Mark E. Shoulson wrote at 12:50 PM on Wednesday, June 9, 2004: >One thing that only recently occurred to me, regarding the quote from >Mishna Yadayim that distinguishes Paleo-Hebrew script from Square >Hebrew: While it is true that any font outside of the accepted ones >will render a Torah scroll unfit for ritual use, that isn't what's being >discussed here. The statement is that a scroll written in paleo-Hebrew >script does not qualify as a "sacred text" in the context of rendering >one's hands or certain foods impure (it's a long story; suffice to say >that by rabbinic decree, holy texts and hands that touched them were >considered ritually impure). A scroll in which all the letters have >been erased except for 85 of them is also unfit for ritual use (no >surprise there), but it does render the hands impure (Yadayim 3:5). So >while I couldn't read in the synagogue from a scroll written in Narkiss >Bold, near as I can tell it *would* fall into the category of ritual >impurity (if it was *written* on parchment, that is; not sure about >printing).
My only point was that the problem presented by the use of Paleo-Hebrew scribal hands for Torah scrolls is not one of LEGIBILITY of the script but of its DESIRABILITY. That is, it wasn't that they could not read it, it was that they didn't want it. Now, as to the reasons why they didn't want, that's a different matter. And the question of the legibility of Paleo-Hebrew to a culture using Jewish Hebrew has been made an issue in the discussion about whether Phoenician/Paleo-Hebrew should be given a computer encoding separate from Jewish Hebrew, with one of my counter-arguments being that they were both legible in Herodian Judea (and probably also in Samaria). Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
