Hebrew Voices #249 – Ginsburg’s Lost Masorah
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In this episode of Hebrew Voices #249 - Ginsburg's Lost Masorah: Part 1 [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/ginsburgs-lost-masorah-1], Nehemia Gordon sits down with Dr. David Moster, Director of the Biblical Hebrew Program at the Jewish Theological Seminary, to trace the remarkable detective story behind his peer-reviewed article "A Chance Discovery." Together they unpack the world of Christian David Ginsburg, who became the unlikely founder of modern Masoretic studies, and reveal how a four-volume, 2,500-page monument of biblical scholarship turned out to be hiding a secret in plain sight!
I look forward to reading your comments!
PODCAST VERSION:
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Transcript
Hebrew Voices #249 – Ginsburg’s Lost Masorah
You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting [https://www.nehemiaswall.com/support] Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com [https://www.nehemiaswall.com].
David: Jews and Christians can sit down next to each other and study at the same time without… and it makes it better for everyone, in my personal opinion. So…
Nehemia: Is this an example of diversity is our strength? In other words, that motto actually has something profound behind it, which is that, if everybody has the same view on the world, you’re going to have blind spots. But where diversity really is powerful (and this is, I think, a very Jewish idea) is where you have lots of different perspectives and beliefs and approaches, and you have conversations where, maybe at first you’re talking past each other, because you have a set of assumptions, they have a set of assumptions, and you realize, “Oh, I never thought that somebody else would see the world that way.”
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Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I am here today once again with Dr David Moster. He is the director of the Biblical Hebrew Program at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the JTS, in New York. He’s also the director of the Institute for Biblical Culture. David, what is the Biblical Hebrew Program at JTS at the Jewish Theological Seminary? Does somebody have to be a student at JTS to participate in that?
David: No, we actually created it for anyone and everyone. It’s all on Zoom; it’s for people at different levels. Right now, for example, we’re running 10 courses with 150 different people, and they are at levels beginning with the Aleph–Bet, reading to learn, and then we have in our more advanced classes, people reading four or five, six chapters of Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, at one time.
Nehemia: Wow.
David: So, we really have from Aleph to Tav, not A to Z, we have from Aleph to Tav, all at the same time. It’s all on Zoom, and everyone is welcome to check out our website at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Nehemia: So, I’ll just share a little story about that. We had a member of what we call our Scholar Club write through my website and contact Lynell and say, “I’m looking for a biblical Hebrew program.” So, I told her to ask you, and now she’s taking it. She’s about to sign up for it. So, she’s like, “Wait a minute, why wouldn’t I do this? This is online. I’m going to learn something here.” She went to Israel and did the Aleph program about two or three years ago. Well, it was actually 2023, just before the war. So, she was there for six weeks at Hebrew University, very intense, but she hasn’t been able to get back to it. So, she’s going to do the online course. What is JTS, for those who don’t know? It’s actually a flagship of Jewish learning.
David: It’s the Jewish Theological Seminary. It’s on Broadway and 122nd Street in New York.
Nehemia: You’re such a New Yorker. That means nothing to most of my audience.
David: It’s the upper, upper West Side, right near Columbia University, and it has been there for more than a hundred years. It’s a really important institution in, not only scholarship in America, Jewish scholarship, but as well, also, synagogue life and Jewish life. So, it organizes a lot of different synagogues and camps and things like that. So, it’s really a multifaceted institution.
Nehemia: It really is a flagship of Jewish learning. I would put it up there with Yeshiva University and Hebrew Union College. What is the significance of it being on Broadway? I literally don’t know why that’s important. Is there a lot of music there, or something?
David: Everybody knows Broadway, so there you go! It’s like, you know, everyone will ask you, “Where do you live?” You want to tell them you live by some kind of landmark. So, I guess we’re on Broadway.
Nehemia: So, I grew up in Chicago, and for decades after, I would meet people from like, you know, I don’t know, Skokie or Evanston, and they would say with a straight face they were from Chicago. And I’d be like, “No, you’re not. I’m really from the city.”
David: Skokie’s suburb, yeah.
Nehemia: I mean, it’s whatever, it’s like a couple miles from where I grew up, so it’s six of one, one-half dozen of the other. But if you’re from there, it’s like Broadway is important, and West Rogers Park is important. Okay, so, I wanted to ask you to come on today because you have a journal article that just came out, and it is in a journal called Sfarad, which is very interesting because Sfarad is sort of the ancient Hebrew word for Spain. I say sort of because it appears in the Tanakh, and in the Tanakh it doesn’t refer to Spain. Well, I don’t know, if it does or doesn’t is perhaps a matter of debate. But generally, it’s thought it doesn’t. But Sfarad is Spain in the Middle Ages, and it’s the modern Hebrew word. When we talk about Sephardic Jews, it means that they’re associated with the culture of Jews that were expelled from Spain in the 14th and 15th century.
It’s funny, I once had this encounter online, there was a person saying he was a Sephardic Jew, and one of these online scholars (meaning someone who doesn’t know anything) said, “Oh, what is he? His grandmother must be 500 years old. How could she be from Spain?” And I’m like, “Really, guys? Really?” Like, no, Jews whose ancestors were in Spain for some period of time, or not necessarily in Spain, were associated with Spain. You could be from Morocco as well. They are called Sephardic Jews.
All right, so I’m going to share my screen here. I’m actually going to start with that. And you have this journal article here. And a lot of times when I’m doing the interviews, it’s before the journal article comes out. So, this is actually… I think when we scheduled this, it was before the article came out, where we first discussed it. And it’s called, “The Chance Discovery: Christian David Ginsburg’s Notes on Two Historic Codices,” which, guys, it’s actually an amazing piece of modern-day detective work.
So, can we start out with, who is Christian David Ginsburg? It’s a bit of, almost like, a self-contradiction, because Ginsburg and David are Jewish names, and Christian is… I guess you couldn’t have a more Christian name. Who is Christian David Ginsburg? Why is he important for the Jewish Theological Seminary?
David: Before we get to that, I need to give a spoiler. The reason this article is in Sfarad, which is about Spanish Jewry and their descendants, is because this little detective work is going to lead to two very old ancient books that come from there. So, we’re going to get there eventually. So, that’s what the Sfarad was, really, an important key to this. Now, in terms of Christian David Ginsburg, he was a fascinating person. He was living in Warsaw. He was a rabbinical student in the late 1800s, and he basically came in contact with some Christian missionaries in Warsaw. And he started arguing with them (and I’ve rarely heard this) he actually, basically, was arguing to try and convince them to Judaism, whereas they convinced him to Christianity. And he was literally in rabbinical school, and he’s like, all of a sudden leaving rabbinical school and his life behind. He even had a kid. I imagine his whole family disowned him, and he became a believing Christian.
I originally thought that maybe he had converted to Christianity to be able to move up in society. There are cases like this in the historical record, of people who converted from Judaism to Christianity to move up in society, and Christian David Ginsburg certainly did that, but by all indications he was a devout believer. The cherry on top was that he was able to move up. He moved to London where his mother was from, and he was able to move through society and really become an important figure in Victorian England. And so, the period we’re going to be talking about with him is going to be in the 1880s.
