The History of the Books of the Torah

Why do we call the fifth book of the Torah, which we start this week Devarim, but non-Jews (and some Jews) call it Deuteronomy?

The text of the Torah, otherwise known as the Five Books of Moses, was written in Assyrian Hebrew script two and a half thousand years ago without vowels, sentences, or titles.

Then there was a Greek translation called the Septuagint. The Greek title derives from the story that the Torah was translated into Greek at the request of Ptolemy Philadelphus (who reigned from 285 to 247 BCE). The term Septuagint, meaning “seventy,” actually refers to the 72 translators — six from each tribe of Israel — involved in translating the Pentateuch from Hebrew to Greek in the third century BCE.

Later came the Latin Vulgate, the work of St Jerome, who, in 382 CE, had been commissioned by Pope Damasus 1st  to revise the various texts in use. And these too had no punctuation, sentences, and chapter divisions.

According to the Talmud, along with the written Torah, came the Oral Torah of explanations, expansions, and clarifications. This included what we call the cantillations, how the Torah was read or sung, and the equivalent of punctuation. We now call them Taamei Hamikra, the marks of reading. These are used universally to this day, but how they sound, can vary from community to community.

Over the years, however, different texts of the Torah appeared with relatively minor but significant variations — the Jewish and then the Samaritan and then the Dead Sea Sects, and others. The Jewish variations were all finally standardized in the Masoretic text composed by the Masoretes, who spanned the 6th to the 10th  century CE. Their work has come down to us through the various Codexes and is the one we all rely on to this day.

The oldest complete text is the Leningrad Codex, but the earlier ones with parts missing are the Aleppo Codex and the Sassoon Codex, which recently was auctioned for $38.1 million this year. It will be housed in Tel Aviv. These are the bases for the various printed versions in book form.

In the printed texts of the Bible that we have today, there are punctuation, cantillation, verses, and chapters. But where do they come from?

Hugh of Saint-Cher (c. 1200 –1263) was a French Dominican friar who became a cardinal and Biblical commentator. He is often given credit for first dividing the Latin Vulgate into chapters in the real sense, but it is the arrangement of his contemporary and fellow cardinal Stephen Langton that really made a difference; in 1205, he created the chapter divisions that are used today. And it was the Protestant French printer Robert Estienne (1503-1556) who was the first to number the verses within each chapter, his verse numbers entering printed editions in 1551 (New Testament) and 1553 (Hebrew Bible).

And so, ironically, it is to Christian scholars, almost all of whom had the virulent anti-Jewish biases of their times, that we owe the divisions of punctuation we have to this day.

So let us stick to Devarim as the fifth book of the Torah instead of Deuteronomy, which was the name the Greeks gave, and does mean “a copy or a repetition” which is what the subject matter is. Except that, we name the books after the first word or words of each book in the original Hebrew — Bereishit, not Genesis, Shemot not Exodus, Vayikra not Leviticus, and Bemidbar not Numbers.

The author is a writer and rabbi, currently based in New York.

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