In order to read the scroll, one needed to pop the top of the tiq, and remove the scroll. Therefore, the scroll was also wrapped in fabrics, so that you wouldn't have to touch the leather/parchment when reading.
She argues that this was still the form of the tiq in 11th-century Babylonia, but that today's Middle-Eastern form, where the opening is on the side and the scroll can be read while inside the tiq, was starting to arise in some other places at the time. We do not have any artifacts nor artistic depictions until much, much later, so she derives this from her interpretation of two written texts about crowns for Torah-scrolls. I don't remember exactly what her argument was, but I remember that (a) I wasn't entirely convinced by her understanding of the texts, and (b) I felt that maybe I shouldn't have a say, because I know extremely little about the field of material culture and art.
The stuff about the crowns was interesting -- the phenomenon seems to have started around the 11th century as an ad-hoc thing on Simchath Tora, when people would string together myrtle-branches (hadassim) or women's jewelry or other materials to make an ad-hoc crown for the Torah scroll. (Then the question was: Once you have made them into a crown for the Torah scroll, are you ever allowed to wear them again? This was in the context of a question to one of the Rav Hai Gaon; it seems that Rav Hai's basic answer was yes, though he didn't necessarily recommend the practice in general.) The crown is described as being placed either "on top of the tiq", or "on top of the Torah scroll, while it is still sitting inside the tiq". Yaniv understands this as meaning that the tiq was as I described above: open from the top, and thus one could open the lid, and put the crown on the Torah-scroll, without removing it from the tiq.
Rav Hai Gaon spoke also about communities that used to remove the Torah scrolls from the tiq specifically on Simchath Tora; Yaniv reads this as meaning that the rest of the year, they always kept them inside the tiq, which means that the tiq must have been like today's Middle Eastern ones -- for otherwise, never removing the Torah-scroll from the tiq would mean it would be impossible to read from it. (Rav Hai isn't so much in favor of this custom of removing the Torah-scroll from the tiq on Simchath Tora, but he says: "If they are doing it in order to show mourning for the death of Moses, by keeping the Torah-scroll naked, that is acceptable."
The one other source that she had from the 11th century was a Karaite source, which criticized communities for bowing to the Torah scrolls, and even bowing to the empty container of the Torah scroll, once the scroll has been removed. Yaniv argues that this must refer to the old kind of tiq, which opens from the top; but I was not convinced by this, because the Karaite author might be speaking about the whole Aron-Qodesh apparatus, which becomes empty when one removes the Torah-scroll, no matter what kind of tiq the scroll is in.
No comments:
Post a Comment