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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.

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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 created, from what I understand, at least, by Stephen Langton, who is the archbishop of… let’s see, he was the Archbishop of Canterbury. And the story is that he was… I think he was riding to Paris or something like this in a carriage, and along the way he said, “You know, we have to break up the Bible into sections.” Look, and there were sections. Like if you go to Psalms, the Psalms are broken up into sections, right? He’s like, “We need that for the rest of the Bible.”

And so, he went through… and for him that was the Latin Vulgate, right? I mean, that was his Bible. So, he goes to the Latin Vulgate, and he says, you know, “Let’s have a chapter in Genesis, it’ll end after the sixth day of creation.” Why not? Why after the sixth day? Because his use of these… from what I’ve been told is, that his function for the sections was that… or for the chapters, rather, was that they be used in the church. That they would read a section, you know, they would read a section…

So, in the Catholic churches, they apparently, I’m told, read sections of the Bible, right? So, how do you know what to read? You’re not going to read three verses or five verses. You want a nice chunk size. You don’t want it too long or too short, right? But you also want it to be some kind of logical unit. So, those sections were created in the early 13th century. The manuscripts have their own sections, and here we’re looking on the right at 1QIsaa from the Dead Sea Scrolls. And on the left we have here the Aleppo Codex. And here we have a passage in Isaiah 42, and it ends with a space, and this is what’s called an open section.

And then 1QIsaa written a thousand years earlier, maybe a little bit more than a thousand years earlier, 1,100, 1,200 years earlier, has the same space in the same place. And even though… by the way, there are some differences, like here; this word is written with a Hey-Mem at the end, and here it’s Hey-Mem- Hey,