Signature of The Creator. The Torah contains an ancient embedded "Security Code".

a reply to: dashen

So despite Deuteronomy 1:1 - 1:4 (which you say is not part of your alleged 'code') IF there does exist a coded checksum embedded into the Masoretic Torah text, it could ONLY be found in text like the Aleppo Codex (c. 1000 CE) which is the main copy of the Masoretic Text from which modern Rabbinic copies are made - in other words the 'code' had to have been ADDED to the text fairly late and not early on i.e. c. 1000 CE by the Masoretes since (looking at all the evidence) the code is clearly NOT present in the Masoretic Hebrew consonantal text from antiquity, e.g. copies of the MT from the Dead Sea (c. 100 BCE to 68 CE) which have been published and is now in the public domain.

That being the case, you cannot posit the statement that there is anything original in the 'code', but in fact is a late addition to an already corrupt text which was gradually morphed into its present state over the centuries by dozens of scribes in the process of transmission.

Try to understand the fact that the Aleppo Codex of the MT is a late text, not an early one, with hundreds of changes, additions, omissions etc. from the versions we have of the MT from antiquity.

Anyone claiming that a 'code' existed in the earliest manuscripts for the MT of the Torah is grasping at straws and ignoring the pluriform textual condition of the torah in antiquity - anything like an exact transcription of 'texts which defiled the hands' (such as the Torah) did not come into common practice until well into the middle ages when the scribes started to count middle letters on a column.

a reply to: Sigismundus


deadseascrolls.org

Remarkably, some of these ancient copies are identical to the traditional text of the Hebrew Bible that is used today.

i·den·ti·cal
ˌīˈden(t)ək(ə)l/
adjective
1.
similar in every detail; exactly alike

a reply to: dashen

Dashan you are grasping at straws again. You wrote QUOTE "Remarkably, some of these ancient copies are identical to the traditional text of the Hebrew Bible that is used today" UNQUOTE

Here is the fuller quote from the Leon Levy Library

"Fragments of every book of the Hebrew Bible (except the Book of Esther) were found in the Qumran caves, the most famous of the Dead Sea Scrolls sites. Remarkably, some of these ancient copies are identical to the traditional text of the Hebrew Bible that is used today. Other copies preserve differences in the text, which was in the process of standardisation."

Notice the word 'standardisation' and 'process'' that you left out of your quote. It merely means there are certain exact overlaps in places between the ancient Masoretic text with the Aleppo Codex. This oversimplified statement is very misleading to those who are more conversant with the facts.

The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa) is the most touted example of the preservation of the MT over the centuries with people claiming the text is exactl;y the same, but if you start counting letters you notice that there are many slight differences letter for letter, something like 15% or 15 different letters out of every hundred. Careful scholars avoid generalisations which suggests that the text is a carbon copy whereas the truth is that they are not perfectly exact letter for letter.

When one is dealing with imbedded Hebrew codes, letter for letter differences make large differences to the success or failure of that code (even though some letter differences often does not affect the overall sesnse of a passage).

Below is the Masoretic recension of Isaiah 53:1-3.

[1] Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of YHWH revealed?
[2] For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.
[3] He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.


Below is the same passage from the Great Isaiah Scroll. Differences between the MT and the Great Isaiah Scroll are underlined. While these differences are not severe, at least in these few passages, it clearly demonstrates that more than 17 differences exist in Isaiah 53 between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the King James Version.


[1] Who has believed our report? and to whom is the arm of YHWH revealed?
[2] For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he has no form nor he has comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we SHOULD DESIRE OUTSELVES.
[3] He is despised and rejected of men and man of sorrows, AND HE KNOWS GRIEF: and we hid as it were our faces from him; AND DESPISED HIM, and we esteemed him not.

This exmple from the great Isaiah scroll is supposed to be one of these exact texts of the MT through the centuries, but as you can see from the CAPITAL letters above there is no exact letter for letter match.

I have several more examples to show but this should be enough for now to show you what I am talking about.

Is this all still clear as mud to you?

a reply to: Sigismundus

Isaiah scroll. Isaiah scroll. I said the code only. ONLY works on the five books of Moses

a reply to: dashen

Dashen,

You wrote QUOTE "...Isaiah scroll. Isaiah scroll. I said the code only. ONLY works on the five books of Moses "

You claim the code 'works' for the consonantal Vorlage of the Torah you are using (except of course Deut 1:1 to 1:4 - which throws the 'code' off apparently for the whole book) but you have failed to say what exact modern consonantal Hebrew Vorlage source text you are using, whether the partially restored Aleppo Codex (supported by Rambam) or the later Codex Leningradensis or the Yemenite torot etc.

