Jots and Tittles

A survey of the devices the sages used to interpret the holy text of the Torah.

By Jeffrey Spitzer

The sense of the sanctity of Scripture goes hand in hand with the traditional assumption that Scripture is a perfect and complete revelation of God's will. Completeness implies that all aspects of God's will could be found to have a basis in Scripture, and the rabbis created rules of interpretation that allowed them the flexibility to find "support" for their views in Scripture. Professor Burton Visotzky, a scholar of Midrash (the Rabbinic interpretation of the Bible), describes in his article "Jots and Tittles: On Scriptural Interpretation in Rabbinic and Patristic Literatures" (Prooftexts, September, 1988, vol. 8 #3, pp. 257-269), the tension between rabbis who assumed that every extraneous letter in the Bible was an indication of some aspect of God's will and those rabbis who preferred a more straightforward reading of Scripture and rejected reading holy texts as "codes." Visotzky also shows how the same conflict existed between different groups of the Christian church fathers. In this essay, the author describes some of the various kinds of interpretation that might be considered analogous to interpreting jots and tittles. He documents how such methods have been used throughout Jewish history and continue in modern times; he also shows how these methods of interpretation also faced ongoing opposition. The argument that Professor Visotzky identified as common to classical Judaism and classical Christianity is actually common to all periods of Jewish interpretive history.

 

Rav Yehuda quoted Rav:

 

When Moses ascended to the Heights [to receive the Torah] he found God sitting and drawing crownlets upon the letters. Moses said to God, "Master of the Universe, what is staying Your hand [from giving me the Torah unadorned]?"

 

God replied, "There is a man who will arise many generations in the future, his name is Akiba b. Yosef. He will exegetically infer mound upon mound of halakhot (laws) from each and every tittle."

 

Moses requested, "Master of the Universe, show him to me." God said, "Turn backwards [and you will see him]."

 

Moses [found himself in R. Akiba's classroom where he] sat at the back of the eighth row. He didn't understand what they were talking about and felt weak. Then, they came to a matter about which the students asked Akiba, "Rabbi, how do you know this?" He told them, "It is the [oral] law given to Moses at Sinai." Moses felt relieved.

 

He returned to God and said, "Master of the Universe, you have a person like this and [still You choose to] give the Torah through my hands?" God replied, "Silence! This is according to My plan."

 

Moses said, "Master of the Universe, you've shown me his teaching (Torah), show me his reward." God said, "Turn [backwards and you may see it]. Moses turned around and beheld [the Roman torturers] weighing his [Akiba's] flesh on the market scales. He said to God, "Master of the Universe, that was his Torah and this is his reward!?"

 

God said, "Silence! This is according to My plan" (Babylonian Talmud, Menachot 29b, translation, Visotzky).

 

This legend is often retold to demonstrate that, despite the rabbinic mythology that the entire written and oral Torahs had been revealed to Moses on Sinai, the third century rabbis who told this story were aware that the details of the law had indeed changed since the time of Moses. This is the clear meaning of Moses' inability to understand what R. Akiba is discussing and his rather remarkable seat in the very back of the classroom.

 

The text as it is written in a Torah scrolls shows the "jots and tittles"--the crowns and other markings--that adorn the letters.

At the same time, R. Akiba's claim that the law that he was teaching actually emanated from Moses on Sinai is presented with complete sincerity, and according to the story, with God's intention and support. God, after all, was adding the "jots and tittles" to the letters of the Torah in order that they might be interpreted. Moses, on the other hand, only had a very limited "snapshot" perception, both of the Torah he received as well as the state of the Oral Torah in the generation of Rabbi Akiba. Consequently, Moses can understand neither why he was worthy of receiving God's Torah in the first place or of understanding R. Akiba's martyrdom.

 

The conception underlying this legend is that God encoded the Torah with additional meanings beyond the "plain meaning" of the text. This assumption of the divine economy of speech—that God does not waste words—coupled with the assumption that God's revelation to Israel was complete, provided the basis for systems of interpretation that treat the Bible as something like a code. Such freedom of interpretation is, of course, destabilizing; without strict rules governing such interpretations, almost anything might be permitted or prohibited. Such rules and limits did exist. There are no recorded examples of R. Akiba or anyone else actually interpreting the crowns on the letters, although the interpretation of words deemed "superfluous" was generally an accepted procedure.

 

One of the common kinds of interpretation that assumed this vision of an encoded Torah is the gezerah shavah (literally, "a comparison of equals"), in which the use of the same term in two distinct parts of the Torah allows the application of a detail from the one case to the other, unrelated case. Gezerah shavah is not simply a good philological method—figuring out the meaning of a word in one case by examining its use in others. A gezerah shavah can apply unrelated details relating to the one context to the interpretation of the other instance of the word. For example, the Talmud makes a gezerah shavah between the phrase "this good mountain" (understood to be Jerusalem in Deuteronomy 3:28) and the phrase "and you shall eat, be satisfied, and bless the good land" (Deuteronomy 8:10) to derive authority for the third paragraph of the blessing after food, which refers to the rebuilding of Jerusalem. Opponents of such radical readings of Scripture, realizing how someone might use such a powerful tool as gezerah shavah to blow huge holes in bodies of established rabbinic interpretation, adopted a rule that one could only use a gezerah shavah if there were already a tradition establishing it.

 

Another implication of the perfection of the Bible is that no word is considered superfluous. If a law is repeated in two places, the rabbis might interpret the duplication to prove the requirement to warn someone about the law before punishment could be exacted. Or the use of the infinitive absolute (e.g., hikaret tikaret, "you will surely be cut off"), which in Hebrew is expressed with a doubling of a verb, might "prove" that the first term applies to this world, and the second to the world to come.

 

Other rules that assume a perfect text include "al tikre"—do not read the text this way, change the vowels and read it this way. Other variants include notarikon in which words are seen as acronyms or anagrams of other terms.

 

Gematria, which creates interpretations based on the numerical value of words (the first letter, aleph=1; the second, bet=2, and so on) is attested early on. During medieval times, the use of gematria became much more widespread and even became the basis for certain aspects of Jewish law. This powerful tool, like the gezerah shavah, also faced opposition. Nachmanides, a 13th century Kabbalist and commentator, argued that one should not make up a gematria on one's own.

 

In late antique and medieval times, these hermeneutic methods and the assumptions of the sanctity of the text spread to documents other than the Bible. The Talmudic interpreters of the Mishnah assumed that the text of the Mishnah lacks superfluous words. Medieval Ashkenazic pietiests assumed that the precise number of words and letters in the texts of prayers reflected cosmic truths, and using gematria, they developed an entire number theory of the liturgy. Their readings were opposed both by those who did not accept the method of applying gematria to the relatively fluid (and human) texts of Jewish liturgy, as well as by those whose alternate versions of the liturgical texts didn't "add up."

 

In modern times, the most "popular" form of interpretation along these lines is study of so-called "Bible-codes." This method, which is facilitated by computers, finds meaning by uncovering words and phrases that occur at equidistant intervals throughout the Biblical text. Some Jewish groups have argued that the presence of meaningful Bible codes as proof of the divinity of the Bible. Nowadays, most of the research on Bible codes is being done by Christians seeking proof of Christianity as well as previously undiscovered "prophecies" about contemporary events. As in every generation, Bible-code researchers face opposition by those who considered these methods as distorting the plain meaning of Scripture. In this, case, however, the critics have had to use the same computer methodologies to disprove the "miraculous" or "prophetic" claims. Critics have argued that the results are merely a function of how Hebrew works, and have found equidistant letter sequences in the Hebrew translation of War and Peace (proving that Tolstoy is God?!).

 

Throughout history, Jews have adopted various models of interpretation that rely on an assumption that the Torah is perfect. At the same time, other voices in Jewish tradition have sought to limit how those models are used. The phenomenon of the development of these models of interpretation reflects the ongoing desire of Jews to find divine authority or justification for their beliefs. Whether those beliefs and models of interpretation will make a long-term impact on Judaism's ongoing discovery of God's revealed will is not apparent. Like Moses sitting in Rabbi Akiba's classroom, we do not have the luxury of historical perspective on our own time.

 

Jeffrey Spitzer is the editor of the Jewish Texts section of MyJewishLearning and the senior educator at Jewish Family & Life!