Middle word Genesis in the BHS?

Aaron Uitti

I am trying to locate the middle letter or word in Genesis and the Torah.  

Rosie Perera

Hello, Aaron. Welcome to the Logos forums! [:)]

I wondered why anyone would want to do that, but then I found this, in Forging Unshakeable Faith (on Google Books, not available in Logos):

You'd probably need a computer program to do that. Logos doesn't have such a feature. Maybe you could find something that the Masoretes had written listing this information, but I'm not aware of it.

All I could find in a serach of my Logos library was this:

We do not have much information concerning the methods used by the authors in writing the Old Testament books, although we know that Jeremiah had a scribe, Baruch, to whom he dictated his prophecies. (We may refer to Professor Hyatt’s article on this subject in B.A. VI. 4, Dec. 1943). Since scribes or clerks were a recognized profession in Israel we may infer that it was the scribes who copied the Law and other parts of the Scripture. The most noted of the earlier scribes was the priest Ezra who was “a ready scribe in the law of Moses” (Ezr. 7:6). Such men, to whom we owe the transmission of the text of the Old Testament, were more than mere copyists. In the course of time different recensions of the Old Testament arose in various parts of Palestine and Babylonia. The manuscripts did not agree in details, and it was the scribes who determined which ones were to be considered as standard or basic for copyists. The scribes were known as sopherim (counters), because it was said that they counted all the letters of the Hebrew Old Testament; they know the middle verse, the middle word, and the middle letter of the various books. Under the guidance of carefully established rules a high standard of accuracy was maintained.

“Biblical Archaeologist: Volume 8 1-4” (Philadelphia: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2001).

And this will answer your question for the Torah, but not for Genesis:

"According to the note at Lev. 10:16* דרש is the middle word in the Pentateuch, and at 11:42* we are assured that the ו in גָּחוֹן is its middle letter."

Frederick W. Danker, Multipurpose Tools for Bible Study, Rev. and expanded ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 56.