Nehemia: So, guys, this is important background. Jews in the 1800s, and in Russia up until 1917, were by law second-class citizens, and oppressed and persecuted. And if a Jew wanted to become a professor at a university, he would often, in many countries, have to convert to Christianity. And it’s almost… I don’t know, is it comical? Meaning, many of these Jews who converted to Christianity didn’t believe in Judaism, and believed no more in Christianity…
David: Right.
Nehemia: …and frankly, neither did most of the Christians around them. So, they were looking at these socioeconomic boundaries, saying, “You can’t become a professor because you are a Jew,” and he’d be like, “I don’t even believe in Judaism.” And they’re like, “Well, we don’t believe in Christianity. So, just say you’re a Christian, be baptized formally and officially,” that’s a legal act in Europe at the time, “and then you can advance in society. Yeah, we’ll still call you dirty Jew for sure, of course we will, to your face, not just behind your back, but you’ll be able to be a professor, and you’ll be able to advance.” And you’re saying Christian David Ginsburg… So, he took the name Christian. He wasn’t given that name, he took that name when he converted.
David: You said a lot of people didn’t believe in Judaism or Christianity.
Nehemia: Yeah.
David: I think Ginsburg believed in both.
Nehemia: Right.
David: He believed in Judaism, and after, Christianity.
Nehemia: So, that’s what’s so interesting about him. In other words… I mean, I’ve encountered people who are leaders of churches who don’t believe in Christianity. And I’ve encountered people who are leaders of synagogues who don’t believe in Judaism, let’s say according to the traditional formulations. Let’s be fair there, right? And so, that’s a phenomenon that still happens today. But in the 19th century, in the 1800s, that was the difference of, you know, are you some pulpit rabbi who is barely eking out a living? Or are you a respected professor at a university? That could be the difference.
David: Right. And so, Ginsburg went to England, and he became a scholar of, interestingly, people on the fringe of Judaism; the Essenes, the Karaites. He wrote a commentary on the Book of Daniel, all these different kinds of things which are really on the fringes in terms of apocalyptics and all that other stuff that’s going on, which isn’t normally in the mainstream of Judaism. But eventually he settled on something that is where I come in, and he basically wrote a four-volume encyclopedia. And it’s not a regular encyclopedia, where it’s just alphabetical and it’s just different topics. What he did was, he went through tens if not hundreds of thousands of handwritten manuscript notes (and these are all on the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible) and what he did was, he made sense of them and put them all in order. And that’s his magnum opus, this four-volume work, which if you have it, you all of a sudden can open it up and really have access to dozens and dozens of manuscripts, all at one shot.
Nehemia: And I was just working on something recently, related… not related to this per se, but related to this whole idea that, up until recently, the greatest scholars in the world didn’t have access to manuscripts, they had to rely on what other scholars said. And today, most people, even if they had access to the manuscript, they wouldn’t know what they were looking at. And so, what he’s done… and I’ll share the screen here. This is available on archive.org, the full scan of the text. And here he wrote this book called The Masorah. And guys, what is Masorah? Masorah is something like… it means the transmission, so we’ll say something like textus receptus, or the received text… which in Hebrew slash English we call the Masoretic Text, meaning the transmitted text preserved by Jews. That’s what Masoretic Text is. Well, maybe you have a different understanding of Masorah. I’ll let you explain in a minute.
David: Nehemia, tell them how many pages there are at the bottom left. It says you’re on page 6 out of…
Nehemia: 2,537!
David: This is a whopper! This is one of the biggest books you could ever get in both height and in thickness. It’s 2,500 pages long.
Nehemia: Let’s have a look at something here. So, the Masoretic notes are these thousands or maybe like you said, tens of thousands (I don’t know that we’ve counted them) notes that have different details. So, for example, here is note 447 under the letter Mem, and it has some detail of… we could look at this and, I don’t know…
David: Do a different one. That’s not… yeah.
Nehemia: Okay, let’s do a straightforward one, where we won’t completely lose the audience. Let’s see, let’s find an easy one. No, that’s also too complicated for most people. Basically, it’s all kinds of minutiae of spelling, and when we say it’s the transmitted text, what it really means is, there was an attempt to preserve these details. Down to very fine details.
David: Right, like right there, it says…
Nehemia: Oh! This is a beautiful one. I believe Daniel Mynott gave a lecture or something related to this. So, “There are three Heys in the Torah,” “hanir’in tmuhot ve’einan tmuhot,” “which appear questionable but are not questionable.” That’s not what it means. They appear to be interrogative Hey. In other words, Biblical Hebrew has two types of… the letter Hey means the, but there’s also a Hey that introduces a question. So, in other words, you begin with… yeah.
David: And Nehemia, for those of us who want to learn this, this is our second class in our class on Biblical Hebrew.
Nehemia: Is it? Okay.
David: It’s prefixes. So, you have one prefix, which means the, and another one which is a question mark.
Nehemia: Beautiful. So, here we have ha’nefesh, which means the soul, “ha’nefesh ha’chotet hi tamut,” “the soul that sins, it shall die,” that is from Ezekiel 18:20. And then, here is a Hey that, in principle, should be a question. “Ha’shofet kol ha’aretz?” “Is it so that the judge of all the earth?” “Ha’echad ba lagur?” “Is it so that one will come to live among us?” So, this Masoretic note is saying, “These three Heys appear to be interrogative Heys, Hey ha’she’ela, the Hey of questioning, but it’s not really a Hey of questioning.” Why does it tell you that? Because a scribe copying this will come along and say, “Wait a minute; there’s no question here. I’m going to change the vowels…”
David: Change it…
Nehemia: “…to the regular Hey, not the Hey of a question.” So, that’s a very important note. So, my approach to these notes (by and large, there’s exceptions) but most of these notes, I understand them as sort of proofreading notes, that they’re notes for the scribe. That the next copyist (or maybe the original copyist as well, right) that when he comes to it, he doesn’t make a correction, because it’s the impulse of scribes to correct what they see as mistakes. And so, this is a sort of controlling mechanism to prevent them from making a mistake.
David: Right, and it could be these are mistakes, but we keep them. That’s what it’s saying.
Nehemia: Right. That’s interesting.
David: “Just because you think it’s a mistake, we know it could be. It doesn’t matter. This is what we got.”
Nehemia: This is how the text has come down to us…
David: Come down to us.
Nehemia: …and we’re going to continue transmitting it that way, and that’s what we mean by Masoretic Text. Go ahead.
David: So, almost two years ago, I turned 40, and my in-laws wrote me a check. And they said, there was a condition on it for my birthday. They said, “David, you can’t use this to pay the electric company. You got to get something you like. Okay? You got to get something you like.” So, I said, “I want to get a copy of Christian David Ginsburg’s The Masorah, the 2,500-page whopper.” That’s what I wanted.
