Over the last seven months I’ve spent working as an intern at Museum of the Bible, I’ve handled more than 45 sifrei torah, or Torah Scrolls. My work with the scrolls consists of two parts. The first part involves cataloging scrolls, one at a time, from Museum of the Bible’s collection of approximately 1,600 scrolls. This means rolling through the scroll from beginning to end, or from end to beginning, to identify certain characteristics. While no two Torah Scrolls look exactly identical, the content of each one is close—every scroll contains the five books of Moses, also known as the Pentateuch, ancient texts that have been preserved for thousands of years. However, some traditions of the soferim, the highly trained scribes who copy Torah Scrolls, had led to some minor changes, some of which I am responsible for identifying while cataloging.
The five books of Moses continue to be copied as manuscripts called Torah Scrolls, which are used in congregations and read from three times a week. One tradition in writing sifrei torah is beginning each column with a word that begins with the Hebrew letter vav. This tradition is called vavei ha’ammudim, which is a wordplay that references the description of the tabernacle’s construction. As described in the Bible, the tabernacle was a portable place of worship used by the Israelites before they arrived in the Promised Land. Components of the tabernacle included columns and curtains held up by hooks. The term ammudim refers to the columns of text in Torah Scrolls, the same word used to describe the columns of the tabernacle. Vav is the term that describes the hooks that held up the tabernacle’s curtains, or yeriot, which is represented by the parchment of the scrolls. Thus, scrolls that follow this tradition have a word that starts with the letter vav, one of the “hooks,” begin each column header (with the exception of five special column headers, see below) upon which the columns of the Torah are “hung.”
Almost every Torah Scroll also follows a tradition of having five column headers that do not begin with a vav, but rather the letters bet, yud, hay, shin, and mem, in that order. There are certain words from specific parts of the text that will typically be used, although based on the specific tradition of the sofer, the scribe, whether Ashkenaz, Sephardic, Mizraki, etc., the exact word that forms the column header varies.
In noting these specific characteristics, I also indicate if there are multiple scribes contributing to the scroll, which would happen if parchment leaves from several partial scrolls were stitched together to create a complete scroll. Part of cataloging scrolls contributes to the second part of my work with them—evaluating their condition to ensure they are fit to be imaged using Museum of the Bible’s custom-built Torah Scroll imaging rig, which we’ve nicknamed “Esther.”
Esther is a one-of-a-kind permanent fixture whose primary function is to image scrolls. Esther features a conveyor belt operated by a pedal and props to hold one end of the scroll while it is unrolled. To capture the color of scrolls with the most accuracy possible, we use Multi-Spectral Imaging (MSI), which takes several photos under different colored lights that are combined to create one color-accurate image.
Through both cataloging and imaging scrolls, I’ve had the opportunity to engage with them and appreciate each one, for both their similarities and differences.
Figure 1: Image of a Torah Scroll with two leaves of parchment that are likely to have been written by two different scribes. Image © Museum of the Bible, 2024. All rights reserved.
Figure 2: Image of “Song of Moses” in the book of Deuteronomy. Most scrolls follow the format of writing the Song of Moses in one five- or six-line paragraph, and then 70 or 71 lines with no paragraph breaks. Image © Museum of the Bible, 2024. All rights reserved.
Figure 3: Velvet cover for a Torah Scroll. Image © Museum of the Bible, 2024. All rights reserved.
Capturing the Collections is a series of articles from our specialists working in the Digital Imaging Lab featuring a look at some of the objects they are digitally preserving.
By Sophie Lichtenstein, Digitization Intern