Most Rabbinic Jews today utilize the Leningrad Codex for their "official" Torah text, but even this one consonantal Vorlage underwent many changes according to the great R. Moshe Goshen-Gottstein back in 1963 -

"The Leningrad Codex is NOT an Aharon Ben Moshe Ben-Asher Codex as was the Aleppo Codex before its near destruction in 1947 - it was secondarily brought into harmony with a Ben-Asher Vorlage by HUNDREDS of erasures and CHANGES around 1009 CE...."

The missing portions of the Aleppo Codex (up to Deut 28:17 for the Torah consonants) were often supplied by various Ben Asher inspired Yemenite Torot which show a number of spelling differences and changes compared to the Leningrad Codex - in view of all this even in comparatively modern times there are pluriform consonantal texts of the Torah in the wild.

FYI when scholars say 'nearly identical' they are basically saying '90%' which [when compared letter for letter] show any two MSS to be in the same (or a different) 'family' of MS -

But no two Hebrew Torah consonantal texts prior to 1009 are in any precise way exact (however close) when comparing letter for letter with each other. After the 12th century CE, the text of the MT changed very little - but that is very late in its development - and that is the ONLY condition a text can be in if one is to propose a code exists - a letter for letter duplication. The 'code' does not work with any torah texts copied prior to the Aleppo Codex which Rambam (Maimonides) supported simnply because there is no single Torah consonantal text in existence prior to the Aleppo Codex that did not have spelling and grammatical variations when compared with each other.

If you want a list of these changes/differences over time (and the Dead Sea Scroll corpus of the Torah, many in paleoHebrew, are still the oldest manuscript evidence for the Torah), I can outline the main ones for you that would only impact the NUMBER of letters in a word (not such a replacement letter, which is the most common change in the transmission of the text)...and by changing the number of letters in a word (whether longer or shorter or omitted or added etc .) the 'code' is thrown off...

a reply to: Sigismundus

the leningrad codex is less authorative due to its apparent karaite provenance.
Aaron ben Moses ben Asher and Moshe ben Naphtalis texts had practically no textual variations, and their disagreements were basically only over vocalization and accents.
and yet. despite it all.
the code works.
try it,

So, this is what I'm getting out of the debate so far.

There is a checksum in a version of the Torah dated 1000ce.

Sigismundas presents a bunch of evidence that the checksum could not occur very much further in the past because of, eh ...diversity. . .in the text of the multiple Torah's predating the checksummed Torah.

Dashen states that diversity doesn't matter because they don't have the checksum. . .so they don't matter because if they don't have the checksum then, of course, they cannot be the legit Torah .

My conclusion is that there was a very good managing scribe in charge of the 1000ce version (or a slightly earlier version) that created the checksum as a management technique. . .to reduce human error and to make error-checking somewhat easier when human error did occur. . .I've used similar techniques where I needed accuracy from the team(s) I've managed.

a reply to: zefiro

But how do you propose a code was woven in 1000 ce when all the variants only vary by a few dozen letters?

a reply to: zefiro

Hi Zefiro

You wrote QUOTE "There is a checksum in a version of the Torah dated 1000ce. Sigismundus presents a bunch of evidence that the checksum could not occur very much further in the past because of, eh ...diversity. . .in the text of the multiple Torah's predating the checksummed Torah. Dashen states that diversity doesn't matter because they don't have the checksum. . .so they don't matter because if they don't have the checksum then, of course, they cannot be the legit Torah ." UNQUOTE

Thanks for your quick summary -- if a checksum 'code' was imposed upon any single text version (i.e. 'vorlage') of the Torah it would have to have been imposed upon the text comparatively late in its transmission history, i.e. after 500 CE - unfortunately the Aleppo Codex (dated 935 CE) was burned in Syria in November of 1947 (up to Deut 28:17) so most modern Rebbes are left with the Leningrad Codex which was originally not a ben-Asher codex (as was Aleppo) but was brought in line to the Aleppo Codex via hundreds of erasures and changes. I suspect the code was added at the time of the Leningrad corrections (c. 1006-1009 CE), although the Aleppo Codex from a generation earlier (worked out by Aharon ben Moshe ben Asher) might well have had some sort of accuracy checking mechanism imbedded into the text.