Nehemia: Even though it’s on archive.org, you wanted a physical copy.
David: Yeah. Anybody who’s used PDFs knows that there’s good things, but there’s bad things. You can’t really move quickly through a PDF, especially if it’s an encyclopedia. You’re not reading through, you’re jumping around…
Nehemia: About a year ago, I was looking at some very fine detail in this book, in Ginsburg’s Masorah, based on the archive.org scan, and I actually couldn’t tell what the accents and vowels were, and I wrote to you and I said, “Can you send me a photo from your phone of the physical copy,” because you’re one of the few people I know personally who has a physical copy. And I all of a sudden saw, “Oh, I thought there was a patach and it was a tzere,” or something, I don’t remember. But the printing isn’t amazing, and on top of that, the scan is less amazing. So, if you take a photo with your phone, there’s details you can see. Like even here, I’ll share this again. Are these tzeres or patachs? I mean, I know from the context this is heisir, but that could have been a patach. How do I know it’s a tzere? Because I know Hebrew, right? But if I didn’t know the context, if there was ambiguous context, which was the case what we were dealing with…
David: Right.
Nehemia: …I would need the physical copy or a better scan, right?
David: And even then, these were actually printed… and he says London on the front page. London. But it was really printed in Austria or Germany.
Nehemia: Really?
David: And he wasn’t the print setter. So, there are mistakes that crept in.
Nehemia: But here, even if it’s not a mistake, I don’t know what he printed, or what was printed, because it’s not the greatest scan ever. And to begin with, in these 1800s (I have some printed books in the 1800s) it’s often hard to tell the difference between Hey and Chet, and very similar letters and symbols.
David: Right. So, what happened was, I took the money and I said I’m going to buy this really old book. They have some reprints, which are almost as much as the books cost me, and so, I just went for the original. And it was funny, because there was this guy on eBay selling them for about six-and-a-half thousand dollars. And I wrote the person, I said, “Listen, the last time these sold at auction, it was for six hundred dollars. So, like, why are you asking so much money, that you’re going to… that’s what you want?” And he said, they’re signed; they’re signed copies. So, I said, “Okay. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m going to use these. I don’t care that they’re signed.”
Nehemia: But for a lot of book collectors…
David: Then I found on a website…
Nehemia: Wait, hold on. So, for a lot of book collectors a signed original copy is worth more than not unsigned. So, if you have an original, I don’t know, The Hobbit, First Edition, signed by J.R.R. Tolkien, it’s worth thousands or more dollars. I don’t know how much it’s worth. It’s worth a lot of money. If it’s in good condition.
David: Right. But I was going to be using these books, so like, it didn’t…
Nehemia: So, for you, it’s functional. You don’t care if it’s something…
David: Yeah. Sure, when people from your podcast come to visit my home, I’ll show them. People are interested. But for most people, it’s not the biggest deal. So, I found on a website called ABE Books…
Nehemia: ABE Books. Yeah, I assume.
David: I used to think it was “Abe” Books. It was A-B-E, ABE Books, and I found on there, there was a copy in Cleveland that was going for 1,100 dollars, and it was not signed.
Nehemia: Okay.
David: And so, that is the copy that I got. I got them to come down a little bit, but that was the copy that I got.
Nehemia: Because it wasn’t signed, you got it for less.
David: Yeah. There’s the six-and-a-half for the signed, and the unsigned one was just about 1,100 dollars. If you could show on your screen what it looked like.
Nehemia: Ah, from your article.
David: Yeah.
Nehemia: “My well-worn copy of the Masorah,” it says.
David: And so, Nehemia, for those who are just listening, can you describe the condition of the book?
Nehemia: So, there’s four cloth-bound volumes. I believe that’s cloth. The binding is kind of tattered, torn, literally in some places torn. In one place, it looks like a little bit of it is missing. These, for collectors, would not be worth a whole lot of money. And it just goes to show 1,100 dollars instead of 6,500 dollars.
David: Right. You go get a re-bound, it’s beat up. It’s like someone’s used this.
Nehemia: Or a lot of collectors would just say, “No, I’m going to buy a better one. If I want one in my collection, I want one that…” Like, I saw an explanation where, like, this little thing at the top of the… what is it they call that, of the back of the binding? If this is split… or here, like for example, here it’s bent back, the difference of that, of, like, a first edition of… I don’t know, of Dickens or something, would be the difference between hundreds and maybe tens of thousands, especially if it’s signed, right?
David: Right. But for me, didn’t matter.
Nehemia: What do you care? Right. You’re interested in the contents.
David: Right. I’m using this book. So, let’s scroll down… this is…
Nehemia: Okay.
David: Yeah, so you can see here that it wasn’t signed.
Nehemia: So, it says on the front of volume 1, name of subscriber is left blank, name of copy is blank, and signature of the author. So, what does that mean, subscriber? We don’t think about that today. We go to Amazon and we buy a book…
David: Yeah.
Nehemia: What’s a subscriber?
David: Yeah, so, the idea was that it cost a lot of capital to publish a book. So, before you would publish it, you would go around to all the seminaries, the churches (in this case, the synagogues) and you might say, “Hey, are you going to want to buy a book?” And then you pay in advance. And I bet…
Nehemia: Look, we have something like that today. It’s called Kickstarter, but basically…
David: We did! Is that still around?
Nehemia: I don’t know if it’s still around or not, but I once bought something on Kickstarter and I regretted it later. But it looked so amazing. But you never know, there are some amazing things that came off of Kickstarter. So, the idea was… and here was an unusual situation, but maybe not so unusual for Jewish books; Ginsburg had to pay for the printing himself.
David: Right.
Nehemia: And he didn’t have any money! Right? It could be… I don’t know what it would have been; a lot of money. And I’ve printed books. It’s very expensive. Now we have print on demand, which requires a lot less capital. Right? You can do it up front for, relatively inexpensive, and then each one costs more to print. But back then, you would go to a printer and say, “I want 500 copies.” You probably didn’t have more than 500 copies, I would guess. I don’t know. Look, even 20 years ago, when I was working on some publications that were being printed by Oxford University Press and Brill, I asked the question, “How many copies do you guys print?” And one of them was 850 copies. I’m like, “How is that possible? I wrote a popular book, not an academic book, and I did 3,000 copies.” And I was told by the printer, “Are you sure you even want to do this? Is it even worth it for you?” “Yeah, it’s worth it for me. I know it costs a lot of money, but it’s worth it, because I want to get this stuff out.” And then, when I reprinted, I did 5,000 copies. Brill was an Oxford University Press. I think it was Brill, was doing 850 copies for a semi-popular book, meaning it was an academic book but meant for the broad public. So, in the 1800s, I don’t know how many copies he made. Maybe it was 100, maybe it was 500. It wasn’t tens of thousands of copies. And so, he would collect money. He would collect subscriptions and say, “Oh, you want a copy?” And if he had enough subscriptions, he could print ones maybe that weren’t subscription, I guess. I’m not really sure how it worked.
