In this episode of Hebrew Voices #221 - Section Breaks in Hebrew Bible Manuscripts: Part 1, Nehemia and research assistant Nelson Calvillo explain the section breaks found in Hebrew Bible manuscripts going all the way back to the Dead Sea Scrolls, explore why they vary between different manuscripts and how that can alter meaning.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Hebrew Voices #221 – Section Breaks in Hebrew Bible Manuscripts: Part 1

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: It’s beautiful. “Anyone who makes a piska errs and he has not learned anything.” So, he’s not only removing the open section of the original scribe, he’s saying the original scribe is an ignoramus. That’s amazing! It’s like everybody’s got an opinion. He’s actually insulting the original scribe who wrote this manuscript.

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Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Nelson Calvillo, who is a research assistant at the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research. Shalom, Nelson.

Nelson: Shalom, Nehemia. Thank you so much for letting me join you today.

Nehemia: I’m excited, Nelson. We both went to an academic conference in November… November 24th, 2024, and I presented there on The Correction of Parshiot in Medieval Hebrew Bible Manuscripts; that’s the big fancy name for this topic. And I wanted to share that with the audience. And you actually helped me with a lot of this research. I would set you loose and you would go find like, amazing things, and I want to share with the people some of the findings. And also, I want you to share the experience of what it was like. Because sometimes I wouldn’t say, you know, “Go find me this specific thing,” I would say, “Go look for stuff.” And who knows what you’re going to find, right? So, what was that like?

Nelson: It was pretty exciting. There were times where you did ask me to find specific things. For example, I think one of our big topics today… you asked me to search through different manuscripts and look for basically things that seemed out of place or things that didn’t seem natural to the flow of the text. And then other times, you did say, “Find me something on this side of the page or that side of the page.” And I was essentially looking for the same kind of discrepancies; anything that seemed out of place, anything that seemed like it interrupted the flow of the text or any of what we call the marginal notes.

So, it was a great experience for me because I learned so much more about manuscripts just by seeing things that weren’t supposed to be there, and then getting acclimated to the different hands, the different hand of each scribe in each manuscript. In a sense it’s a lot like today, when, even though we don’t really write, we type, mostly, but we don’t really hand write that much anymore. But it was a lot like trying to decipher someone’s handwriting just 1,500 years ago, give or take. So, it was very educational for me in that sense, and it allowed me to be really, really hands on in terms of observing the way some scribes worked, the way some scribes made mistakes and then either corrected their own mistakes or another scribe sometime later came along and corrected that mistake. So, it was really something I greatly appreciated. Even though I did spend a lot of time on it, I learned so much that I really don’t think I could learn while reading a book.

Nehemia: Yeah, there’s definitely something to be said for that. Like, the experience of actually doing the work, you know, there’s no book that can teach you… like… It’s cliche, but the famous example is, you can write a PhD on chocolate and what it tastes like, and then you can taste it. And there’s no amount of writing that could explain what it tastes like. So, that’s very interesting. And I don’t think we should underestimate what a big deal it is for someone to say, “Go find me something which doesn’t fit.” Well, first you have to know what fits, right? You have to really understand the flow of the text… And so, anyway, it’s amazing things you found.

We’re going to talk about the parshiyot, or the section divisions. So, section divisions… what do we mean about the… and really, what we call these in English is the open and closed sections. And, you know, often I’ll be studying with Lynell, and she’ll read a verse, and then she reads another verse, and another verse, and then she keeps reading. I’m like, “No, no, that’s a different prophecy.” She’s like, “Well, how do you know that?” Well, it’s right there in the manuscript, right? And then later, in printed editions, that’s recorded.

Meaning, we have these chapter divisions that were cre...