Sacred Hands

The Torah or Pentateuch

The Jewish Bible is divided into three main parts: the Torah, or Pentateuch; the Neviim, or Prophets; and the Ketuvim, or Writings. Consisting of five books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), the Torah is considered to be the most sacred part of the Hebrew Bible because it is traditionally assumed that Moses composed it by divine dictation.

Here is a tenth-century manuscript of the Torah open to the account of the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22:5). The two columns of the main text are written in a professional square script of which there are very few extant examples. The so-called Masorah - a set of rules of pronunciation, spelling, and intonation of the Bible designed to preserve and transmit the text accurately-is written in a mashait hand (formalized cursive script) and added in the margins and between the columns. A manuscript like this would have been written by up to four different scribes, including the main scribe for the consonant text, the naqdar or vocalizer, the accenter, and the masorete, who wrote the Masorah. As regards our manuscript, it seems that there were two scribes who wrote the consonantal text and the Masorah respectively. Probably, a third scribe wrote both the accents and the vocals.