David: Yeah, it was hard to get a copy. There’s a story that the tsar of Russia, who had a lot of manuscripts (and if you have Hebrew manuscripts, this book is really important) wrote a letter to the ambassador of England saying, “Hey, can you get me Ginsburg’s The Masorah?” So, yeah, it was…
Nehemia: Was he able to get it?
David: I imagine so. You would know better, Nehemia, because you went to St. Petersburg.
Nehemia: Well, we’d have to look it up in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg. So, that’d be an interesting question for someone to go look up; did the Tsar ultimately get it, and is his a signed copy? So, why was the copy signed? That’s a weird thing to us today. In other words, so, here’s an important thing; if you have a signed copy of Charles Dickens Nicholas Nickleby, or something he wrote, I don’t think it was signed originally. Somebody bought the book from a commercial bookseller or commercial publisher (the publisher sold it to booksellers who, then, you bought the book from them) and then you would maybe meet the author, and you would ask him to sign it. Here it’s completely different. How did these get signed, and why?
David: Well, I think they were signing it almost as, like, a thank you. And like, “Hey, you signed up for this. Thank you.” And also, to make sure that you’re getting my copy, that nobody else is pirating it.
Nehemia: So, this is an interesting concept.
David: Yeah, like we think of pirating. Nehemia, you and I remember, I don’t know how many of your listeners remember Napster, pirated music, and all that. Like, this was going back way before the digital age; people were pirating books and selling them.
Nehemia: So, here’s an interesting thing. Before the French Revolution, one of the tightest censorship systems was France, the kingdom of France. And every certain period, the French government would put out a list of books that were censored. And all of the printers around France, and Belgium, and the Netherlands, and Germany, would get that list, and they’d say, “Oh, these are the books we should print because we have no competitors.” And so, they would print pirate copies of the books that were illegal to print in France, smuggle them into France, and people would buy them.
And so, we don’t think about this today (many people don’t) that there were pirated books back… There are pirated books today, right? I mean, I use this service called Otzar Chochma, where they have this online database for all these traditional Rabbinical books, some of them recent books from the last few years, and there’ll be a thing at the front page that will say, you know, “If you’re not seeing such and such, this is a pirated copy.” Today we see that kind of thing!
David: People pirate my videos. There’s a guy in India that takes my videos and then just does his voiceover of exactly the same thing. And, like, yeah, it’s totally normal. So…
Nehemia: So, I was once in the Philippines, in 2014, and I was asked there to speak. I spoke at this church, and this lady walks up to me and asks me to sign my book. And it’s spiral-bound. And I’m like, “Wait, I know I didn’t print a spiral-bound book.” So, she had asked me to sign a pirate copy that I guess she made herself because she couldn’t afford it. And… all right.
David: You signed it.
Nehemia: I absolutely signed it, and I was touched that she thought my book was important enough to pirate. She wasn’t doing it for commercial purposes. These pirates generally are doing it… In other words, they’re saying, “Wait a minute; other people want to buy Ginsburg’s book as well. Let’s make a pirated copy and we’ll sell it for a lot of money, and when he runs out of his subscription sales, we’ll pick up the slack.”
David: But this was important to me, because this was my first indication that something was weird about my book.
Nehemia: That it wasn’t signed.
David: It wasn’t signed. So, the guy on eBay, his is signed. How come mine’s not? It’s supposed to be signed. And then… so, all of a sudden, I started opening up the book, and I noticed two things at the same time. The first thing was that all 2,500 pages had pencil scorings down the line in the margins.
Nehemia: What does scorings mean?
David: So, each page has two margins; let’s say, the right-side margin and the left-side margin.
Nehemia: Yeah.
David: Someone took a pencil and drew a line down both sides of every single page, 2,500 pages.
Nehemia: So that they could write notes or something.
David: Something. We don’t know. And then so that was, like, “Okay, I have no idea what’s going on here.” So, you know, now I’ve got two weird things with this book. And then, the third thing was where things actually got extremely weird. In this book, the two most important volumes are one and two. Those are really where the greatest mass of information is. And so, in one and two, every time I would go to two, I would notice these little handwritten notes, and just, like, move away from them because I didn’t understand them. But as time… remember, I’m using this every day. This is, like, on my desk. All of a sudden, I can’t ignore these notes. So, Nehemia, could you please pull up, and let’s take a look at what some of these notes look like.
Nehemia: And guys, just to think about this; 2500 pages, and every single page somebody took a ruler and put a pencil mark to sort of make boundaries where they could…
David: Yeah. Next time somebody asks me, “Can you do something for me?” And I go, “Oh, I don’t know if I have the time,” I’m going to think of this, Nehemia. Hey, you know, somebody…
Nehemia: So, this is an example of one of these… I call these ruling lines.
David: Yeah.
Nehemia: Because they’re made with a ruler.
David: Yeah.
Nehemia: So, here are these lines. And this was made by hand in pencil on 2,500 pages.
David: Scroll up for just a little bit.
Nehemia: More here.
David: Okay, no, scroll down… good. And so, let’s just see at that top image there. What we see over here is, we’re looking at one of the encyclopedia entries, and on the left-side margin there’s a pencil line, and then there are notes.
Nehemia: By the way, I downloaded this from Sfarad. There’s a mistake here that you have to ask them to fix. They’re using Arabic numbers instead of Arabic numerals. I mean these are…
David: Yeah, something happened. That’s a mistake.
Nehemia: So, let’s ask them to fix it. They can fix that. At least online they can.
David: Okay so, what we’re looking at here is that there are notes, and they’re cryptic. 277A… what I first thought was 376… you see in the red there Nehemia. If you could highlight it…
Nehemia: All right, so here… okay. So, wait, hold on, let’s back up here. So, this is volume 2, page 243, and it’s under letter Mem, and that in Arabic says 718, which is over here. 718 in Arabic numerals, and these are in Arabic…
David: Yeah, that was a font issue.
Nehemia: They’ll fix the font, hopefully. And then here in Hebrew, it’s Tashiach, Tav-Shin-Yud-Chet, which comes out to 718. So, in other words, this is list number 718 under the letter Mem.
David: Mem.
Nehemia: And this is based on him comparing a bunch of different manuscripts, and it says here Isaiah 60:13.
David: And next to it…
Nehemia: And that’s in print. And then to the left, in red pen, it says 277A. The next line says, Psalms 26:8. And to the left of it in red pen, it says 370… it looks like a 6, but I assume that’s a B. And then, to the left of the vertical pencil line, it says… is that in blue pen or black pen?
David: Purple, 151A.
Nehemia: Okay, 151A, and below that 237B. So, yeah.
David: So, automatically, I’m saying to myself… and you can scroll down. You’ll see on this one page 18 of these.
Nehemia: Somebody went through a lot of trouble to add notes to a printed volume, giving what appear to be, if I had a guess, not knowing any… well, I heard your lecture so I’m cheating…
David: No, that’s fine, say it, yeah.
Nehemia: …but if I didn’t know anything, I would say, “Oh, these are page numbers in a manuscript that has…”
David: Or early printed, because…
Nehemia: Or could be early printing, yeah.