But the 'code' outlined by the OP on this thread could NOT have existed inside any earlier Torot of the Masoretic 'family' prior to the Aleppo Codex (or corrected Leningrad Codex) since when the earlier proto-Masoretic consonantal texts were all essentially pluriform as far as counting letters is concerned by as much as 15% e.g. during the period (c. 150 BCE to 500 CE) - and (this is important) their actual consonantal spelling varied widely especially in the use of consonants used to represent long vowels (vav for "o" and yod for "i" ) when a word for example is spelled with a long o expressed by a vav it is called 'plenum' (e.g. the Hebrew word ' cavod' spelled with kaph, beth, vav and daled) whereas if 'cavod' is spelled without the long "o" expressed (Kaph, beth, daled) it is called 'defective' i.e. shortened form. This is important since adding or subtracting a consonant affects any 'code' embedded within the text that relies on the counting of letters.

One has to remember that variety and inconsistency rather than a systematic approach to spelling characterized the work of individual scribes in the earliest recensions of the consonantal torah text up until about 200 CE when the rabbinic copyists started to count middle letters in a column of any text they happen to be working from.

So in the earliest pluriform copies of the Torah, there was no single version of the text that was considered authoritative for all Jews until well into the 200s CE - we see the proto Masoretic gaining acceptance as early as 135CE from the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt, i.e. mainly as a result of Pharasaic rebbes coming into prominence following the 1st failed Jewish War against Rome (66-72 CE, where 900,000 Hebrew speaking Jews were killed - if you believe Josephus' shocking figures) and (naturally) they favoured their own recension, the proto Masoretic - other Torot in the wild (eg. the Hebrew consonantal textual Vorlage (Hebrew underlay) to the LXX Setuaginta, the Hebrew textual consonantal underlay to the Greek translation of Symmachus or Theodotion and the Dead Sea Scroll copies, etc.) were more or less left to die since there were no other majority sect that could impose their own version of the Torah on world Jewry, the majority of whom spoke Greek and not Hebrew after 72 CE.

In other words, if the 1st Failed Jewish War against Rome (66-72 CE) had not ever taken place, the 2nd Temple would have survived with the Hashmoneas in place - all the pluriform texts of the torah and prophets and psalms and writings that we see among the Dead Sea Scrolls would have continued being copied side by side unabated. But the War did come, and there was a focus change from the Temple to the Books - which were in the decision making hands of a comparatively select few proto Masoretic reading Rebbes who made some very sweeping decisions (in the absence of a powerful temple hierarchy) about which books 'defiled the hands' and which versions of those books were 'authoritative' at the so-called Council of Javneh in 90 CE, after which the other pluriform texts began to die off. Only the proto Masoretic text party survived the War.

Curiously there are only a very few complete Torah Scrolls prior to 1200 CE (Aleppo Codex, Cairo Codex, Leningrad Codex and British Museum Codex) - all others date after 1200CE, and the majority of these late copies were conflated with the Aleppo MT Codex of 935 CE.

Just try to bear in mind that the Masoretes were not working with anything like an original Hebrew Bible - corruptions and changes of consonants had already crept into the versions they were copying from - and although this is not widely known, every singe printed Torah contains textual corruptions and difficult readings - and they try to sooth these out as best they can in their translations.

Interestingly, they are about to publish a BHQ/ Biblia Hebraica Quinta at Stuttgart (due for publication within 4 years, i.e. 2020) which is the 5th corrected / updated Hebrew version of the Tanakh which is going to take into account many of the larger variants found among the Dead Sea Scrolls as well as the LXX and the Greek translations of Symmachus and Theodotion - whether any 'code' for the Torah will survive such radical editing will remain to be seen.

In the meantime, if you wish to get further into the weeds of this discussion, check out the essays of Emanuel Tov on this convoluted subject ...

www.emanueltov.info...

a reply to: Sigismundus

you are quite incorrect. before 200ce there was a jewish gathering called Hakhel where all the israelites would assemble and among other activities, would all bring and compare their Torah scrolls with one anothers. any mistakes would be compared against the master copy in the Temple and repaired.

a reply to: dashen

Dashen

You wrote QUOTE : "...you are quite incorrect. before 200ce there was a jewish gathering called Hakhel where all the israelites would assemble and among other activities, would all bring and compare their Torah scrolls with one anothers. any mistakes would be compared against the master copy in the Temple and repaired..." UNQUOTE

Your comments betray a lack of even basic historical knowledge of the period. First, there was no 'temple' standing in Jerusalem after 70 CE when the Romans ground Jerusalem to powder and burned the 2nd Herodian Temple down during the 1st Failed Jewish Revolt against Rome (66 - 72CE). Read 'The Jewish War' by Josephus for taste of how horrific and devastating this War was to world Jewry who no longer had a central shrine to worship in Jerusalem.

