The meaning of “different versions” of the Torah scroll

If someone reads that there are “different versions of certain words and letters” in the Torah scroll, it may cause him to wrongly have a doubt about the authenticity of the written text. That could happen if he doesn’t doesn’t understand what this means.

A more accurate way to express this is that there are “different versions of letters in certain words”. It then remains to be explained what the term “different versions” means, in regard to a Torah scroll.

Background

There are 79,976 words in a Torah scroll. There are no “different versions” of this number. All of those are the words that were dictated by G-d to Moses. Moses wrote 13 Torah scrolls with those exact words. He gave one of them to each of the 12 Tribes, and he put one into the “Holy of Holies”. It stayed within the Tabernacle, next to or inside the Holy Ark that contained the tablets of the Ten Commandments.

From that point on, the process for writing a valid new Torah scroll is for a trained Jewish scribe (a sofer) to copy by hand, letter for letter, from an earlier Torah scroll that is in front him. Therefore, the chain is unbroken going back to one of the 13 original Torah scrolls that Moses wrote.

What is meant by “different versions of letters in certain words”?

The following example is a starting point for understanding. The sentence in English, “The color of my shirt is white”, is written in the United States mode of English. In the British mode of English, the sentence would be, “The colour of my shirt is white.” The variants of “color” and “colour” are different versions of the letters in this certain word. But that does not in any way change the fact that this is the same word. It is just two different ways of spelling the same word correctly, with or without the letter “u”. Of course, it does not change the meaning at all.

Here is a different example. The sentence in English: “I need to apologize”, is written in the United States mode of English. In the British mode of English, the sentence would be, “I need to apologise.” The variants of “apologize” and “apologise” are different versions of a letter in this certain word. But it does not in any way change the fact that this is the same word. It is just two different ways of spelling the word correctly, either with a “z” or an “s”. Of course, it does not change the meaning at all.

The history of the Jews in exile

Moses wrote the 13 original Torah scrolls 3295 years ago. That was at the end of the 40 years that the Jews spent in the wilderness after they left Egypt. After another 1352 years, the Romans destroyed the Second Holy Temple, and sent the Jews of Judea into worldwide exile. This forced the Jews to be separated into regional populations in different parts of the Eastern Hemisphere. There were separate Jewish populations in Europe, Northern Africa, Teman, and the Arab countries.

Looking at the situation 1000 years after that, it is found that in comparing the Torah scrolls that were being written in the different regions, those types of differences in spelling had arisen in just a few words in the scroll. It’s known that it happened with two of the 79,976 words, with no change in the meaning of the words. There are unproven conjectures about the spelling (not the meaning) of a couple of other words in regard to pre-diaspora vs. post-diaspora Torah scrolls.

Scholarly analysis

The matter of these few differing letters (none of which change any meaning at all), out of the 304,805 letters in the Torah scroll, has been the subject of extremely extensive and deeply scholarly Rabbinical analysis over the centuries. Within Torah law, those few specific known alternate spellings do not invalidate the scrolls for the respective populations of Jews in which they have been used for upwards to 1000 to 2000 years.

The end result is that the Torah scroll is the most historically exact record in the world of any ancient text for which the original inscription is no longer extant. But the original version of those few letters will be resolved soon. The original scroll that Moses wrote is safely stored together with the Holy Ark and the tablets of the Ten Commandments. These items are stored in the place where they were hidden before the First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians.

When the Jewish Messiah (Moshiach) comes in the near future, he will reveal that hidden chamber. Then the Holy Ark, the tablets, and the first Torah scroll will be placed in the eternal Third Temple. That original Torah scroll with then be available for inspection, and original spelling of those few words will be seen.

The point of this explanation is that the claim by some non-Torah religions – that entire stories in the Torah scroll were completely rewritten and changed around (G-d forbid) – is completely untrue.

https://www.chabad.org/therebbe/article_cdo/aid/5906/jewish/Hayom-Yom-Elul-7.htm