David: …the first books didn’t have page numbers like we do. They had side A and side B.
Nehemia: Well, to this day in Rabbinical books, they’ll say, you know, Aleph and Bet; side A and side B.
David: Yeah, in the Gemara, 100 percent.
Nehemia: So, in other words, we say, you know, page 55. They would say, “Oh, that’s page…” I don’t know, 22B, right?
David: Right.
Nehemia: So, in other words, they’re actually not counting pages technically, they’re counting folios.
David: Yeah.
Nehemia: A folio in Latin is a leaf, or in English now it’s a leaf, meaning it’s the physical page, which has a front and a back, Aleph and Bet. Or in Latin they’ll say recto and verso. Okay.
David: So, I have on my bookshelf a really fascinating little copy of a biblical book by someone named Seligman Bayer in the 1800s, and it has notes all over it. Notes in Greek, notes in Hebrew. It’s an amazing notes thing. But I could tell very clearly that this was somebody commenting on Scripture.
Nehemia: Okay.
David: Whereas with this one here, it almost felt like this was explaining the book. Like, why would you put a cryptic note here unless you knew something about this book that nobody else knew?
Nehemia: Who would this help?
David: And I was kind of thinking, maybe these were the sources. You know, perhaps somebody’s trying to undo Ginsburg and argue against him. I wasn’t quite sure. So, the next step for me was trying to figure out who wrote these notes. That, for me, became the big issue.
Nehemia: Well, I mean, I would say there’s two questions here. The bigger question I would ask, and I know you asked it, so, again, I’ve heard the lecture and I’ve read the article… so, the bigger question is, what are the manuscripts they’re referring to? Right? Because that, actually, could be really useful. And then secondly, who wrote this and why?
David: Right. So, you have to say… so, in the 1800s, only a few people on earth had access to manuscripts, or at least a number of manuscripts. And so, Ginsburg was one of those people. Now you start saying, “Well, who else?” And you can probably count them on your hands, you know, and try and cross them out. But for me, the big question was, was it Ginsburg? Right? It’s his book.
Nehemia: Just so people understand the significance of not having access to the original manuscript. So, there’s a famous case of the Karaite Abraham Firkovich, who went around the Middle East and the Russian Empire, and he was a manuscript collector. The Firkovich Collections in St. Petersburg were collected by him. That’s at the Russian National Library today, which is considered the greatest collection of early Masoretic Bible manuscripts in the world. So, one of the things he was accused of was being a forger. And what was the nature of his forgery? So, he would write a letter, a handwritten letter, to some scholar, and say, “I found a manuscript, and here’s what it says in this manuscript.” And eventually, people said, “That sounds too good to be true. Show us that manuscript.” And he couldn’t come up with it. And they said, “Okay, he sent us a copy of what it says. How do we know it really says that? Maybe he just made that up.” And in some instances, he… based on what I know today, almost certainly made it up. In one instance, after he died, the librarian in Saint Petersburg said, “I couldn’t find this document. He lied and made up the document.” About 10 or 20 years ago they found it.
David: Wow.
Nehemia: So, for over 100 years it was a fact that he was a forger, because this unbelievable document that he says he found wasn’t… and why didn’t they find it? Because there are hundreds of thousands or millions of documents in the Russian National Library. Or, back then it was the Russian Imperial Library. That was the tzar’s library, right? And, you know, they couldn’t find something. I’ve gone to libraries in the 21st century, and I said, “There’s such and such thing in your catalog. I’d like to see it,” And they can’t find it. And I’m talking about manuscripts. And I’m like, “Wait, you’re saying you misplaced a manuscript?” This happens particularly with scrolls, because scrolls don’t fit so neatly onto a shelf.
David: They’re huge.
Nehemia: Right. So, they’ll stick it up like you see here. This is a library, this photo, a famous one behind me…
David: Yeah.
Nehemia: …is a library in Bologna. Bologna University Library took this photo. So, imagine you have a scroll and you don’t know where to put it, so you stick it up here. And then, you retire, and two librarians later, they’re like, “I don’t know where that is. It’s somewhere in the library. We’ll find it one day. Maybe.” So, this happens today, especially with scrolls, but not just scrolls, with Codices. Like, priceless manuscripts are misplaced even today. So, all right, I forget why I mentioned that.
David: So, you were going to say that Ginsburg, he never told us which manuscripts used…
Nehemia: Oh, so Ginsburg had access to the manuscripts, but he didn’t always… well, in his introduction, he says which manuscripts he used, right? But here was one…
David: He only mentions a few. He never…
Nehemia: Ah, he doesn’t give the full list.
David: He doesn’t tell you which he gets from which. So, if he’s using 40 manuscripts, you have to now go through all 40.
Nehemia: So, let’s look at an example of what we’re talking about here from your article, okay? And you have a page here from Ginsburg, and there’s a note here, note number 390, under Kaf. It says “la’kna’ani, three times in Scripture, and they are…” and then it lists the three times that that form appears. And then, somebody writes a note, handwritten, 156a.
David: So, what…
Nehemia: And what we don’t know from Ginsburg is, where did Ginsburg get this note?
David: Get this note. He got it from either one or more manuscripts…
Nehemia: But we don’t know that from the book.
David: He could have got it from all 40. But we don’t know.
Nehemia: So, somebody actually did a PhD dissertation, a student of Yosef Ofer, Anat Hayut, where she went through a bunch of manuscripts (I want to say they were in London, at what is today the British Library; back then it was the British Museum Library, in the time of Ginsburg) and she found the sources of a bunch of the notes.
David: Yeah, and what she basically did was, about a third of the notes she was able to find in these two or three or even four key matches…
Nehemia: And some of the notes she couldn’t find, right?
David: Yeah like, 60 to 70 percent; they’re not there. So, my thought was, “Wait a minute. Is this the source?”
Nehemia: Hmm.
David: And then, that would be very helpful to people like Nehemia and me, and hopefully some of your viewers, to say, “Well, wait. I want to look it up.”
Nehemia: And here’s why it’s important to look it up. So, back in the day of Ginsburg, if I wanted to know what the note in the Masorah was (and I almost say Masorah in air quotes) on the word la’kna’ani, I had to do one of two things: I had to travel around the world looking at manuscripts, or I could look in Ginsburg.
David: Right.
Nehemia: And today, because the manuscripts (many of them, not all of them) have been digitized, we can look up and we can see, “Oh, you know, Anat Hayut found these four manuscripts have 30 percent of the notes. Is this in there?” And by the way, where do you look for it? Well, you would look in Joshua 13:3. You’d look in Ezra 9:1. You’d look in Proverbs 31:24. Right? So, you’d have to look in three different passages, maybe in a fourth, because maybe this note appears somewhere else in some of the manuscripts, I don’t know.
