Symmetrically Designed Sifrei Torah: A Quantitative Analysis - Hakirah

212 : Hạkirah, the Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought
We have thus far attributed the 160-verse discrepancy to:
• The Gemara’s using the last page as if it were full of verses.
• The Gemara’s looking for the middle verse of this virtual Torah.
• The Gemara’s verse is on the top of a page.
• The Gemara’s verse is exactly 3 pages (138 verses) after it should be.
• The Gemara includes the 6 blank pages placed at the end of the
S”T.
We now turn our attention to the middle-letter and middleword
discrepancy. As previously discussed, the number of letters and
number of words in the Torah are respectively about 304,805 and
79,980. While we have until now discussed the idea of dividing the
Torah into pages with an equal number of verses, we could also
construct a S”T that had an equal number of letters or words per
page. Being that verses have a variable number of words, and words
have a variable numbers of letters, it is reasonable to assume that the
pages’ “layout” for a S”T constructed to have an equal number of
words per page will be more similar than one with an equal number
of verses per page; and that a S”T with pages that have an equal
number of letters will have the most visually similar pages of all. 65 It
is therefore reasonable to assume that if the soferim experimented with
an equal number of verses per page, they also considered the word
and letter options. It is our feeling that the soferim’s choice of middle
letter and middle word supplies the evidence of how they produced
each of these alternatives.
Dividing the S”T into Pages with an Equal Number of
Letters
To create the 46-verses-per-page S”T, the soferim added 43 “virtual”
verses and worked with the number 5,888. When creating a S”T with
an equal number of letters per page, no such major correction is
needed. A simple spreadsheet analysis (Table 7) shows that for such a
65 Note that the fact that all pages have the same number of letters does
not mean their “layouts” are carbon copies of each other. As we have
previously discussed, different letters take up different amounts of
horizontal space, and additional spaces due to Pesuchas, Setumos, Chumash
separators, etc. must be considered.