In this week’s parasha, Beha’alotcha, there is a strange occurrence in the text of the Torah. The traditional way of writing Numbers 10:35-36 in a Torah scroll is with two inverted letter nuns around it:

There are a number of reasons given to explain this strange phenomenon. One answer from the Talmud (Shabbat 115b-116a) is that the nuns are there because the two verses that it surrounds make up a whole independent book of the Torah! So, the first part of Numbers, 1:1-10:34, makes up one book, then come these two verses which are a book of their own, and then the rest of Numbers, 11:1-36:13. This means that the Torah is not composed of five books, but seven books, and this is the meaning of King Solomon’s words: “Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn seven pillars.” (Proverbs 9:1) The seven books of the Torah correspond to the seven classical pillars of wisdom (which we have discussed before here).

Others hold that the nuns are there because these two verses belong earlier in the book of Numbers, but were moved here for various reasons. The Talmud does not actually say that the two verses are surrounded by nuns specifically, which led some authorities to suggest putting those nuns in actually makes a Torah scroll not kosher! This was the opinion of the Maharshal (Rabbi Shlomo Luria, 1510-1573), who stated that the inverted nuns are an entirely Kabbalistic thing, and suggested the current way of writing it isn’t exactly accurate. (See Chokhmat Shlomo on Shabbat 115b, and his Shu”t #73.)

Whatever the case, there is some beauty in saying the Torah is made up of 7 books, considering the importance of that number in Judaism. Nonetheless, everyone agrees that the Torah is a chumash made up of the Five Books of Moses, not seven. One of the earliest sources to state this is the ancient Jewish-Roman historian Josephus (37-100 CE). In Against Apion 1:8, he wrote:

For we do not have an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from and contradicting one another [as the Greeks have] but only twenty-two books, which contain the records of all the past times; which are justly believed to be divine; and of them five belong to Moses, which contain his laws and the traditions of the origin of mankind till his death. This interval of time was little short of three thousand years; but as to the time from the death of Moses till the reign of Artaxerxes king of Persia [Ahashverosh], who reigned after Xerxes, the prophets, who were after Moses, wrote down what was done in their times in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God, and precepts for the conduct of human life.

It is true, our history has been written since Artaxerxes very particularly, but has not been esteemed of the like authority with the former by our forefathers, because there has not been an exact succession of prophets since that time; and how firmly we have given credit to these books of our own nation is evident by what we do; for during so many ages as have already passed, no one has been so bold as either to add anything to them, to take anything from them, or to make any change in them; but it is become natural to all Jews immediately, and from their very birth, to esteem these books to contain Divine doctrines, and to persist in them, and, if occasion be, willingly to die for them.

Josephus explains that the first five books of the Tanakh are those written by Moses. The following 13 were composed by the prophets that followed him, until the time of Esther. The remaining four are hymns and precepts for life. Josephus explains how there are indeed more books (referring to the apocryphal ones), but they are not included in the official canon since the era of prophets had ended, and the divine nature of those additional books is uncertain. Altogether, he says the Jews have 22 books—yet today we number the Tanakh as having 24 books! How do we account for this discrepancy?

Which Books are Holy?

The standard explanation for this discrepancy is that in the time of Josephus the book of Lamentations was combined with Jeremiah (since he wrote it), and the book of Ruth was included within Judges, where it belongs chronologically. The thirteen books of the prophets were: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Twelve Prophets, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles. The remaining four “poetic” books are Psalms, Proverbs, Job, and Shir HaShirim, the Song of Songs. Indeed, the traditional way of writing the scrolls for three of these books—Psalms, Proverbs, and Job—was unique, in two-column fashion, and with special cantillation marks. They were collectively called Sifrei Emet, “Books of Truth”, where Emet (אמת) stands for Iyov (איוב), “Job”; Mishlei (משלי), “Proverbs”; and Tehilim (תהלים), “Psalms”.

The Song of Songs was always a controversial book. Because of its explicitly sexual language, and the fact that it seemingly offers little in the way of history, prophecy, or law (at least not in its simple reading), there were those who wanted to remove it from the Tanakh. Rabbi Akiva famously defended its inclusion in Scripture, calling it the “Holy of Holies” (Yadayim 3:5). There in the Mishnah, the Sages debate the holiness of one other book: Kohelet (Ecclesiastes). This one, too, offers little in the way of history, prophecy, or law (at least in its simple reading), and of course, is quite depressing, too. The entire passage in the Mishnah is a fascinating read, and connects to our weekly parasha:

A scroll on which the writing has become erased and eighty-five letters remain, as many as are in the section beginning, “And it came to pass when the ark set forward…” (Numbers 10:35-36) defiles the hands. A single sheet on which there are written eighty-five letters, as many as are in the section beginning, “And it came to pass when the ark set forward”, defiles the hands. All the Holy Scriptures defile the hands. The Song of Songs and Kohelet defile the hands.

