Qere and Ketiv

Um, and, uh, remember this is the, um, series of, I guess, riddle-like straightforward pesukim in the Mishlei of Asher Chizkiahu.

Um, so we have katzipor lanud kadror la'uf ken kililas chinam, and then we've got a Qri/Ketiv here.

Lo tavo or lo tavo? [laughs] Okay, lo tavo is the Ketiv with, uh, an alef, and then lo tavo with a vav is the, uh, the Qri.

Um, so who wants to attempt to translate this? Again, the, the...

some words here are genuinely difficult.

So a baseless curse, uh, will, and then let's go not, uh, and then let's say come to him.

Yeah.

I don't know how to do Qri/Ketiv in-

However, And almost all of the instances of kriyukhtiv, and all of them in Chumash, besides these two, are cases where the variation is very, very slight, and it's understandable how we would arrive at such a mistake, because after all, the Torah was divinely given, but copied by humans.

And as the Radak says in his comments on Sefer Yehoshua, when introducing the whole notion of kriyukhtiv, he said that when the rabbis returned from Bavel, they found manuscripts of Tanakh, or at least the books of Tanakh that were already canonized, and that there were, in some cases, slight variations between them, and when they felt that both variations were possibly the original text, they maintained both, one by the Ketiv and the other being the Kri.

However, that would only explain variations such as Vayyar and Vayiru, and Vayihi and Vayyu, like in Bereshit Tet, but what are we to make of the differences here, where the difference is quite gross? And the answer is that this brings us to a sugyan, masachet nedarim, in the fourth parakh, that refers to tikkun sofrim, that which was amended by the sofrim.

Now, whether it means that tikkun sofrim is built into the biblical text itself, or something really added by the rabbis is a dispute among the Rishonim how to understand the phrase.

וכל הדברים האלו למצווה מן המובחר, ואם שינה לא פסל, those, like we said, are the most perfect way of doing the mitzvah, but if you don't do any of them, it doesn't necessarily disqualify the Torah.

אבל אם כתב המלא חסר או החסר מלא, if a person wrote a short form of a word that should be in a long form, or vice versa, או שכתב מילה שיקריא וכתב כקריאתה, כגון שכתב ישכבנה במקום ישגלנה, Right, so there's a Kree in Ketiv.

If anyone has ever leaned before, there's certain words which are written in one way and read in another.

And he gives an example.

He says, So if you read a Kree as a Ketiv or vice versa, Or if you read a Kree as a Ketiv or vice versa, Or you mix up it being a parasha, a passage that is patuach or satum.

Or you write a shira like everything else.

Or you write any other parasha like a shira.