What are Unintentional Textual Variants?

Textual Criticism studies the differences found in manuscripts, called textual variants, of which there are two types: unintentional changes and intentional changes. This article focuses on the unintentional types of textual variants; a later article will be about intentional textual variants.

In an ideal situation, a professional scribe will have a pristine copy of a book, and smooth blank sheets of parchment...

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What is the Middle of the Torah?

The “middle letter of the Torah” is written much larger than normal. It should be the size of the letter two letters to the left.

The research I did
for the article What is a Sefer Torah? shows there are
304,805 letters in a Sefer Torah. A common question asked on the websites I
looked at is: What is the middle of a Sefer Torah?  The word Sofer
is the Hebrew word for counter (not scribe, writer, author, copier, etc.), and Soferim count the letters in a Sefer Torah to
ensure it was copied accurately. Since the letters have been counted so many
times over a few...

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