Scrolls and Scribes

The first time I saw a Torah scroll was in the special collections library at the University of Alberta. The scroll was beautiful. It was about three feet wide, made of parchment, and hand-written in ancient Hebrew, in strictly measured rows and columns. Like all Torah scrolls, it contained the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, and was written laboriously by a professional scribe over about a year. Like all scrolls, every line is the same length and contains the same words, and in every scroll there are precisely the same 304,805 Hebrew letters.

A new scroll will cost a synagogue something in the neighborhood of eighty thousand dollars. A synagogue's scroll is stored in an ark at the front, and every Sabbath it is taken out and carried up and down the aisles, and the congregants touch it with their prayer books, and then touch the books to their lips. The synagogues keep their scrolls in a beautiful fabric case, and decorate them with ornamental breastplates and crowns. I later learned that the University's scroll originated in what is now the Czech Republic, and is centuries old.

I felt a kind of awe when I saw this scroll for the first time. To be within a couple feet of something so old, so beloved and sacred, is quite an experience. Traditional Jews believe that the Torah was verbally inspired, word for word, to Moses on Mt. Sinai. They believe it was written at that time in the same form and the exact Hebrew letters and words in which it is now preserved, that the scroll I saw was a perfect preservation of the very words of Almighty G-d.

I've thought since then about the 17th century Czech scribe who wrote that scroll, and many others identical to it, one each year throughout his adult life. It's a very prestigious job, a high calling, but it must also be extraordinarily boring - a monotonous and meticulous process of copying 300,000 letters one by one, with exactly the right calligraphic flourishes.

I mentioned the scrolls and the scribes to a friend recently, and she decided she wants to write out the whole Old Testament by hand. I thought it was a great idea, but I doubt I have the patience to get through even the first five books. A good chunk of the Old Testament is unspeakably boring. But the New Testament might be manageable.

So on Thursday I bought a book with a black cover and thick, blank pages, and on Friday I bought two good pens. I won't follow the any of the strict rules of the Jewish scribes and I won't try to wrest my scrawl into an elegant script, but I will attempt to copy neatly and accurately the whole text of the NIV New Testament by hand.

I decided to do this for a number of reasons. For one thing, I hope it will help me develop patience and perseverance. I also hope that it will force me to read carefully through the text and not rush past the parts that don't interest me, or that I just don't like. I imagine it will be difficult for me to copy passages such as Romans 9, but maybe doing so will foster a sense of humility and reverence for the book. Maybe putting so much effort into the Bible will make it feel more meaningful or valuable or something. Or maybe I'll just get sick of it. I'll keep you posted.