Parashat
Toldot
“And G-d said
to her: two nations are in your belly” (Genesis 25:23)
“Nations” is
written giyim with a yud, but we read it as goyim
with a vav. And Rashi also wrote that giyim is the text as
written. But the Gemara, in Brachot 57b, brought that what was written was goyim
with a vav, “And G-d said to her: two nations are in your belly -- do
not read goyim but giyim. Rabbi Yehuda said in the name of Rav:
these were Antoninus and Rabbi.” That is, according to the Talmud, in the Torah
it is written goyim with a vav, and therefore it said not to read
it as goyim but as giyim. And Mesoret HaShas wonders about this:
“In all the books and copyist originals it is written giyim and read as goyim.
It is a commandment to explain this.”
So we have come to fulfill this
commandment. We have already cited Radak’s opinion about variants in what is
written and what is read in our page on parashat Vayera
and we will add for you, the student who desires knowledge, the opinion of Meiri in his book “Kiryat Sefer,” the second
article. “And now we must clarify about defective and plene spelling and how we
decide in the cases where we found a disagreement between the Midrashim of
our rabbis OBM and the earlier Mesorah books written by linguistic scholars and
the precise books. For in the medrashim of our rabbis we have found ‘and to the
sons of the concubines,’ pilagsham is written, [without the yud]
and in the books of Mesorah it is written plenary (see what we wrote in parashat
Chaye-Sarah) and ‘When Moshe finished’ [kalot, with a vav].
In the Midrash they say that kalt is written and in the books of the
Mesorah it is plene. The same is with karnot -- karnt is written,
and there are many others like this.
“And I have seen by the Torah
greats that for anything which comes from the Talmud as a basic matter and from
which we derive some halacha we rely on the rabbis’ opinion, as in the cases of
karnot/karnt, sukkot/suct, totafot/toteft, we rely on the
ruling of the Talmud [see parashat
Chaye Sarah, where we wrote that the Mesorah is toteft, and not as
in the Gemara, and that is despite the Meiri’s opinion]. But everything which
comes by way of allegory, we rely on the book of Mesorah, and if we find a
disagreement within the books of Mesorah, we rely on the majority.”
His words are clear and enlightening;
if we find that the Mesorah disagrees with the Talmud on a matter which has no
halachic implications, as in our case, we do not follow the words of the
Gemara. This settles the Mesoret HaShas’s question, as Radak and Meiri attest
that there were errors and different versions of the text of the Torah.
And to greatly strengthen our
words we will bring an additional example from our parsha. “Go out to the field
and hunt me down some food” (Genesis 27:3). Food, tzeidah, is written
with a hay and read tzayid without the hay. The midrashim
and early commentaries did not mention a written/read issue at all; neither
Rashi nor Ibn Ezra did. However, the later commentators, such as Radak and
Chizkuni, wrote “tzeidah is written with a hay, read without a hay,
and the interpretation is known that ‘it was written with a hay to hint
at the five laws of ritual slaughter (hesitation, pressing, thrusting, moving,
and plucking)'.” But they did not cite the source of that "known
interpretation."
So I looked in the books and the
midrashim. This interpretation is found in the Midrash “Lekach Tov.” This
explains the matter perfectly: the book “Lekach Tov” was written by Tuvia Ben
Eliezer, who lived c. 1100 (see Encyclopaedia Hebraica, Tuvia Ben Eliezer).
And Minchat Shai, whom we will quote later, wrote thus, so you see that the
variation in writing and reading the word tzeidah is a later addition
and was not present in Torah scrolls extant at the time of the earlier
medrashic writers, and were not available to Rashi and his generation.
A proof that our words are true
and stable comes from the words of Minchat Shai, Genesis 27:3: “Tzeidah --
read it tzayid. In the Greater Mesorah, in the array of the letter hay
a sign is given; there are two words written with a hay at the end of
the word which are not read, and there is one they disagreed about, the tzeidah
of ‘take now your weapons.’ And I have
seen in a handwritten mesorah and also in one manuscript scroll from Spain,
that there is a tradition of reading it tzayid and there is a dispute
about this. But the Ramah…tzeidah is written and tzayid is
read…and in Midrash Lekach Tov tzayid is read and tzeidah is
written… And the cited medrash is unequivocally the composition of Tuvia Ben
Eliezer, called Medrash Pesikta… and within the composition it is noted that it
was 4850 years from the creation of the world.” (1090 C.E.).
This is an overwhelming proof by
the author of the Minchat Shai that there is disagreement amongst the Mesorah
masters whether there is a written/read issue on the word tzeidah.
Do not be amazed at the
different versions and many errors, for this is the way of people who copy many
books; they make mistakes and they err, especially during a period when the
printing press had not yet been invented and everything was painstakingly
hand-copied. There
were copyists who were precise and some who were not precise. The Rama attests,
in the Shulchan Aruch Orech Chaim 143, paragraph 4, “And another (Torah scroll)
must be brought because of a complete error, but because of defective and plene
spellings you should not take out another, for our Torah scrolls are not so
exact that the other one will be more kosher.”
About this we have already
brought the words of Radak (II Samuel 15:21) about the versions, “It seems as
though the books were lost and confused in the first exile, and the sages who
knew the Scriptures died, and the men of the Great Assembly who returned the
Torah to its previous luster found disagreements in the remaining books and
followed the majority thereof, according to their knowledge. Where they could
not completely clarify matters they wrote one thing and did not add vowels or
wrote in the margins and not inside the texts, or wrote one in the margins and
a different word in the text.” Whoever explicates the letters and the words as
though they had come down from Sinai exactly as they are written now will fall
mute and turn a deaf ear, but he who understands will understand.
Words of True Knowledge
