that head of the fetus forms first. Galen (c. 129-216 CE) also used the analogy of the umbilicus serving like the root of a plant.  According to Galen, the embryo grew from menstrual blood, and then from the blood that nourished it through the umbilical cord.

What Actually Happens

Development of the Umbilical cord. A: The posterior body wall is established. B: the vitelline duct form as the cells form a head and tail end, fold inwards on their lateral sides. C: The umbilical cord forms as the yolk sac and vitelline duct fuse. From O'Donnell K. Glick P, Caty M. Pediatric Umbilical Problems. Pediatric Clinics of North America. 1988 24 (1) 792.

At its earliest stage the embryo consists of a sheet of cells, an amniotic cavity and a yolk sac. The sheet of cells develops a head (cranial) and bottom (caudal) end, and grows around most of the yolk sac. This enclosed yolk sac then grows into the gut of the embryo.  The part of the yolk sac that is not surrounded by the embryo is still connected to it by a thin tube called the vitelline duct.  This duct then fuses with the contained yolk sac, and forms a larger bundle of vessels we call the umbilical cord. This occurs between the 4th-8th week of gestation (calculated from the first day of the last menstrual cycle).  

It is clear then, that embryo does not grow from the head or from umbilical cord.  As you can see from the diagram, the fetus do not grow from the head. In fact the head develops from the early cells of the embryo as it takes on a cranial-caudal polarity, sometime around 3-4 weeks gestation, when the embryo is about 3mm in length. Neither does the embryo grow from the umbilical cord, as Abba Shaul claimed. In fact it is the umbilical cord that grows out from the early embryo, and not the other way around. (For more on talmudic embryology, see Samuel Kottek's 1981 paper Embryology in Talmudic and Midrashic Literature.)

As we will see in more detail in the winter of 2019, talmudic embryology reflected the prevailing Greek theories of the times. But those theories developed without the benefit of microscopes and the other tools later available to scientists. It was perfectly reasonable to claim that the embryo grew from its head, since even in antiquity the importance of the head for life was clear. No less unreasonable was the view that the embryo grew from the umbilical cord, for that cord does in fact sustain the embryo as it grows and matures inside the womb. But two wrong but reasonable theories does not make one correct one. Sometimes however, the rabbis of the Talmud were spot on with their embryology. For example, here is Rav Simlai (3rd century CE, and the rabbi who brought you the famous count of 613 commandments) describing how the fetus sits within the womb.  Compare his words below with the famous sketch of Leonardo Da Vinci.Then answer this question: How did he know?

“R. Simlai delivered the following discourse: What does an embryo resemble when it is in the bowels of its mother? Folded writing tablets. Its hands rest on its two temples, its two elbows on its two legs and its two heels against its buttocks. Its head lies between its knees, its mouth is closed and its navel is open, and it eats what its mother eats and drinks what its mother drinks...”

— Niddah 30b

Leonardo Da Vinci. Studies of the Fetus in the Womb. Drawn between 1510-1513.