[Avodah] Moshe Rabbenu's Sefer Torah

[Chanoch (Ken) Bloom]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 11:44:37AM +0300, Michael Makovi wrote:
> My own thoughts: In the Temple, they found three scrolls and took a
> majority of each textual reading; the reason, as it seems to me, is
> that they had nothing else to go by, and this was the best they could
> do. It seems to me that contra R' Zvi Yehuda's version of Hazon Ish,
> this is *precisely* the same as an academic historical attempt! Now,
> perhaps their method was crude by modern academic standards, but the
> point is that they used historical evidence - these three Torah
> scrolls - to reconstruct as best they could what they thought was the
> best textual version. (Today they'd also use whatever it is that
> modern academic scholars do.) Presumably, in the Temple, had they
> found the three scrolls AND Moshe Rabbenu's scroll, they would have
> ignored the three scrolls and gone with Moshe's alone. In short: they
> went by a majority of the three scrolls, not because of any sort of
> halakhic al-pi-rov lo ba-shamaim hi, but rather, because
> scientifically, when you don't know what the best reading is, your
> best bet, pragmatically, is to go by majority. But if there's no
> safeiq, then you don't go by majority. And thus, Rambam followed the
> Aleppo Codex, and not the rov.
> 
> So as far as I can tell, I think it is clear that we'd go by the text
> of Moshe Rabbenu's scroll. On the other hand, Moshe's own scroll
> itself might be treif. First, it'd probably be smudged, have some
> fading letters, etc. Second, it'd be in ketav ivrit, but our scrolls
> must be in ketav ashurit. But even though the scroll itself would be
> treif, the textual reading found therein, once transcribed into fresh
> clean writing in ketav ashurit, would be kosher. (Professor Leiman,
> ibid., notes that one can write a kosher sefer torah from an unkosher
> source text, such as a humash. I don't know the laws of this, so I'll
> take his word for it.)

Assuming, of course, that one could still read the text despite the
smudges and fading letters. If not, you need to fill in those words
from some other reliable source.

Since there had to be some reason for choosing the sifrei torah that
were in the mikdash versus others that were outside the mikdash, I
would imagine (in my limited knowledge) that the three sifrei torah in
the mikdash had some chazaka as being *the standards* and that they
were well kept and ancient. One (if not more) of them may very well
have been Moshe Rabbeinu's sefer Torah.  (Remember he wrote one for
each tribe plus one that was stored in the Aron.)

I also imagine that there were very few disagreements betweent he
scrolls, and that those were attributable primarily to degradation of
a small number of letters in the text.

So before you could go ahead and say "I'll use Moshe Rabbenu's
scroll", first examine the condition of Moshe Rabbenu's scroll and see
whether it could be used.

-- 
Chanoch (Ken) Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/
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