Secondly, there was and is no single master copy of the Torah (the proto-Masoretic family of MSS eventually and only very gradually became dominant over other hand copied Torot in the wild - and we know these pluriform Torot existed because of the Dead Sea Scroll corpus in Caves 1-11 (BCE 250 to 68CE) which reflectes the plurality of text families that existed side by side in 2nd Temple Jewry.

You referenced the term [mitzvat] Hakhel, used in Deuteronomy 31:10-12: but obviously this 7-year ceremony would have ceased altogether by 70 CE, that is, after the 2nd Temple was destroyed and Judaeans ceased to exist as a people in Jerusalem and in most of Palestine, where (Jospephus claims) more than 900,000 Palestinian Jews perished...leaving only the Greek speaking Diaspora Jews alive in places like Alexandria where many had fled during the War.

Here is the text in question (for what it is worth) "At the end of every seven years, at an appointed time, in the Festival of Sukkot [following] the year of Shemitah. When all Israel comes to appear before the face[s] of your clan god YHWH, in the place He will choose, you (MT reads 'you' in the grammatical singular) shall read this (SamPent says : "he shall read") Torah before all Israel, in their ears. Assemble the people: the men, the women, the children, and your stranger within your gates..."

Where do you get the 200 CE date from? By then the 2nd Failed Jewish Revolt (Bar Kokhba, c. 135 CE) Rome had expelled all Jews from Palestine and (c. 140 CE) Jerusalem was renamed by the Roman Emperor Adrian as 'Aeolia Capitolina' where Jews were not allowed to live.

If Mitzvat Hahkel was honoured even sporadically after 70 CE in the Diaspora it would have been at the local Diaspora synagogues, and these had their own hand copied Torot, not some nebulous master copy - which is a product of your imagination.

It will help if you could stick to fact and not fantasy on this thread !

originally posted by: Sigismundus
a reply to: dashen

Your comments betray a lack of even basic historical knowledge of the period. First, there was no 'temple' standing in Jerusalem after 70 CE when the Romans ground Jerusalem to powder and burned the 2nd Herodian Temple down during the 1st Failed Jewish Revolt against Rome (66 - 72CE). Read 'The Jewish War' by Josephus for taste of how horrific and devastating this War was to world Jewry who no longer had a central shrine to worship in Jerusalem.

It will help if you could stick to fact and not fantasy on this thread !

Lack of knowledge?
Fantasy indeed.

After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the Sanhedrin was re-established in Yavneh by agreement between Yochanan ben Zakai and Roman Emperor Vespasian. Vespasian agreed in part due to the perception that the Pharisees had not participated in the first revolt to the extent that other groups had. Thus the Sanhedrin in Yavneh was comprised almost exclusively of pharisaic scholars. The imperial Roman government recognized the Sanhedrin. They regarded the head of the Sanhedrin as their own paid government official with the status of Prefect. Roman legislation severely reduced the scope of its authority, but confirmed the body's ultimate authority in religious matters. In an attempt to quash revolutionary elements, Rome in effect declared one form of Judaism to be the only recognized form of religion. This led to persecution of sectarian groups, and attempts by these groups to find fault with the Sanhedrin before the Roman government.

They held the master copies of the Torah and were the authorities till about 358 ce

Please note that Pirkey Avotvery meticulously tracks the chain of custody and provenance of the Torah and its traditions.

The tractate consists of six chapters. It begins with an order of transmission of the Oral Tradition; Moses receives the Torah at Mount Sinai and then transmits it through various generations (including Joshua, the Elders, and the Neviim, but notably not the Kohanim), whence it finally arrives at the Great Assembly, i.e., the Rabbis (Avot 1:1). It contains sayings attributed to sages from Simon the Just (200 BCE) to shortly after Judah haNasi (200 CE), redactor of the Mishnah. These aphorisms concern proper ethical and social conduct, as well as the importance of Torah study.

The first two chapters proceed in a general chronological order, with the second focusing on the students of Yochanan Ben Zakkai.

a reply to: dashen

Dashen

You wrote: QUOTE "They held the master copies of the Torah and were the authorities till about 358 ce" - UNQUOTE

The Wikipedia entry you quoted earlier ("After the Destruction of the 2nd Temple in 70 CE the Sanhedrin was re-established in Yavneh..." does not address the problem of the many pluriform text families of the Torah circulating at this time (even the late Aleppo Codex consulted pluriform Torot as late as 960 CE) or the combined reasons for the gradual emergence of the consonantal proto-Masoretic MSS family of texts which was eventually accepted by the majority of world Jewry.