Rabbi Yehudah says: the Song of Songs defiles the hands, but there is a dispute about Kohelet. Rabbi Yose says: Kohelet does not defile the hands, but there is a dispute about the Song of Songs. Rabbi Shimon says: Kohelet is one of the leniencies of Bet Shammai and one of the stringencies of Bet Hillel. Rabbi Shimon ben Azzai said: I have received a tradition from the seventy-two elders on the day when they appointed Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah head of the academy that the Song of Songs and Kohelet defile the hands. Rabbi Akiba said: Far be it! No man in Israel disputed that the Song of Songs does not defile the hands, for the whole world is not as worthy as the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel; for all the writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies. If they had a dispute, they had a dispute only about Kohelet. Rabbi Yochanan ben Yehoshua, the son of the father-in-law of Rabbi Akiva, said in accordance with the words of Ben Azzai: so they disputed and so they reached a decision.

The Sages use the term “defiling the hands” to refer to a sacred book. If it is truly divine, it is said to cause the hands to become spiritually “unclean”. The idea is that we should be careful to touch its holy parchment. To this day, people avoid directly touching the scroll of Torah when they go up for an aliyah, and instead use their tallit. The Mishnah states that all books of the Tanakh “defile the hands”, ie. they are all sacred. The same is true for any writing that has at least 85 letters worth of Torah. How do the Sages derive this? From that special section in our weekly parasha that is delineated by two inverted nuns. There are 85 letters in them, and they are likened to a book of their own. Therefore, any time there are 85 letters of Torah written on some parchment, that piece of parchment becomes sacred.

The Mishnah then goes on to debate whether Shir HaShirim and Kohelet “defile the hands”. Rabbi Yehuda holds that Shir HaShirim is holy, but Kohelet’s status is unclear, whereas Rabbi Yose insists that Kohelet is not holy, and the status of Shir HaShirim is unclear! Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai says that Beit Shammai considered Kohelet not holy, but Hillel considered it holy. Shimon ben Azzai confidently states that he is certain both books are holy. Rabbi Akiva is certain about Song of Songs, but suggests there may have been a dispute on Kohelet. The final word goes to Rabbi Yochanan ben Yehoshua, who concludes that the earlier Sages did debate on whether these two books should be included, and decided at the end that they should.

Considering that all of the great rabbis cited above were born after Josephus (except possibly Rabbi Akiva, who in any case was not a rabbi until much later in life), it might be that Josephus speaks of the Tanakh as having 22 books because Shir HaShirim and Kohelet were still under debate in his day. It is possible that he placed them with the other apocryphal works whose sacred status is unclear, which he briefly mentions. (In that case, Lamentations would probably be among his four books of hymns, and Ruth among his 13 prophets.) There is a certain elegance in organizing the Tanakh into 22 books, one for each letter of the divine Hebrew alphabet. Since God created the universe through these divine letters, and by using the Torah as a blueprint, and since God Himself states that were it not for His Torah He would not have created the universe to begin with (Jeremiah 33:25), having 22 books of Tanakh is fitting.

(There is a similar tradition regarding the Zohar: It is said that Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai taught 22 volumes of mysticism, one for each letter of the alphabet. All were lost except the volume on the letter zayin, hence the Zohar.)

36 for Light, 40 for Purification

Having said all that, the reality is that the Tanakh has neither 22 nor 24 texts. Ezra and Nehemiah are always combined into one, even though they are separate books with different authors. The book of Twelve Prophets, Trei Assar, is a collection of twelve “minor” prophets, short texts that were put together for convenience. If we count each of these as a separate book (since it is), we get 36 books. This is a good number because 36 represents or haganuz, the divine light of Creation which shone for 36 hours before being concealed.

Even that number is not complete, though. The book of Psalms is actually five different books (Psalms 1-41; 42-72; 73-89; 90-106; 107-150). Each has an overarching theme, and each ends with a concluding line to close the book. (This is most evident with Psalm 72, which closes Book Two with the verse “The prayers of David, son of Yishai, have ended.”) With Psalms divided into its 5 parts, the total number of books in the Tanakh comes to 40!