And then, here’s where it’s very hard to prove the negative, right? Let’s say someone were to come today and say that Ginsburg was a forger. It’d be very, very difficult to prove. I don’t think he was, by the way. But if you wanted to prove that, back then it would be almost impossible to prove. So, he was on the honor system, in many respects. But maybe he made mistakes. And there’s no way to know if he made… or the printer might have made a mistake.
David: Right.
Nehemia: And there’s no way to know if the printer or he made a mistake without looking in the manuscript and checking for yourself. Where do I start?
David: Right. And often, just looking at a manuscript, you see things that aren’t included on the page…
Nehemia: Because they can’t include everything. They have to be selective, right? Because even today, when you look in a critical edition of the Tanakh, or any book, they can’t include everything. Right?
David: Right.
Nehemia: Right. So, they’re including what they think is important. Maybe there’s other things they thought weren’t important that you think is important.
David: All right. So, now we’re up to the key moment. So, we’ve got this massive book, this four-volume, 2,500-page book, that has no sources. There’s no footnotes, there’s no endnotes, there’s no bibliography. We don’t know where all these mountains of information comes from. And are these notes, possibly Ginsburg himself, telling you? So, Nehemia, could you please share the next picture, where I compared Ginsburg’s handwriting, as we know it in Cambridge, with the handwriting in my book?
Nehemia: Okay. All right. All right. Here we have the Kaf manuscript. Should I tell what the Kaf Manuscript is, or do you want to…?
David: Sure.
Nehemia: So, I was at the Wren Library at Trinity College in Cambridge, and I was there to look at some Torah scrolls and some other manuscripts. And the librarian comes up to me, and he says he’s been going through some boxes, and in the boxes, he found a bunch of unpublished manuscripts. Are they of any importance? And I look at some of them, and I’m like, “Yeah, not particularly.” And then I look at this, and I see the Kaf. And what is Kaf? So, they’re alphabetical, the way Ginsburg arranged the Masoretic notes. And then he has a volume where he gives an English sort of explanation of what the various notes are, and he gets through Aleph through Yud. And he says something like, “When I have more money, I’ll do Kaf and on. Kaf through Tav, which I’ve already prepared.” And he never printed it.
So, this librarian finds Kaf and shows it to me. I’m like, “Yes! This is very important.” And I send it to Prof. Ofer, who right now is working on an edition of it. And by the way, how did it end up in the Wren Library at Trinity College? So, Ginsburg needed money. Let me tell this; it’s worth telling the story. Ginsburg needed money for various things. He was deeply in debt for printing his books. He took subscriptions but it wasn’t enough.
By the way, I know a story, which I won’t go into details of names, but I have a story, a very famous story in a certain community, where somebody did the exact same thing. He took subscriptions for a book that he was working on, and then he fell into debt, and he took the money to pay his debts. And the book was never printed. So, this happens. It happens in the 21st century, or maybe that was the 20th century. It might have been in the 90s. I don’t remember.
So, Ginsburg falls into debt. He’s not going to steal the money from the people who subscribe. So, what does he do? He goes to Aldous Wright, who is… I don’t know if at that time he was at Trinity College, but at some point, he… and he says, “You give me the money, and when I die, you can have my library.” And when Ginsburg died, the library was turned over to Aldous Wright. And then Aldous Wright donated it to Trinity College. So, his library includes boxes of handwritten documents, including the Kaf Manuscript. Where is Lamed through Tav? Nobody’s found that yet. Could still be at Wren Library.
David: So, everyone should be aware; because of Nehemia, this was put online. His handwriting was put online. And it wasn’t just like one, “Dear mom, hope you’re doing well,” note, it was 100 pages of dense handwriting.
Nehemia: Yeah, so, he prepared it for the typesetter, right? Meaning, he prepared it for printing, not necessarily for the typesetters.
David: And so, Nehemia, because of you, I was able to now compare his handwriting easily to mine. So, why don’t we take a look at it?
Nehemia: Okay. And Prof. Ofer convinced him to put it online, but I sent photos of it to Prof. Ofer. Yeah, all right. So…
David: So, let’s do the middle column. Let’s go for that.
Nehemia: Okay. Yeah, there’s no question that this is the same hand. And what’s important here, guys… and you’ve really done amazing pieces of detective work here, David. What David did here is, he took the same words written in cursive, and in the case of the numbers, they’re, you know, numbers; but he took the same exact words from the Kaf Manuscript that we know was written by Ginsburg, and from his personal copy of this book, under the idea that maybe Ginsburg is the one who wrote all these tens of thousands or however many notes. And when you look at the handwriting, like the word Deuteronomy, if you just took like an E or something, who knows, right? Or a T. But when you take the full set of words, you see how he writes Genesis and Exodus, these abbreviations, Numbers. Look at the shape of the N, a little curl on the left side of the N. Right? This is clearly written by Ginsburg.
David: So, my little cheap, quote-unquote cheap, which was very expensive, the most expensive book I’ve ever bought, you know, my inexpensive copy, all of a sudden didn’t have Ginsburg’s signature, but it had tens of hundreds of hours of his notes, of handwritten notes.
Nehemia: So, in other words, this is Ginsburg’s personal copy, where he’s adding notes. And when he says it’s on page 163a of a certain manuscript, he knows that, because he must have some other notes. Maybe those are still at Wren Library at Trinity College. But he must have some other notes of what he sent to the typesetter, and the typesetter didn’t include those.
And it could be he had index cards, right? In other words, what they would do… we don’t know that Ginsburg did this, but what many, many scholars would do back in the day, and in fact, until relatively recently, is, they would have an index card, a three-by-five or something index card. I don’t know what size they used. And on that, they would say, “Okay, there’s this note in this manuscript,” and they’d write the page number, they’d write the note, and then they’d organize those index cards alphabetically. And they’d say, “Oh, these two manuscripts have the same note. It’s slightly different wording. Now I, Ginsburg, am going to decide which of the wordings to use.”
And that’s why this is important for me, because, when I see this, you know, verbiage, well here’s, you know, “va’yikana gimel ve’simanhon”, I don’t know that that’s in any manuscript. In other words, he might have found that in four different manuscripts, and each one had slight differences, and he’s giving… I don’t know, right, he might be giving what we would call an eclectic version. An eclectic version means he’s taken the four different index cards, and he says, “Okay, in this one, they misspelled one of the words. In this other one they left out this word. I’m going to give you my version.” Why? “Because it’s all kind of the same thing.” Well, but it’s not the same thing. Right? Or maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, right?
David: Yes, so, here we had the exciting opportunity to see his sources. And so, for me now, the question was; well, remember that pencil line down the middle of the margins?
Nehemia: Yeah.
David: That was differentiating between two manuscripts, between the purple, and the red and black.
Nehemia: And again, guys, just to understand here, somebody wrote a PhD dissertation. That’s an investment of three to five years…
David: Yep.
Nehemia: …trying to identify the source of notes, and she found, you said 30 percent of the notes. I don’t remember that.
David: Yeah.
Nehemia: Something like 30 percent of the notes in four of the manuscripts, and here Ginsburg is telling you not only what manuscript it is, but what page it is. But he doesn’t tell you what manuscript; you just have to figure out based on the page numbers.
