The Zohar Chadash on Shir ha-Shirim makes the famous statement that there are 600,000 letters in the Torah. The Megaleh Amukos explains that these 600,000 letters correspond to the souls of the Jewish people. Interestingly, the Megaleh Amukos sees a hint to this fact in the very name “Yisroel,” the initial letters of which are an acronym for “Yesh Shishim Ribo Osiyos Le-Torah” – There are 600,000 letters in the Torah.

The Zohar Chadash’s statement is, however, difficult in light of the fact that our Sifrei Torah only contain 304,805 letters! As far back was can verify, via ancient texts, this has always been the case. There is no evidence nor mention anywhere of there ever having been a 600,000-letter Torah Scroll.

There are several possible answers to this problem, most of which require the realization that a single Hebrew letter is, more often than not, not a single Hebrew letter. There are two way of understanding this:

1 – every Hebrew letter can be formed by a combination or permutation of six letters: Dalet, vov, zayin, yud, kaf, or nun. For example, the letter mem is a kaf with a vov attached to its front while a alef can be reduced to a vov with yud attached up top and down below. When one counts letters according to their constituent parts (i.e. alef = 3 letters and Mem = 2) instead of as single letters (i.e. alef = 1 and mem=1) you find that the total number of letters is almost exactly 600,000. This understanding is suggested by the Megaleh Amukos, the Pnei Yehoshua to Kiddushin 30a, and the Mishnas Avraham.

2 – The Beis Yosef YD 275 points out that when the Halacha speaks in general terms of “letters,” this usually implies the smallest letter that there is, the yud. Additionally, the Beis Yosef points out that we describe the dimensions of the letters in terms of “yuds.” A shin, for example, is three-yuds wide, while most other letters are two-yuds wide and a few are only one-yud in width. If one totals all of the yud-widths of all the 304,805 letters, the result is supposedly 600,000 letters.

Curiously, I have calculated both of these totals only to find that understanding #1 results in a total of 552,865, while #2 results in a total of only 575,376!

Indeed, very few of any of the proposed solutions to this problem, when calculated out precisely, get us close to 600,000.

Part of the problem may be that don’t fully understand the counting methods described by the sages who have tackled this question. For example, Rav Saadia Gaon wrote that he once counted the letters in the Torah and arrived to a total of over 700,000 letters! We are not sure how Rav Saadia got this number and, to this day, no one has ever duplicated his method of counting.

However, I think that a solution may lay in reexamining the Beis Yosef who proposed that one should count the letter-widths of the total number of letters.

Ideally, the halacho is that a Sefer Torah should be written in 245 columns with 42 lines per column, which translate to a total of 10,290 lines of text. Now, the dimensions of an ideal line of text are such that it should be wide enough to accommodate 62 yud-widths. If we multiply 10,290 lines of text by 62 yud-lengths per line, then the total yud-lengths encompassed by a sefer torah are 637,980.

Now, there are certain places in the Torah text that must be left blank, such as the breaks between the paragraphs of the Torah and the spaces between the lines of Shiras ha-Yam and Haazinu, both of which are written in a different format then the rest of the Torah. The total average yud-widths of these blank sections is about 56.7 yud-widths. If we subtract the total yud-widths of the sections that must remain blank from the total yud-widths of a Sefer Torah, then we arrive at

637,980 (total yud-legnths of lines for writing) – 37,932 (the total number of blank lines) = 600,048 yud-widths.

As far as I can tell, this explanation gets closer to the 600,000 letter count that any other ever offered. But note, that according to this interpretation, the 600,000 letter count mentioned by the Zohar Chadash is not a count of the actual letters of the Torah, but rather an enumeration of the total amount of written space that is occupied by the letters of the Torah. Indeed, as we have just shown, the total amount of writable space is almost exactly 600,000 yud-widths.

Tomorrow, I’ll start posting an overview of the creation of a Sefer Torah, starting with the making of the parchment, all the way though the Siyum ha-Torah and…. Ta Da! Photos of the second amud are coming soon!

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