Fragments of the earliest complete Torah scroll in the Cairo Genizah?

Abstract

This essay looks at the form of the early Torah scroll as found in the Cairo Genizah Collection by re-examining the scroll originally described by Colette Sirat, Michele Dukan and Ada Yardeni in the late 1980s as potentially the earliest to be found there. This scroll, composed of two fragments from the book of Genesis, T-S NS 3.21 and T-S NS 4.3 from Cambridge University Library, has been dated between the fifth and eighth centuries CE. Whether it had originally only held Genesis, or once had been a complete scroll of the Pentateuch, was unclear, but interest was generated by a number of what were assumed to be early and non-standard features in it, in particular a non-masoretic section division before Gen 17,1. The current essay presents a substantial new piece from the same scroll, this time from the book of Exodus, which was recently discovered in the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York (ENA 4107.20). The essay looks at the new text, which covers chapters 5 to 7 of Exodus and includes several textual variants. In particular, it re-examines the question of the non-masoretic section division in the light of numerous section divisions preserved in the new fragment, and concludes that this early scroll is in fact wholly consistent with later masoretic practice.