Menachem Mendel

The Masorites divided up the sections of the Torah using parashiyot. It wasn’t until the 13th century that Archbiship Stephen Langton of Canteburry, England, divided up the Bible into the chapters. Often the division of Langton’s chapters and the Masoretic parashiyot overlap, but sometimes they don’t. That the chapter division differs from that of the parashiyot can sometimes be explained on the basis of an intentional attempt to interpret the narrative of the text differently from that of the Masoretic tradition. Below are a number of examples which I have come across or read about in the articles cited below and there are probably more. Sometimes the difference between the Masoretic and the chapter division is only one verse, something which seems to me to be a sign of an attempt to intentionally distinguish the two types of division. The Hebrew letters פ or ס represent Masoretic divisions.

I. Genesis 1-2

Gen. 1:31 And God saw all that He had made, and found it very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day
Gen. 2:1 The heaven and the earth were finished, and all their array.
Gen. 2:2 On the seventh day God finished the work that He had been doing, and He ceased on the seventh day from all the work that He had done.
Gen. 2:3 And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because on it God ceased from all the work of creation that He had done. פ
Gen. 2:4 Such is the story of heaven and earth when they were created. When the LORD God made earth and heaven —

Each day of creation is its own parashah, and yet the final day of creation, the Shabbat, is relegated not to chapter 1, but to chapter 2, while according to the Masoretic division, the second chapter should have started with Genesis 2:4.

II. Exodus 31-32

Ex. 31:16 The Israelite people shall keep the sabbath, observing the sabbath throughout the ages as a covenant for all time:
Ex. 31:17 it shall be a sign for all time between Me and the people of Israel. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day He ceased from work and was refreshed. פ

Ex. 31:18 When He finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai, He gave Moses the two tablets of the Pact, stone tablets inscribed with the finger of God.
Ex. 32:1 When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, the people gathered against Aaron and said to him, “Come, make us a god who shall go before us, for that man Moses, who brought us from the land of Egypt — we do not know what has happened to him.”

For some other examples see Exodus 6:1; Deuternomy 1:45; Deuteronomy 13:1; Deuteronomy 14:2. E. Tov claims that even some of the Masoretic divisions seem to have been influenced by later interpretations. See Exodus 21:37-22:3; Deut. 4:44; Deut. 16:21-22, 17:1.

Sources: Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 50-53; Weingarten, Shemuel ha-Cohen. “Halukat Ha-Torah Le-Ferakim.” Sinai 42, no. 1-6 (1959): 281-93.

Posted on July 15th, 2008 under Bible Studies • RSS 2.0 feed • You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed