18 Responses to Letters of the Torah

1. Joseph Kaplan on October 23, 2012 at 11:24 pm

   See “Proofiness” by charles Seife for a compelling discussion how, at a certain point, people cannot be exact in counting. He applies it (and it’s based on, in the main) elections and counting ballots, but would, I think, apply here as well.
2. Joseph Kaplan on October 23, 2012 at 11:29 pm

   To prove that point. According to the chart above, there are 16 letters in which Celerus has a higher number than Even Shshan (about 100+ letters). Yet the total is the same. Something’s wrong.
3. avi on October 23, 2012 at 11:29 pm

   Since the total numbers are the same, and only the letters differ, might it suggest another reason for the miscount other than human error?
4. Jonathan on October 24, 2012 at 12:11 am

   Joseph – pay attention to the צ – there’s nearly 100 more in the Even Shoshan than by Celerus which makes up for it. But that overestimation/count is very perplexing.
5. JLan on October 24, 2012 at 12:18 am

   “To prove that point. According to the chart above, there are 16 letters in which Celerus has a higher number than Even Shshan (about 100+ letters). Yet the total is the same. Something’s wrong.”

   You’re right. Specifically, though, Celerus says that there are higher numbers of 16 letters than Even Shoshan, but 90 fewer tzadis (and that’s the only one with fewer). Seems like a drastic over/undercount, but I don’t have the data they’re working with.
6. avi on October 24, 2012 at 12:44 am

   Tzadi and Ayin can be easily confused, not sure about the other letters though.
7. Elon on October 24, 2012 at 1:25 am

   That can’t be it. They have the same number of ע, more or less. That there would be exactly the same number of letters, and that there is that huge a discrepancy on one letter to account for the others, strikes me as bizarre.
8. Nachum on October 24, 2012 at 4:32 am

   Doesn’t Ibn Shoshan count final forms separately? What was done about them here? (Note that Tzadi is one of them.)

   Also: Yemenite would be off by about eight, right?
9. Nachum on October 24, 2012 at 4:35 am

   Just checked. Yemenite has six less and two more, for a total of four less. Note that the Breuer editions follow the Yemenite, with a note.
10. G Pickholz on October 24, 2012 at 5:17 am

    A error of ten on “yud” raises eyebrows statistically, but an error of nearly 100 — and an overstatement of number at that– seems of the scale of probability for Even Shoshan or any other professional publisher. I would question that….perhaps both are incorrect and the answer lies in the middle.
11. GPickholz on October 24, 2012 at 5:19 am

    Apologies, the error of nearly 100– and as an overstatement rather than understatement.– relates to the “tzadik” and presumably the “tzadik sofi”.
12. Hirhurim on October 24, 2012 at 8:51 am

    On review, I was mistaken to quote this from the Even Shoshan Concordance. It is the Tanach Yehoash (a Yiddish translation). I got confused last night at the last minute and mistakenly changed it.
13. Shalom Rosenfeld on October 24, 2012 at 10:56 am

    (How) do you count the backwards nuns?
14. david woolf on October 24, 2012 at 11:48 am

    I would have expected differences between “look alike” letters. For example, kav and beit, or vav and zayin. To have Tzadik off by 90 and the others off by 1′s and 2′s means that when they did the original count, when they saw a tzadik they counted it as a beit or a kaf or a mem? Doesn’t feel right.
15. joel rich on October 24, 2012 at 12:51 pm

    Of course I have no idea what happened but I have seen accountants who when faced with a discrepancy between the whole and the sum of the parts, when they are sure the whole is correct, say “just throw the delta into category X”
    KT
16. Shlomo on October 24, 2012 at 5:18 pm

    By the way, the letter is named Tzadi not Tzadik.
    http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A6
17. Matthew P on October 24, 2012 at 6:32 pm

    I did look into this in 2000 based on some Chumash databases I had found. I have just checked back on this, and I get exactly the same figures as in the Celerus column (which probably just means that the Chumash text I had was produced by them).

    There is a list eg at the end of the standard Torah Temimah of the numbers of each letter. This differs significantly for a few letters, eg final ץ – there are 1035 in my count, but 1067 in the Mesorah count – this is by far the largest difference. OTOH there are 13 too few נ and 8 ך

    I also had a download of BHS (Leningrad codex) but it appeared that that had an extra 56 letters overall.
18. Anonymous on November 1, 2012 at 1:55 am

    Rav Saadia Gaon has a letter count for all of Tanakh.