David: Right.
Nehemia: You have to reverse engineer it. How do you do that when there’s 40 manuscripts he used?
David: Right.
Nehemia: So, if you can find which manuscript has a certain note on page 163A and then you check it, because it could be a coincidence, right? You check it across a bunch of different notes. Then you say, “Oh, this refers to manuscript X and this refers to manuscript Y.” So, that’s an incredible piece of scholarly sleuthing, I would call that. That’s an incredible piece of scholarly Sherlock Holmesery to try to find that kind of thing.
David: Right.
Nehemia: Did you find it? We’re on the edge of our seat.
David: So…
Nehemia: So, wait, wait. The first big lead is what they call the burying lead, David. You discovered Ginsburg’s personal copy. And guys, let’s back up. Christian David Ginsburg was a Jewish convert to Christianity. He was a true believer both in Judaism and Christianity; certainly, in Christianity he was a true believer. We know that from a bunch of different sources. And he is, to this day, considered the founder of Masoretic studies, what I spend my life on, as a modern scholarship, right? Meaning, like modern, in the sense of modern critical scholarship, right? Meaning, we have a scholar in like, what is it, the 16th century, Eliyahu B’chur, who kind of, or Elijah Levitas, they call him, who is a scholar of the Masorah, but he’s not a modern scholar using modern approaches. Christian David Ginsburg is, meaning, he’s comparing manuscripts and he’s doing it critically, and sometimes that’s good, sometimes that’s bad, right?
But in any event, he’s the founder of Masoretic studies and he is a Jewish convert to Christianity. And although you are the director of the Biblical Hebrew Program… So, let’s address this. You’re the director of the Biblical Hebrew Program at the Jewish Theological Seminary, yet you’ve written an article about a Jewish convert to Christianity. Is that controversial, and why not?
David: It’s certainly not controversial.
Nehemia: Okay.
David: Listen, in the world we live in, there’s always going to be people on the edges of…
Nehemia: Like me!
David: …of groups who are moving back and forth and back and forth, and Christian David Ginsburg is one of those fascinating people. He’s really… you said, like you. It’s interesting, Nehemia, some of the things that he’s studied are the kinds of things that are the most exciting parts of biblical studies.
Nehemia: Hundred percent.
David: Right, the Karaites, the interpretation of… the Essenes…
Nehemia: Why do you think he focused on these edge cases? I have an idea, but what do you think? Why do you think he would… Even the Masorah, in a sense, is an edge case. Meaning, when he’s at yeshiva, they’re not sitting there studying Masorah.
David: Right, they’re not. I really want to point out that what he did was not easy.
Nehemia: No.
David: We were at the conference this year, Nehemia, when somebody…
Nehemia: SBL, Society of Biblical Literature, yeah…
David: At the Society of Biblical Literature, somebody gave a presentation about his life and mentioned how he had left a child behind in Europe, in Poland, and started life anew in England, and never had any contact back again. And that really troubled me. Like, why would he have done that? Why would he abandon his child? And then somebody raised their hand and said, “Well, how do you know he wasn’t exiled?” He probably was.
Nehemia: I mean, it’s a no-brainer to me. When somebody converts to Christianity, certainly in the 1800s in Europe…
David: Yeah, their family is not going to speak to them.
Nehemia: Not just, they don’t speak to them, they sit shiva. Meaning, they literally sit on the ground for seven days…
David: Yeah…
Nehemia: … which is what you do when somebody dies. Look, my father went to his rabbi, and said, “My son has become a Karaite. Do I have to sit shiva?” In other words, does my father (of blessed memory) did he have to treat me as if I had died because I no longer accepted the Oral Law? And his rabbi’s response would have been binding to him, in his eyes. And his Orthodox rabbi said to him, “Well, at least he’s not Reform.” And what did he explain? He said, “The Reform deny both the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, your son just denies the Oral Torah. He still accepts the Written Torah.”
So, that was a very, let’s say, moderate response. There’s many Orthodox rabbis today would say, “Of course you have to sit shiva.” And if he was a Christian? Not he. If I had converted to Christianity or Messianic Judaism, then my father wouldn’t have asked the question, he would have known he had to sit shiva. So, in other words, his wife treated him as if he’s dead…
David: You can imagine…
Nehemia: His child probably didn’t have a say in it. And here, we don’t know this for a fact, but it’s reasonable to infer that that’s what happened.
David: Yeah, so, the fact that he’s doing this is not without cost.
Nehemia: Right, personal cost, where you decide to become a Christian knowing that you’ll never see your child again.
David: Or your family.
Nehemia: As far as your child knows, you might be dead. Look, I have a story from about 10 years ago, no, seven years ago. I was working on my PhD, and I went to a certain library, I won’t say which, and the librarian comes out to me, and we’re talking about Moses Shapira of the famous Shapira Scrolls. I did an episode with Edan Dershowitz about it. And the librarian says to me… and we’re speaking in Hebrew; she says, “Do you know he was a meshumad, an apostate?” And I thought, “What a strange thing for a scholar to say. That’s highly inappropriate. Like, why is that relevant?”
But here’s what she really meant, right? Because Shapira was accused of being a forger. And really the subtext there is: what do you expect from an apostate? His whole life is a lie. And it really shocked me that someone in the 21st century, someone with a PhD, someone who’s a scholar, someone who’s a respected academic, still has this sort of prejudice against somebody who converts to Christianity. And this is a secular person, right? Imagine now an Orthodox Jew in 19th century Poland, right? And imagine the social cost for Ginsburg to say, “I’m going to walk away from my family, from my child, from my community, because I feel,” Christians say, “convicted by this belief.” I mean…
David: Yeah. And so, in a certain sense, that’s a really fascinating person; a person who’s really navigated two different worlds and went from one to the other. So, yeah, I don’t see in any way is that an issue, personally. I will say, Nehemia, I understand that you got that comment, and maybe your father’s rabbi might have said that, but not everyone feels that way.
Nehemia: No, a hundred percent, no. No, no. Look, but even my father’s rabbi said, “No, you can have a relationship with your son. You don’t have to treat him as if he’s dead.” That was a very big deal. You know, my father would have done whatever the rabbi…
David: Right.
Nehemia: …said, whatever he gave him as a… like, it was a she’ela. It was a formal question, right?
David: Right.
Nehemia: And he gave him a formal response, right, which was considered binding by my father, at least, and by the rabbi. And he didn’t. Look, I mean, I know a lot of people in, I’ll just call them Christian denominations without giving details, who remained Christians, but were no longer dues-paying members of that denomination, and their parents have to shun them. Or their children have to shun them, meaning treat them as if they’re not allowed to speak to them, they’re not allowed to interact with them. So, this happens today.
David: This happens.
Nehemia: Look, it happens in some ultra-Orthodox denominations today.