Forty is not without significance either. That number parallels the forty days and nights Moses spent on Sinai receiving the Torah. This is also the number of days and nights it rained during the Great Flood to purify the world, and the minimum amount of water necessary for a kosher mikveh (40 se’ah). Study of Tanakh similarly serves to purify us, and we wrote recently of the mystical meaning of the letter mem—whose value is forty—and its intrinsic connection to the Torah.

Names of God  

Finally, if we take this week’s parasha and the Talmud into consideration, and assume the Torah has seven books, it brings our total up again to 42. This number is associated with one of the most important names of God. The Talmud (Kiddushin 71a) states that the Forty-Two Letter Name of God cannot be revealed to a person unless they are “modest, and humble, and at least middle-aged, and does not get angry, and does not get drunk, and does not insist upon his rights.” The Talmud does not state what this name is. It is generally accepted to be the initials of Ana b’Koach, which has 42 words. At least one alternate tradition is that the Name is composed of the first 42 letters of the Torah. Another is that it is made up of the Tetragrammaton, plus the milui (“letter-filling”) of the Tetragrammaton, plus the milui of that. Some say there are multiple versions of the Name, corresponding to different dimensions of Creation.

The number 42 is significant for many other reasons. It represents the entirety of Torah, since the Written Torah begins with a letter bet (“Beresheet”), and the Oral Torah (ie. the Mishnah/Talmud) begins with the letter mem (“M’imatai”), together adding up to 42. When God told us to speak words of Torah all the time (Deuteronomy 6:4, which we recite daily in the Shema), the words used are v’dibarta bam (ודברת בם), alluding to the Written and Oral Torahs. And, of course, in Douglas Adams’ classic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the number 42 is the answer to “life, the universe, and everything”.

It should be mentioned that when the Tanakh was first translated into Greek over two thousand years ago, the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles were split in half. This is because while Hebrew lacks vowels, Greek doesn’t, so the translations were a lot longer than the originals. The Greek versions could not fit on standard scrolls, so they were divided in two. A whole system of numbering and citation was built around that. Eventually, that system was adopted by Jews, too, and we use it today. Although this division is seemingly non-Jewish in origin, the most likely case is that the division was instituted by Jewish scribes, as they were the ones translating the Hebrew into Greek (see Septuagint). If we maintain those divisions, the Tanakh would have 45 books!

Forty five is the gematria of Adam (אדם), and also another important Name of God in Kabbalah (יו”ד ה”א וא”ו ה”א), referred to as Shem Mah, “the Name of Forty-Five”. This is the name most associated with tikkun, man’s rectification and perfection. A person who fully rectifies themselves, ascends to the highest spiritual levels, and unites with God is said to be a complete “Adam” of Forty-Five, and is one with God’s Name of Forty-Five. This monumental task would be impossible to accomplish without study, meditation, and practice of the Tanakh and its 45 parts.

Why 24?

Despite all of the above possibilities, the Sages set the official number of Tanakh books at 24. Why this number in particular? Several weeks ago we discussed the significance of this number as it pertains to the traditional 24 ornaments of a Jewish bride. Since the Jewish people standing at Mt. Sinai were compared to a bride—with God being the groom, and the Torah being the ketubah—and a bride is to be adorned with 24 ornaments, God “adorned” us with 24 precious holy works of the Tanakh.

Another explanation is that there are 24 hours in a day. We read in the Tanakh that words of Scripture should never leave our lips, and that we should be meditating upon these holy words yomam v’lilah, “all day and night” (Joshua 1:8). This is the exact same term used in Jeremiah 33:25 (cited above) where God states that were it not for His covenant yomam v’lilah, ie. if His Torah was not observed and studied 24/7—He would “not establish the laws of Heaven and Earth.” God created this universe, with all of its natural laws and cycles, on the condition that His Torah would be diligently kept. And the most important cycle of nature for us humans, giving structure to our lives, is the daily rhythm of 24 hours. The 24 books of Tanakh appropriately parallel this.

