Middle word Genesis in the BHS?

Aaron Uitti · May 2013

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

Rosie Perera · May 2013

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.

Aaron Uitti · May 2013

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/493730#Comment_493730

Thanks, Rosie. I am amazed at your quick and informative reply! Just one problem for me and it requires not response but there are two darash next to each other. But what I have is accurate enough. I am just trying to show how meticulous the scribes were. Aaron

Martin Grainger Dean · May 2013

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/493741#Comment_493741

Aaron Uitti said:

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

According to BHS the middle word in Genesis is to be found in Gen 27:40 (וְעַל־חַרְבְּךָ). As for the middle of Pentateuch: "Our total of 304,849 for all the consonant letters in the Pentateuch cannot be squared with the assertion that Lev 11:42 contains the middle letter. In our text, the midpoint is consonant Number 152,425, which is the first h in hḥzh in Lev 8:29. This is a long way from Lev 11:42. The w in gḥwn in that verse is letter Number 157,239 in the Torah. This is 4,814 positions past the true middle, or 51.58 percent through the text, about five pages too late in BHS. Blau already noticed that Lev 11:42 was not on the middle page of the Torah in the editions he used. Nevertheless he did not doubt the truth of the tradition, nor did he check it. He was content to “explain” the fact that the middle letter (supposedly) was not on the middle page “by the circumstance that comparatively larger blank spaces occur in the first half of the pages than in the latter half.” (Blau 1896: 346) In the Qoren edition, which has a uniform layout of block text, the Torah required 8,563 lines. The middle line is Lev 8:28. How are we to account for the tradition? Divergence mechanism 1.a (Text Changes) can hardly be the explanation because the text underlying the tradition would be utterly different from any known text. Divergence mechanism 2.b (Differing Definition of Middle) is a more likely explanation. A scenario similar to that proposed above to explain the middle word tradition in the Torah may serve here as well: The middle letter of tradition could have been the middle letter of the middle line of the middle seder as demarcated by one of the alternate traditions. Word boundaries adjacent to the traditional middle letter are such that it could have been at the middle of lines of length 9, 17, 21, 29, 33, or 45 letters." David Noel Freedman, A. Dean Forbes and Francis I. Andersen, Studies in Hebrew and Aramaic Orthography, Biblical and Judaic studies (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1992). 315-16.