David: But in a certain sense, it could be what led him, as you say, to the Masorah, because these notes, they’re there, but rabbis don’t study them. And so, it’s also, they were written by people who, you might agree with me on this, were most likely Karaites. And so…
Nehemia: I don’t think any of the manuscripts he worked with were copied by Karaites, let’s put it that way. And some of the notes…
David: 4445? You don’t think so?
Nehemia: Oh, okay, all right. So, that one may be.
David: That’s old…
Nehemia: Right. All right, so, that one may be. But most of his manuscripts were… and that one we don’t know for sure. Most of his manuscripts were relatively late, or we would consider them late today.
David: So, he has a little paragraph here, and the second part of the paragraph says, “The list of donors and subscribers for whom the work is printed will be given in the third volume.” And here’s the key part. “Each volume has on it the name of the subscriber and a number, as well as the signature of the author. Copies without these marks will be considered pirated. Christian David Ginsburg.”
Nehemia: Okay.
David: And so, that’s the eBay volume, which for 6,500 dollars was saying, “Hey, we’ve got it. We’ve got the author’s signature.” Whereas mine did not.
Nehemia: So, in other words, the reason yours didn’t have a signature, based on this, we can infer, is because it wasn’t purchased by a subscriber, it belonged to the original author. He only signed the ones that he sent off to subscribers.
David: Right.
Nehemia: Along with a number. Yours wouldn’t be numbered because it belonged to him. It was his personal copy.
David: Right.
Nehemia: What’s interesting, by the way, is, he also writes this in Hebrew, and the word for pirated here is ganuv, stolen. That’s interesting!
David: Yeah.
Nehemia: Very cool. That’s very, very cool. All right. Beautiful. Wow. So, wow, very interesting.
David: Okay, but let’s do some sleuthing. You ready for some more sleuthing?
Nehemia: Let’s do some sleuthing. This is exciting. All right.
David: Okay. All right. So, I needed to figure out what these purple notes are and what these red notes are.
Nehemia: Are they consistently purple when they’re in the outer margin?
David: Outer margin is purple.
Nehemia: Always?
David: Always. And inner margin is red or black. And I didn’t know if red and black were two different manuscripts, but I was able to determine that the red only goes up to, like, page 80, and then 81 is black. So, it’s really one manuscript.
Nehemia: And this is just a question that I don’t know the answer to. I don’t know that, on my computer, I can tell that that’s purple.
David: Yeah, but it is purple.
Nehemia: No, no, I believe you.
David: No, no, no, yeah.
Nehemia: So, here’s an example, guys. I did an interview with a guy who’s a scholar of Mormonism, and he made a statement which I think is profound, and it’s something that many people who deal with manuscripts know. But he put it really, really clearly. He said, all photographs lie. Right? So, here you have the original handwritten notes, and this is a photograph of the notes, and you can see details that aren’t necessarily obvious.
David: Yeah, because… so, for everyone to just kind of think about the lighting on this.
Nehemia: Right.
David: I’m not a professional photographer. This was from my iPhone.
Nehemia: Okay.
David: The second thing is, the paper isn’t white. It’s yellow from age.
Nehemia: Yes.
David: And then the third thing is, the purple has faded.
Nehemia: Yeah.
David: So, like, it’s there, but it’s a weak purple… but it’s there…
Nehemia: And now that you’re telling me it’s purple, I believe you and I can see it, but I don’t know that I would know that that was purple. I would bet (and I don’t know the answer to this) but it would be interesting to open this up in photoshop from the PDF, because that’s what most people have access to, and use the eyedropper tool and see if it identifies it as purple. Guys, I’m only mentioning this because it’s important to know that, when you look at a photograph of a manuscript, you have to take into account that there is something called a white balance that… I just spent weeks working on a question related to this in Berlin; the imaging software does things that it doesn’t always tell you, that are a black box. So, just… it’s important to know that.
David: All right, and I would like everyone to know that Nehemia has an open invitation to my home in Yonkers, New York, and Nehemia will update you if it’s a different color.
Nehemia: I’m the worst person to tell you about what colors are. I famously once went out of the house wearing one black Croc and another that was navy blue, and when someone pointed it out, I looked down at my feet, I said, “Oh yeah, now I see it.” But I hadn’t noticed it at home. And then I bought a black car which turned out to be very dark green. And now, every time I look at it, I’m like, “Yeah, obviously it’s green.” But you know, in the lighting that I bought it, I did not notice that. So, anyway.
David: Okay, so, back to sleuthing.
Nehemia: Yes.
David: Here we go. So, Nehemia, I had about two, three thousand notes, and I didn’t know how to make sense of them. So, the first thing that I did was try and look up all those…
Nehemia: Oh, wait, this is really cool. Here you have volume 2, page 143, it’s in your article on page 5. You have a black note, you have two purple notes, and you have a red note.
David: Right. And I put that in because it’s not clear, the color…
Nehemia: It’s definitely not clear, yeah.
David: Right. So, I started with the purple notes. I said, I want to figure these things out. And the moment of insight came to me was something that I rarely use well, is Microsoft Excel.
Nehemia: Okay.
David: I said, “These are numbers. Why don’t I just start plugging in the numbers?” And so, if the number is 100A and it’s on verse Ecclesiastes 12:6, I would put in Ecclesiastes 12:6, 100A. And then by doing that, what I was able to do was rearrange all the thousands of notes in a way that made sense, and something jumped at me on the screen.
Nehemia: What was that?
David: So, your listeners probably have heard of the term Tanakh.
Nehemia: Yeah.
David: Tanakh, which stands for the Torah, the Nevi’im, the Prophets, and the Ketuvim, the Writings.
Nehemia: And just as a side note, if people want to learn the Hebrew of the Tanakh, known as Biblical Hebrew, where can they do that?
David: At the Jewish Theological Seminary Biblical Hebrew Program. Thank you, Nehemia.
Nehemia: Of which you’re the director. And you could learn online. And it’s for someone who doesn’t even know the Aleph–Bet. And guys, I don’t know if you realize what an opportunity this is to study at JTS’s program, Biblical Hebrew.
David: Right.
Nehemia: Let me ask a question here. So, it’s the Jewish Theological Seminary. Do they have to be Jewish to study in the program?
David: Absolutely not. What we’re talking about with Ginsburg is, I think, a great example. You could be a Rabbinic Jew, you could be a Karaite Jew, you could be a believing Christian of any denomination, et cetera. We study Tanakh together, we read together, and people from all backgrounds have insights and teach me and teach each other about studying the Tanakh. So, it’s open to everybody, and I think this study that we’re talking about… I’m not bothered by Christian David Ginsburg. Neither are you, right? It’s not a big deal. Jews and Christians can sit down next to each other and study at the same time, and it makes it better for everyone, in my personal opinion. So…
Nehemia: Is this an example of diversity is our strength? In other words, that motto actually has something profound behind it, which is that if everybody has the same view on the world, you’re going to have blind spots. But where diversity really is powerful, and this is, I think, a very Jewish idea, is where you have lots of different perspectives and beliefs and approaches, and you have conversations where maybe at first you’re talking past each other, because you have a set of assumptions, they have a set of assumptions, and you realize, “
