קושר כתרים לאותיות: מנהג סופרים אלוהי בהקשרו ההיסטורי

In the famous story in b. Men. 29b, when Moses ascends to heaven he sees God binding crowns to the letters of the Torah. To Moses’ question ʻwho holds your hand?ʼ God replies that in the future there will be a man named R. Akiva ʻwho will expound on every qots, mountains of halakhot’. Most scholars assume that the crowns and the qotsim are ornaments added to the letters, similar to those found in today’s Torah scrolls. According to such a reading, the narrator credits R. Akiva with midrashic virtuosity that included derashot on the minutest paratextual elements. Yet in the entire rabbinic literature we do not find even one halakha that was expounded from a qots or a crown of a letter, either by R. Akiva or by any other sage. In light of this, Shlomo Naeh has convincingly suggested that one should understand qots as qutsa – a small textual unit. Such an understanding, however, disconnected the qotsim from the crowns, which continued to be interpreted as ornaments. In this paper, I argue that God’s scribal actions should be viewed in light of contemporaneous scribal practices. Therefore, the crown should most likely be identified with the coronis, a scholarly scribal sign which designated the end of books and textual units, and whose name and form recall a crown. This identification also helps to understand the connection between the qotsim, which R. Akiva would expound, and the crowns, which God binds.