Leviticus 1:1-5:26
Hebrew doesn’t have capital letters: the first letter in a sentence, or the first letter of a proper noun, is written the same size as a letter in the middle of a sentence or name. But this convention has some exceptions in the Torah. A well known example is the first verse of the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4). In Torah scrolls, the last letter of the first word in this verse, the letter ‘ayin, is written extra-large, and so is the last letter of the last word in the verse, dalet. The usual reason given is that these two extra-large letters are designed to prevent a public reader of the text from mistakenly uttering a heresy.
How so? The last letter of the word shema‘, “listen” or “hear,” is an ‘ayin . But in late- and post-biblical times, many Jews did not pronounce it as such (as most Israelis don’t nowadays). They just skipped it. As a result, it sounded just like the word shemah (with the letter hei at the end), which means “perhaps.” If the Torah reader in synagogue read it that way, he would in effect be saying “Perhaps, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” To prevent this, scribes came to write the ‘ayin extra-large. (You can see this in most printed Hebrew Bibles today.)
The same danger accompanied the very last letter of this same verse, dalet. If your eyesight was failing, you could easily mistake this letter for the similar-looking letter resh. Then, instead of reading the word eḥad, “one,” you might mistake it for the word aḥer (“another”). If so, you would be saying “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is another.” So scribes came to write the word eḥad in the Shema with an extra-large dalet to head off this blasphemy.
There are many other cases of extra-large letters, as well as of extra-small letters—and an example of the latter comes in the very first word of this week’s Torah reading, vayyikra, “and He called.” The letter alef at the end of this word is conventionally printed extra-small and suspended a little above the other letters on the line. There are some imaginative explanations for this convention, but the simple truth seems to be that, sometime in the ancient past, a scribe was preparing a copy of Leviticus, seeking to reproduce exactly (as all scribes do) the model text he had in from of him. But the first word in his model text lacked an alef at its end. Without the alef, it would seem to saying, “and He happened upon,” or “He chanced.”
I like to think about this scribe. I’m pretty sure he was, like most scribes, a pious person who took his job altogether seriously. But here he was in a real bind. If he reproduced the word vayyikra without the alef, he would be faithful to his model text, but he would be saying something that seemed wrong: God didn’t just “happen to” or “appear to” Moses; He deliberately called or summoned him. (This, by the way, is how the Septuagint Greek translation rendered the word, “He summoned.”)
What should the scribe do? Be faithful to tradition and copy exactly what he had in front of him? Or take a chance and say what he thought the text meant to say, even if it was lacking the alef?
Put in these terms, this may not be merely a pedantic copyist’s question, but something that haunts anyone who takes the Torah seriously. Such a person must not try to reshape the Torah to fit his or her own views; on the contrary, the idea is to enter into the Torah’s own world, so as to see things through its eyes. This is the whole challenge and the whole reward. And yet… Sometimes the words themselves seem to be pointing to something that is not there, something that needs consideration. What to do?
I’m with that scribe and the suspended, modest, little alef.