Scribal Secrets by James S. Diamond;Robert Goldenberg;

Author:James S. Diamond;Robert Goldenberg; [Diamond, James S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781532648014
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2019-05-10T07:00:00+00:00

Figure 6: Genesis 2:4 as represented in a contemporary Torah scroll. Note the small letter he in the sixth line of text in this image. [Torah scroll by scribe Rabbi Gustavo Surazski. Scroll image courtesy of Temple Aliyah, Needham, Mass.]

Although there is no necessary connection between the enlarged bet of Genesis 1:1 and the small he here, the linkage between them is easily made. Both are in verses that narrate The Beginning, and if we follow the source critics, these are the verses which, respectively, open the two Creation stories.157

We can’t really say when or why this particular miniscule came to be. Emanuel Tov calls its occurrence “insignificant,” though he doesn’t explain why he says this.158 This is surprising, since it is hard to imagine any detail of the biblical text being insignificant, even a letter. We could theorize that minuscules like this point to the existence of an alternate textual tradition that got left, so to speak, on the cutting room floor. Minuscules serve that purpose well. They signal by their small size that they might not really belong in the word, and the word should be read without them. If this is the case here, then the text could be read, or might once have been read, like this:159

בבראם אלהים אלה תולדות השמים והארץ

This is the story of heaven and earth when God created them.

Such a reading is plausible because the word בהבראם (be-hibbar’am, “when they were created,” or more literally as a passive Niph‘al infinitive, “in their being created”) is awkward.

Removing the he to leave the five letters בבראם (be-var’am, “when [God] created them”), an active Qal infinitive, is smoother, though it requires a subject (אלהים God) to be added. We don’t know if such a reading ever existed, and because we don’t know, and because the minuscule here did establish itself in the Masoretic tradition—just when we cannot say—it was natural that midrash would come to supply what the received tradition forgot or did not record. It could even be argued that it was midrash that generated the he in its downsized form in the first place, and there never was an alternate textual tradition for this verse.

If this was so, the question then becomes: what midrashic interpretation might have led scribes to write the letter he in this verse diminutively?

Again, we can’t say. The most plausible one is a midrash that senses that the word בהבראם is indeed awkward, and cleverly breaks the word in two to get around the problem, the text now reading בה בראם (bah bera’am). The midrash does not parse these words literally, because they make no sense, but instead reads them imaginatively as ב-ה״ בראם (be-he bera’am, “with a he He created them”). In other words, the world, in this midrash, was created with the letter he. This is a different take on the Creation from the midrash on Genesis 1:1, in which the world was created with the letter bet. The two midrashim are not necessarily in conflict; they just make different points.

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