The History of the Hebrew Bible

PIKESVILLE, Maryland — The eighth biblical portion in Numbers is Pinchas (25:10-30:1). It begins in the middle of chapter 25. In the prior section 25:1-9, we read the episode of some Israelites “committing harlotry with Moabite women.”

Verse ten starts a new event, in which God praised Pinchas for killing an Israelite male and a Moabite female who were involved in the act.

Arnold Ehrlich asks, “Why did God give Pinchas such a large reward for his behavior?” Since Ehrlich was always sensitive to the style and wording of the Torah, he noticed that 25:14 is unusual. Often, the Torah does not identify the name of a person who performs a misdeed. In verse 14, it not only names each of the murdered couple but also relates something significant about them.

He explains that verse 14 reveals that Pinchas’s heroic actions merited his reward. The man he killed was a chief of the tribe of Shimon, and the woman was the daughter of a Midianite chief, powerful and influential people. Pinchas responded fearlessly to show fellow Israelites that their harlotry was contrary to Moses’ teaching. He did so without concern for revenge from the tribe of Shimon and the people of Midian.

The Pinchas portion ends with the first sentence of chapter 30, as 30:2 marks the beginning of a new narrative. The inappropriate beginnings and endings of chapters occur often, starting with a verse that belongs to a prior chapter. For example, the prior portion, Balak, begins with the second sentence of chapter 22, which is appropriate because it marks the start of a new narrative. Another strikingly egregious error is misplacing chapter beginnings and endings, such as placing the seventh day of creation in chapter two of Genesis when it belongs in chapter one. Chapter two should have started with 2:4.

To understand how this situation arose, it is essential to recognize the significant differences between today’s Torah and the original Torah.

The earliest manuscripts of the Torah and New Testament were not like today’s texts. The Bibles were written without spaces in between words. The Hebrew manuscripts did not have vowels, chapters, or verses.  The letters in the Hebrew Bible were the consonants of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, a script related to the Phoenician alphabet that evolved from the Proto-Canaanite script. After the Babylonian Exile in 586 BCE, the Jewish people began to use the square form of the Aramaic alphabet, which they observed being used by the people in Babylon, the land of their exile. The Aramaic alphabet became the modern Hebrew alphabet.

Although modern Hebrew letters were derived from Aramaic letters and often differ from the forms that existed during Moses’ time, some Jewish Mystics derived moral lessons from the forms of these modern letters. For example, the letter Bet, the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, signifies “house” or “dwelling place” for them, and that God dwells among people.

Both Greek and Latin were initially written right-to-left, mirroring the direction of the Phoenician and Hebrew predecessors. It was not until around 500 BCE that the left-to-right direction became standard in Greek writing. Latin writing almost always became left-to-right only after the first century BCE.

Reading the Torah publicly every week began with Ezra the Scribe, likely around 400 BCE. Torah portions were read on Mondays, Thursdays, and Shabbat to ensure the Israelites understood and adhered to God’s laws. Mondays and Thursdays were days when people came to towns for commerce and were good days for them to gather to read parts of the Torah.

While the annual cycle is the most common today, some Jewish communities in ancient times practiced a triennial cycle, where the Torah was read and completed over three years.

It was not until the fifth century of the common era that scribes called Masoretes, a word meaning “traditionalists,” who worked in Tiberias and Jerusalem in Israel between the fifth and tenth centuries, created spaces between words, added vowels to aid in pronouncing the words, and divided the writings into sentences and paragraphs.

The Hebrew scribe Aaron ben Asher finalized the version around 925 CE in a document known as the Aleppo Codex. It is also called in Hebrew Keter Aram Tzovah, “Crown of Aleppo,” and is the earliest known complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. Maimonides wrote that Aaron ben Asher’s work was the true Torah, and Jewry accepted his decision.

The codex was retained for five centuries in a synagogue in Aleppo until the synagogue was set on fire during an anti-Israel riot in 1947 as a rejection of the formation of a Jewish State. What occurred to the codex thereafter is unclear. When Israel acquired it in 1958, only about forty percent of it, including most of the Torah section, was missing. Only two more pages were recovered since then. Some additional pages may be hidden in private hands.

However, these were not the end of the changes that were made.

The division of the Bible into chapters, as we know them today, was done in the thirteenth century by Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury (c. 1150 – 9 July 1228). He was an English cardinal of the Catholic Church and Archbishop of Canterbury from 1207 until he died in 1228. The dispute between King John of England and Pope Innocent III over his election was a significant factor in the crisis that produced the Magna Carta in 1215.

Before him, some Christian scholars tried other divisions, but Langton’s system, used in the Wycliffe English Bible of 1382, became the standard.

This change was supplemented in the 16th century, by Robert Estienne (1503-1559), an eminent Parisian printer and scholar, who invented the verse numbering system we use today.

The Geneva Bible, published in 1560, was the first to feature chapter and verse divisions as we know them today.

Langton’s division of the Bible into chapters was messy. Judaism accepted it simply because the chapters made it easy to find a text. For instance, all we need to say is, “You will find what you are searching for in chapter 22, verse 2.” Also, if we use the same system as the Christians, we can communicate easily with them about the Bible.

Everyone makes mistakes, without exception. However, the considerable number of Langton’s errors merits him a prominent place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the master of mistakes.

In short, it would be foolish to think the ancient Torah was written as we write books in the twenty-first century. The Torah had to be composed as other books at the time it was written, just as its content had to address the ancient mindset and work to improve it.

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Rabbi Dr. Israel Drazin is a retired brigadier general in the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps and the author of more than 50 books.