There certainly was no 'Master Copy' of the Torah in existence (that did not come about until the Leningrad Codex in the early 11th century CE), merely a host of pluriform versions all with their own consonantal divergences from the LC and the number of consonants as well as spelling issues (defective v,. plenum spelling options) - and the proto-Masoretic family of MSS had substantial differences between them, though they were all similar enough to be regarded of the same 'MSS family'.

Some scholars had postulated the existence of a Council of Javneh (Jamnia) c. 90 CE to discuss the canon of the Hebrew scriptures (according to some, books such as I-II Chronicles, Esther, Qoheleth, Hezekiel and Song of Songs were on the table to see if they 'defiled the hands' i.e. were sacred writings - or not. Certainly by the time of the alleged Council (90 CE) the protoMasoretic family of MSS became dominant over other recensions in the wild (we see this favouring of the proto Masoretic family MSS Tendenz in the Dead Sea Scroll copies found at later sites such as Nahal Hever and Masada from the time of the 2nd failed Jewish Revolt against Rome (c. 135-137 CE) which are all basically proto Masoretic - but they too are not exact copies of the Leningrad Codex or even the Aleppo Codex which went through several stages of editing before deciding upon certain readings. The Ben Asher Aleppo codex (favoured and supported by Maimonides) is the first de facto authoritative copy which was used by the Masoretes to bring their own Leningrad Codex into alignment with.

But in Caves 1-11 (from a much earlier period c. CE 250 to 68 CE) we clearly see the pluriform textual situation still in tact (think of them as kind of Ancient Biblical MSS time capsule- I factthe oldest Torah copuies in existence to-day) where it is beyond question now that the Qumran Community did not develop any single standard Torah/Psalms/Writings/Prophets' text for their own use as a scriptural base but their hand copied texts remained in the stage of textual plurality with one 'family of MSS' lying side by side several others IN THE SAME CAVE.

It was not until after the First Failed Jewish War against Rome (66-72 CE) that the proto-Masoretic family of MSS began to become predominant and copied almost exclusively from then on in the Hebrew recensions. The Greek pluriform texts were copied as is in the various Diaspora Greek speaking synagogues where Hebrew was no longer spoken or widely understood by those Jews living in say, Alexandria, Laodeceia or Ephesus, etc.

The proto-Masoretic text famiy only very gradually became predominant - mainly as a result of political realities - where the Pharisees supplanted other religious groups, and naturally they promulgated their own text, the proto Masoretic family of MSS to the exclusion of all others.

The idea of pluriform texts of the torah is not discussed widely by the sages in the Talmud but they do offer some insight c. 200 CE when they admit that several passages of Torah support the inevitable conclusion that the ancient reading must have differed in places from that of the proto-Masoretic text they knew. R. Shimeon ben Pazzi (c. 260 CE) calls these pluriform readings 'emendations of the scribes (Tikkune Sofrim, see Midrash Genesis Rabbah 49:7) which assumes that individual scribes had made many of the emendations, additions and omissions we see in the pluriform text families, and the Masoretes concurred that the earliest scribes were something less than punctilious in their copying the consonantal text. The numerous emendations / erasures and corrections found in the Leningrad Codex (the main single version copy for most modern Torot used in most Jewish synagogues today) show that they were trying to align a non ben Asher MS to the ben Asher Aleppo Codex (which was highly revered amongst the Kairites as well).

Again, I must repeat: Since the proto-Masoretic texts the later mediaeval Masoretes started with already held corrupted readings (admittedly numerically more differences can be found in the Neviim and the Ketuvim than in the Torah) then even a faithful, perfect & exact transmission of those consonants would only serve to preserve all of those textual corruptions.

You don't seem to be able to grasp any of this in your postings and prefer to see an uncorrupted Torah which was preserved since the time of Moses - a fatuous and jejune fantasy if there ever was one (see "Who Wrote the Biible?" by Richard Elliott Friedman which summarises 300 years of textual scholarship on the myth of Mosaic authorship) - why is that you cannot look facts in the face?

The MSS evidence that can be studied in detail by scholars to-day show there was no 'master copy' of the Tanakh fom antiquity (i.e. pre 400 CE) as the work of Emanuel Tov proves beyond a shadow of a doubt.

