Parashat Ki Tavo, and the numbers in it

A basket no other book of the Tanakh ever borrowed, two scripted declarations in two registers of language, twelve amens answered aloud, and one commanded demand aimed at heaven.

The reading after Ki Teitzei is Ki Tavo, Devarim 26:1 through 29:8, and the two names make a sentence between them. The portion before this one is called when you go out; this one is called when you come in. It falls late in Elul every year the cycle runs, and it is a portion built out of speech the Torah writes down word for word: a declaration said over a basket, a confession said over an emptied house, twelve curses answered aloud by the whole people, and one commanded demand aimed at heaven.

The index weighs it first, as usual: 122 verses, 1,747 words, 6,816 letters, and a standard value across every letter of 482,044. A measurement, not a teaching, and nothing below stands on it.

The name, and the letter it gains coming home

Two words again, when you come in, and together they come to כי תבוא=439. A reader who was here for the portion that appoints the judges has met this number: the Torah’s own defective spelling of שפטים, the one the Shoftim piece led with, is 439 as well. Two portions of one Elul run, sharing a value. Nothing in either text connects courts to baskets, no tradition we hold reads the pair, and this site prices such meetings honestly: values collide constantly, and a shared number is a fact about arithmetic until a source makes it more. It is recorded here because it is true, and priced at what it costs.

The spelling is worth more than the value. Written out in full, with the vav, the pair stands together six times in the twenty-four books, from Eliezer’s oath in Bereshit to wisdom entering a heart in Mishlei. Devarim writes the pair four times in all, and the book’s habit is the thing to watch. Its first three comings-in are all written short, without the vav: the man who will ask for a king when he comes into the land, in Shoftim, and the man walking into his neighbour’s vineyard and his neighbour’s standing corn, twice inside Ki Teitzei. A hypothetical throne and somebody else’s field. This verse is the only place in Devarim where the coming in is written full, and it is the one where the coming in is the coming home. That is an observation about spelling, made by an index that can check it in a millisecond, and it is offered as exactly that; what a darshan does with it is his own affair.

And deep in the portion’s chapter of blessing, the two portion names meet in one verse: blessed when you come in, blessed when you go out. Rashi hears a whole life in the pair, a departure from the world as clean as the arrival into it. The portion named for going out ends with a man remembering an ambush on the road; the portion named for coming in blesses both directions of the door.

The basket

The portion opens with first fruits: take from the first of every fruit of the ground, put it in a basket, and go to the place that will be chosen.

טנא comes to טנא=60, and here the count needs saying carefully, because the bare spelling stands in the twenty-four books 0 times. The word never appears undressed. Dressed, it stands 4 times: as בטנא in this verse, as הטנא two verses later when the priest takes it from the bringer’s hand, and twice as טנאך in the chapter of blessings and curses. All four stands are inside this one portion. No other book of the Tanakh ever borrowed the basket.

Blessed is your basket, says the portion’s own chapter of blessing, and twelve verses later the same basket stands cursed. The two inventories open at the same shelf. A darshan would say the portion that begins by teaching what to put in the basket ends by telling you what rides on it; the index only insists that the word is this portion’s private property.

The other missing word is the famous one. The tractate that grew around this passage is called Bikkurim, and the passage never says it. Spelled bare, בכורים stands 4 times in the books: twice in Vayikra, once for the loaves a man of Baal Shalishah brings Elisha, and once for Nachum’s early figs that drop into the eater’s mouth. None of the four is in Devarim. This chapter calls the gift ראשית, the first, and the name everyone knows it by was supplied by the tradition from the Torah’s other first-fruits verses. The count is a spelling count, as ever, and it is the kind of small honest fact this series exists to check.

The procession

What the bringing actually looked like is not in the chapter. It is in the Mishnah, in the third perek of Bikkurim, which this site holds whole, and it is the best procession in rabbinic literature. It begins in the orchard: a man goes down into his field, sees a fig that has ripened first, ties a reed cord around it and says, these are bikkurim. Rashi carries that mishnah onto this verse nearly word for word. The gift is designated while it is still growing; the basket comes later.

