The Halakhah of the Humash
A Torah scroll carries no punctuation, but its spacing carries meaning: the open paragraph running to the end of the line, the closed one of nine letters, four blank lines between books. Works through what the sages counted and what they must have meant by a unit — 5,845 verses, each with exactly one etnachta — and notes that the chapter numbers everyone now uses came from a thirteenth-century English bishop.
Aside from critical and historical notions of how the Torah was composed and written and how its units are to be conceived, it is interesting to investigate the internal conceptualization within halakhah (Jewish law) of the various units, such as: the word, the sentence, the paragraph. The humashim (the five books of the Pentateuch) as the constituents of the structure known as the Sefer Torah, [Torah Scroll] obviously has a status of its own, above its being the totality of the other units.
We must assume that the sages had a notion of meaning, or unit, beyond the laws of writing, for the constituent parts of the Torah. We do not know how much they indulged in the niceties of grammar, but the mesorah (tradition) knows of numbers of letters, words, sentences, parshiot (chapters) and humashim [books]. They obviously thought of words as being names, persons, objects, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, although they had no corresponding terms for these units.
PETUHA - SETUMA
Though there is no punctuation in a Torah scroll, spacing in the writing connotes meaning. In the scroll there is a space between the words, equal to the space between the sentences. There is a space for the petuha, the open paragraph or parshah, which is the balance of the line, and a space of nine letters for the setuma, the closed paragraph. There is a space of four lines between one humash and the next one (see Figure next page). The petuha connotes a new paragraph whereas the setuma refers to a new subsection. Of the 379 setumot and 290 petuhot occuring in the Pentateuch, I shall present one example of each from the Book of Genesis to illustrate the differences between them.
The narrative of the changes of name of Abraham from Abram is followed, after a setuma (17:15), by that of Sarah from Sarai. By contrast, the episode
of Esau selling his birthright to Jacob is interrupted (25:34) by a petuha following the narrative of a famine during Isaac’s sojurn in Canaan.
SENTENCES
When we come to the notion of the sentence, it is more complex. While the sages counted a total of 5,845 pesukim [verses] and decided where in the reading the conclusion of a sentence should be indicated, it is more difficult to describe what definition for a sentence they had, if any, and whether it corresponded in any way to our ideas of subject, predicate and other concepts related to the structure of the sentence. In the trope (the musical chanting of the Torah) we do notice that they thought of something similar to the semicolon, because every sentence in the Torah has one, and not more than one etnachtah, which divides the pasuk into divisions of significance. Exceptions are very short sentences.
PARSHAH - CHAPTER
Parshiot [chapters] here do not refer to the portions of the weekly reading, which are subject primarily to considerations of roughly equal quantities of textual material, and are definitely associated with theme and content. We find the rabbis in the Talmud and midrashim dealing with parshiot as units of subject matter, considering questions of proximity or semikhut, and whether there is a chronological order determining the sequence of paragraphs. It should be noted that the chapter numbers used so widely today, even in traditional circles of scholarship, are completely outside of Jewish origin, and were instituted by an English bishop named Langton in the 13th century.
PARSHAH - WEEKLY PORTION
The word parshah, however, is used in another sense. When the sefer torah is read in the synagogue, the parshat hashavua, the portion designated for each shabbat and the week after, is subdivided into sections called aliyot. That is, when worshippers are called to the Torah, the section read by them, or for them by the official reader, or baal keriah, sometimes called the baal koreh, is also known by the word parshah. There is a total of 54 parshiot in the course of a year. For example, on Shabbat, seven people are called to the reading. We digress here to offer a theory of why the number of seven was
chosen for the Shabbat torah reading of the weekly parshah. It is based on an examination of the verses in Exodus which refer to the ascents of Moses, the aliyah if you will, to Mount Sinai. There are seven such ascents (Ex. 19:3; 19:8; 19:20; 20:21; 24:1; 24:9; 24:12). In addition, according to tradition, the “Torah was given on Sabbath” (Talmud Bavli Shabbat 81b).
JEWISH LAW RELATING TO INDIVIDUAL BOOKS OF THE PENTATEUCH
But what is the humash (individual book such as Genesis or Exodus), and how does Jewish law deal with it? Is it simply a quantitative division, similar to the parshiot hashavuah (weekly Torah portions) for purposes of convenience of handling by individuals and the schools? Or does the humash have some standing similar to the sanctity of the sefer torah as a whole? The question becomes sharper if we assume that Moses gave a unity to the Pentateuch, which preceded the division into humashim, rather than assuming that first there were five books which later were united into one. The passage about “Torah Megillah Megillah Nitnah” (the Torah was revealed section by section) (Talmud Bavli Gittin 60a) can hardly be taken as referring to complete humashim, as opposed to smaller units of subject matter.
In shedding some light on this question, the decisions cited below from the article on humash in the Encyclopedia Talmudit are not necessarily Halakhah Pesukah, finalized rulings, but reflect on at least concepts temporarily entertained with regard to the entity we call a humash.
It is permissible to write each humash separately. Humashim do not have the Kedushah [sanctity] of the complete sefer torah. In the Talmud Yerushalmi they said that Torah and humashim have the same sanctity. What is greater about the sefer torah is that it is read publicly. Also, the mitzvah (commandment) of writing a Torah is fulfilled thereby. Humashim written by a scribe on parchment may be sewn together to make a complete Torah. A minor holding a humash in the form of a scroll counts for a minyan (a quorum of ten adult males). All the sifrei torah (books of the Torah) we have are not made according to the laws of Moses given at Sinai, and are permitted only because of et laasot, “It is time to do for the Lord, so they abrogate Your Torah.” And so the same can be said for humashim. Humashim should not be written in Hebrew together with a translation because as the sheets fall on each other, the profane falls on the sacred. In our day, when learning Torah is
from printed books and not from scrolls, the mitzvah of writing a Sefer Torah should be transformed into a mitzvah of writing separate humashim, which should remain the property of the writer and not sold to others. Contributions of $25.00 and over are U.S. tax deductible when paid to P.E.F. Israel Endowment Fund, Inc., 317 Madison Ave., Suite 607, New York, N.Y. 10017
IMPORTANT
Please stipulate that the recipient of your contribution is
the Jewish Bible Quarterly, P.OB. 29002,
Jerusalem, Israel.
Jacob Chinitz was ordained at Yeshiva University and is a member of The Rabbinical Assembly. He has taught at several colleges and written over 100 articles for many journals. He has served as rabbi at numerous congregations, and is currently at Congregation Shaare Zedek, Montreal. His book In My Opinion, a collection of 60 essays previously published in 17 journals, appeared in 2000.
Cite this article
Jacob Chinitz. "The Halakhah of the Humash." Jewish Bible Quarterly 32, no. 1 (January – March 2004).
Jacob Chinitz. "The Halakhah of the Humash." Jewish Bible Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 1, 2004.