If any 'fifty letter code' exists in the proto-Masoretic it would have to post-date the time of standardisation of the consonantal text c. 600-950 CE

a reply to: Sigismundus

Although I dont have an original Leningrad Codex in front of me, I am quite certain that this code would not work on it if it were a shoddy Kaarite scribe job.

Please read the excerpt from the OP, the Pharisees were extremely meticulous about every last letter in the Torah scroll. the pluriform versions you keep referring to are from breakaway cults without an oral tradition or guidelines for scribes.

originally posted by: dashen
a reply to: Sigismundus

There is a code in only one of those versions.

Why not all; and God tells us the truth (FINALLY). I am tired of searching for IT.

a reply to: vethumanbeing

because the rest are imperfect copies of the original

a reply to: dashen

Dashen

You wrote QUOTE: "Please note that Pirkey Avotvery meticulously tracks the chain of custody and provenance of the Torah and its traditions..it begins with an order of transmission of the Oral Tradition : Moses received the Torah at Mount Sinai and then transmits it through various generations including Joshua the Elders and the Neviim [but notably not the Kohenim], whence it finally arrives at the Great Assembly i.e. the Rabbis (Avot 1:1)." UNQUOTE

Just so we are on the same page, below is a translation of the quote itself from the Mishna's Pirkei Avot: 1:1 :

"Moshe received Torah from Sinai and handed it down to Yehoshua who handed it down to the Zaqenim ('elders') to handed it down to the Neviim ('prophets') who handed it down to the Anshei Knesset HaGedolah (אַנְשֵׁי כְּנֶסֶת הַגְּדוֹלָה) (Men of the Great Knesset)...".

There are a number of fallacies in the Mishnaic quote above. First, the Pirkei Avot ("Chapters of the Fathers (i.e. fundamentals)" in the Mishnah (vis a vis any claims of a 'chain of custody') does NOT state anything 'meticulously' at all - on the contrary it glosses over and grossly oversimplifies (and downright distorts) the true far more complicated nature of the creation of the pluriform consonantal Torah texts in the 2nd Temple period and its subsequent highly convoluted textual pluriform dissemination and hand copying & editing over time by various Jewish circles since at least 400 BCE.

Not only does the Pirkei Avot not mention the vital role of the priests (Cohenim) in the creation of the documents we read today of the Torah but also ignores the Sofrim (scribes) especially all the influential early 2nd Temple era men like Ezra (c. 400 BCE) who along with his scribal school was responsible for much of the combined and edited forms of the consonantal text we read to-day.

It also neglects to talk about the Jewish Wars which determined which recension of the Torah was to become dominant - in other words, the quote in the Mishnah is basically rabbinic self-serving nonsense.

Secondly, even to imply that a single inerrant Torah text was preserved from the time of Moses to the present day is pure fantasy - not only is it jejune, it flies in the face of more than 300 years of serious academic textual studies, not the least of which include Imanuel Tov's recent recent publications of the early Torah text copies especially found in Cave 4 of the Dead Sea Scrolls which show the pluriform condition of the Torah PRIOR to the Destruction of the 2nd Temple during the 1st Failed Jewish War against Rome (66-72 CE).

For a basic introduction to all the arguments scholarship deals with on this matter, read 'Who Wrote the Bible?' by Richard Elliott Friedman, a student of the great Hebraist Frank Moore Cross of Harvard - it's a layman's introduction to the myth of Mosaic authorship which is to-day no longer tenable in serious academic circles - and judging from your naive comments above it seems you are quite oblivious to the 'meticulous' textual studies of the Pentateuch (especially in recent years after the discovery and publicatiion of the Dead Sea Scroll Corpus).

To outline the many reasons why Mosaic authorship of the Torah is fallacious would require several posts and are outside the scope of this thread on the consonantal text as it exists today (based on a single MSS, i.e. the Leningrad Codex). But I can outline this under future posts if you really have no working-knowledge of them, not the least of which is the description of Moseh's own death in Deuteronomy 34:5ff and the fact that the same writer (whose style recalls the author of the Book of Jeremiah, much later than the time of Mosheh, c. 550 BCE) is seen to have written the Book of Joshua, which is technically outside of Torah.

Are you really not aware of these basic facts of the case?

originally posted by: dashen
a reply to: vethumanbeing
because the rest are imperfect copies of the original

I think that was planned. God learns from its own mistakes/cunning/genius (and who is God we are).

a reply to: Sigismundus

I am aware of your fallacious arguments and the Tradition which has been faithfully transmitted for millenia.