Then the district goes up together. The towns of the station gather in the county town and sleep in its open square, not in the houses, and at first light the appointed man calls the words of Yirmiyahu: rise, and let us go up to Zion. An ox walks in front with its horns plated in gold and a crown of olive leaves on its head. A flute plays ahead of the column all the way, and the craftsmen of Jerusalem stand up before the arrivals and ask after their welfare, brothers, men of such and such a place, come in peace. The rich brought their fruit in baskets of silver and of gold, says the same perek, and the poor in baskets of peeled willow, and the baskets are handed to the priests with the fruit. When the column reached the Temple Mount, even Agrippas the king put the basket on his own shoulder and carried it in.

The declaration, and the three words the seder borrowed

At the altar the bringer speaks, and the Torah scripts him. The three marked words are among the most argued in the Chumash. The JPS line above reads them as a wandering Aramean was my father, the father himself the Aramean, Yaakov the wanderer. Rashi, in the cache this site holds, reads the Aramean as Lavan, who pursued Yaakov and wished to uproot everything, and was charged with the deed because he intended it. Both readings live inside three words of two and three letters, and the argument between them is as old as the translations. This site’s index can settle spellings; it takes no position on grammar.

The Mishnah stages even the sentence. While the basket is still on his shoulder, the bringer reads the opening of the declaration; at these three words he lowers it, holds it by its rim, a priest puts his hand beneath and waves it, and then the rest is read to the end. The same tractate remembers that at first whoever could read read and whoever could not was prompted, that people then stopped bringing fruit altogether, and that it was ordained the words be prompted to everyone, reader and non-reader alike. The mishnah gives no reason for the refusal. The reason every later reader supplies is shame, and the ordinance is shaped exactly like an answer to it: a law was bent so that no one’s basket would betray his schooling.

Two rules from elsewhere in the Mishnah frame the speech. The declaration must be said in the holy tongue: Sotah’s seventh perek derives it from the word this verse shares with the Levites’ answering at the mountains, further down this same portion. And the seder night is built on it: the mishnah in Pesachim rules that the father begins with disgrace and ends with praise, and expounds from these three words until he finishes the whole passage. The Haggadah in which every reader has met that exposition is a later book, not in this site’s library, and is named here without a page.

The other declaration, in whatever language you own

The portion’s second script is the confession over the tithes, said when the house has been emptied of every sacred obligation at the end of the cycle. I have not transgressed, says the speaker, and I have not forgotten. The Mishnah in Maaser Sheni walks the sentence clause by clause, each phrase assigned to one gift: the hallowed things are the second tithe, the Levite has his, the stranger, the orphan and the widow have theirs. And on I have not forgotten it rules: I have not forgotten to bless You over it. Forgetting the blessing is the failure the verse is made to confess.

The frame is the same chapter of Sotah that fixed the bikkurim declaration in the holy tongue, and the contrast is the mishnah’s own: the vidui maaser stands in the first list, the things said in any language at all. One portion, two commanded speeches, and the Oral Law splits them: the words over the basket are fixed sounds, and the words over the tithes may be said in whatever language a person actually keeps his accounts in.

The confession ends on the strangest verse in the portion. השקיפה, look down, comes to השקיפה=500, and that spelling stands in the twenty-four books exactly 1 time, here. The Mishnah hears the grammar precisely: we have done what You decreed upon us, now You do what You promised us. It is an imperative aimed upward, spoken on command. The Torah orders a person who has finished giving everything the law asks to stand in the Temple and require the promise. There is nothing else quite like it in the twenty-four books, and the index can certify at least the spelling half of that sentence.

