Fixing God's Torah: The Accuracy of the Hebrew Bible Text in Jewish Law (review)

God's Torah is perfect, restoring the soul; God's testimony is steadfast, making wise the simple.

Psalms 19.7

Therefore were the ancients called scribes [soferim], for they would enumerate all the letters in the Torah.

bKiddushin 30a

From the time writing was invented, scribes have made mistakes.

Moshe Sokolow

Frankly, I initially found the title of this book offputting. Insert Torah, accuracy, and Jewish law into the same sentence and it appears to be an Orthodox "no brainer." Combine Torah and fixing, however, and it presents itself, to an Orthodox reader, as an almost heretical oxymoron. Happily, reading Fixing God's Torah disabused me of my reservations.

B. Barry Levy, professor of religious studies and dean of the faculty of religious studies at McGill University, conducts us on a voyage of discovery that chronicles the traditional veneration of the Torah text yet surprises us by illustrating the genuinely critical lengths to which various rabbinical authorities were prepared to go in order to preserve their perception of its accuracy. Wielding talmudic passages and rabbinical responsa with the erudition and rhetorical dexterity of a talmid hakham (old world scholar), he enables his readers—scholars and laymen alike—to come to terms with the overt evidence of textual anomalies without surrendering their faith in either the Torah or in its rabbinic interpreters.

The "protagonist" of the book is Rabbi David [ben Solomon] Ibn Abi Zimra (Radbaz; Egypt, sixteenth century), prolific author of over 2,400 responsa, several of which—featured in the book—deal specifically with the validity of the textual transmission of the Torah. In one case, Radbaz discusses the propriety of changing a word in the Torah to conform to the spelling indicated by the Zohar. Another responsum comprises an important statement on the origin and authority of the Masorah (the collective scribal wisdom pertaining to the consonantal text of the Jewish Bible, its vocalization and accentuation) and the extent to which it should be used to determine the correct spelling of biblical words. A third deals with the letter waw in the word shlwm, "peace," in Nm 25.12, and whether it was necessary to follow a talmudic teaching that required it to be interrupted (ketu'ah). A fourth responsum considers a medieval suggestion to change the traditional reading of hw', "it," in Lev 25.33, to hi'.

Levy also examines the position of the outstanding Spanish sage Rabbi Solomon Ibn Adret (Rashba, d. 1310), whose own responsa served as a basis and precedent for Radbaz. He inquires, as well, into Radbaz's use of the Masoretic notes of Jacob ben Hayyim Ibn Adoniyah, who prepared the text for Daniel Bomberg's "Rabbinic Bible" (aka Mikra'ot gedolot). Finally, he concludes with a brief examination of the attempts that have been made since the sixteenth century to reconcile Torah texts with those of Talmud and midrash, with particular emphasis on the twenty-one discrepancies noted by Rabbi Akiva Eger (Poznan, nineteenth century) in his glosses to tractate Shabat.

Talmudic and midrashic literature, ranging from explicit references to variant readings among scrolls that were kept in the Temple precincts to allusions implicit in text-based hermeneutics, already testifies to the absence of complete uniformity among extant Torah texts. Given that testimony, it is difficult to comprehend why the suggestion of textual variation (mostly of the least invasive variety, comprising plene and/or defective spellings) should raise the hackles of religious Jews. Even granting that the minute care that was exercised in copying the Torah worked to severely limit the possibility of scribal deviation, ever since writing was invented scribes have made mistakes.

And yet, the importance of the accuracy of revealed Scripture—and the implications of its absence—is hardly unique to Orthodox Judaism or even to Judaism in general. Witness the following claim made on behalf of the Koran:

No other book in the world can match the Qur'an . . . The astonishing...