Some scholars have pointed out another interesting parallel: in the ancient Greek world the most important text of study was Homer’s Iliad, which was generally divided into 24 books. Rabbi Burton Visotzky writes:

Much as the Greeks and Romans wrote commentary and endlessly quoted from the twenty-four books of “the divine Homer”, so the rabbis quoted and commented on the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible. That the number of books is the same is not a coincidence; it required the rabbis to do some creative accounting in order to show that the rabbinic canon and the Greco-Roman “canon” were libraries with the same number of volumes. (Aphrodite and the Rabbis, pg. 11)

While Visotzky suggests that the Sages wanted to make the Tanakh 24 books so that it resembles Homer’s 24 books, it might have happened the opposite way.

Jews vs. Greeks

It isn’t clear when Homer’s Iliad was first divided into 24 books. The consensus is that it wasn’t until around the 2^nd century BCE. The Tanakh was first compiled by the Anshei Knesset HaGedolah, the “Men of the Great Assembly”, before this. Although we saw above that the status of a couple of books was still in debate, the overall structure of the Tanakh was set by the 2^nd century BCE, and it was around that same time that the Tanakh was firstly translated into Greek.

Scholars generally like to point out how much the Jewish Sages adopted from the Greeks, yet they forget how much more was adopted by the Greeks from the Jews! This was well-known in ancient times, too. The 2^nd century CE philosopher Numenius of Apamea famously admitted “What is Plato if not Moses speaking Greek?” Perhaps more than any other historian, Samuel Kurinsky shows in great depth the forgotten (and often deliberately buried) impact that the Jews had on the ancient world, including the Greek world. To offer just one example, he writes of the great Pythagoras, among the most famous of Greek philosophers:

Josephus quotes from a book by Hermippus of Smyrna in which Hermippus baldly stated that Pythagoras had plagiarized Thracian and Jewish concepts, accusing Pythagoras of the “imitation of the doctrines of the Jews and Thracians, which he transferred to his own philosophy.” Josephus then adds a pointed emphasis of his own: “For it is truly affirmed of this Pythagoras, that he took a great many of the laws of the Jews into his own philosophy.” (The Eight Day, pg. 290)

Kurinsky then refers to the ancient works of Hecataeus of Abdera, a 4^th century BCE Greek historian who described the Exodus, and the leadership of Moses, “famed for his wisdom and valor”. Hecataeus goes on to state that the founders of Greece, the heroes Cadmus and Danaeus, were also part of the Israelite Exodus from Egypt! Kurinsky concludes:

Hecateus thus places the purported founder of the Hellenic culture as emerging from within a Judaic matrix. Whether Cadmus and Danaeus were fictional characters or not, they symbolize the process by which fundamental Judaic precepts arrived on the Greek scene.

Therefore, it is just as likely that the Greeks organized their Homer into 24 books to mimic the Jews’ 24 books of the Tanakh! The only good argument in favour of the Greeks doing it first is that by the end of the 4^th century BCE, the Greek alphabet had been reduced to its current 24 letters. So, Homer was divided into 24 parts, one for each letter of the Greek alphabet. Maybe this is why Josephus speaks of the Tanakh in 22 parts, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

Repairing the Jewish World

So how did 22 books of Tanakh become 24? One possible answer might lie with Rabban Gamliel II, a contemporary of Josephus. The Talmud (Bava Kamma 83a) states that the house of Rabban Gamliel was filled with 1000 students, 500 of whom studied Torah, and 500 of whom studied Greek wisdom. It seems Rabban Gamliel presided over a massive and important academy where scholars poured over these texts 24 hours of a day—half of them studying and discussing the 24 books of Homer, and half of them studying and discussing the 24 books of Tanakh. It isn’t difficult to imagine the two halves of Rabban Gamliel’s school dividing their work into an equal number of textbooks.

Rabban Gamliel lived through the destruction of the Second Temple. He was the first president of the Sanhedrin once it moved to Yavneh at the conclusion of the Great War with Rome. And this leads us to one final suggestion as to why the Sages grouped the Tanakh into 24 books.

The Talmud (Yerushalmi, Sanhedrin 53b) states: “The Jews were not exiled until they had divided into 24 sects.” As is well-known, the destruction of the Second Temple was decreed in Heaven because of sinat hinam, baseless hatred and divisiveness among the Jews. The antidote is ahavat hinam, love and unity among all Jews. Achieving this begins with the individual. Each person needs to refine themselves to the highest degree in order to love their fellow. And refinement is impossible without the Torah. As the Midrash states, the Torah and mitzvot were given in order to refine us (Beresheet Rabbah 44:1). And therefore, the antidote for Jewish divisiveness—symbolized by the number 24—is study and practice of the 24 books of the Tanakh.