Six against six

The portion then stages the largest antiphon in the Torah. Six tribes on Har Gerizim for the blessing, six on Har Eival for the curse, and the two verses split the twelve by name. The Mishnah in Sotah sets the scene: the priests, the Levites and the ark below in the middle, the priests surrounding the ark, the Levites surrounding the priests, and all Israel on this side and on that. The Levites turned their faces toward Gerizim and opened with the blessing, blessed is the man who does not make a graven or molten image, and these and those answered amen; they turned toward Eival and opened with the curse, and these and those answered amen. The chapter in front of you prints only the curses. The blessed half of each sentence is the Mishnah’s testimony, not the written text’s.

The same mishnah ends the day with the stones: plastered with lime, and the words of the Torah written on them in seventy languages, reading the verse’s well clarified as clarified into every tongue. Hold the two rulings side by side, because they are one perek’s: the bringer’s declaration is fixed in the holy tongue, and the Torah itself is published on the mountain in seventy. Rashi condenses the whole ceremony onto the first of these verses; the daf of Sotah he is condensing is not in this site’s library, and his condensation is.

Amen, twelve times

Twelve curses follow, one to a verse, and after every one the whole people has exactly one word. In this chapter אמן stands twelve times, and all twelve are the last word of their verse. The people never speak first and never say more. The word’s value is אמן=91. The curse quoted above is the second, against one who makes light of his father and his mother, and a reader coming from the Ki Teitzei piece will feel the rhyme: the portion before promised length of days for honouring parents, and this one curses the man who discounts them.

The spelling, corpus-wide, stands 32 times, and five of those are not the answer-word at all: the same three letters are the craftsman to whose handiwork Shir HaShirim compares the beloved, the foster father who raised Hadassah in Shushan, a governor of a city in Melachim, and twice a plain noun of faithfulness, the children in whom there is none in Haazinu and the counsels of old Yeshayahu calls faithfulness and truth. A spelling count is not a word count, which regular readers of this series can now recite in their sleep. Inside the Torah, the answered amens besides this chapter’s twelve belong to one person: the sotah, who answers the oath put to her doubled.

The first amen the Torah records is a woman’s, said twice, under an oath she did not compose. Her parashah heads the list of things said in any language, in the very perek of Sotah that stages the mountains, which is why one tractate carries both. And the prophets close the loop on this chapter directly: Yirmiyahu, hearing the covenant’s own cursed-be-the-man read back at him, answers it the way the tribes answered at Eival.

One more number is repeated about this word every year, and it can be said honestly in one sentence. A tradition in the later literature reads ninety-one as the meeting of two Names of God, the Name as it is written and the Name as it is said aloud, twenty-six and sixty-five. The works that carry that reading are not in this site’s library, so no line of them is quoted and neither Name is set in Hebrew on this page; the sums themselves are checked by our engine like every other number here. What the index adds is only what it counted above: in the Torah’s own text, the word whose value is ninety-one is the whole of the people’s part in the ceremony. Rashi, at the chapter’s end, brings R. Moshe the Preacher’s count that eleven of the curses answer to eleven tribes, with none written against Shimon; the count is his, quoted from a cache we hold, and left as he left it.

The long chapter

Then comes the chapter everyone lowers their voice for. By our count it runs sixty-nine verses, the longest chapter in Devarim: fourteen verses of blessing, a rebuke of fifty-four verses read in the synagogue without a break, and one closing verse that names the whole of it a covenant. The tradition counts ninety-eight curses in it, double the forty-nine of the earlier rebuke in Vayikra. That counting is midrashic; the works that carry it are not in this site’s library, and it is named here without an address, alongside two customs of the reading, that one reader takes it whole and that he drops his voice for it, whose sources are likewise not ours to open. What is ours: Rashi on the bronze sky of this chapter, from our own cache, records the Gemara’s distinction that the earlier rebuke was spoken as from the mouth of the Almighty, and this one Moshe said as from his own mouth, and the daf he cites is not in our library either, so it reaches this page only through him.

The index refuses to treat the chapter differently. Every word of the fifty-four is indexed, weighed under all seven methods, and served to a search like any word of the blessings. The text itself does not quarantine its hard passages; only the reading custom does, and the custom is also a kind of commentary, made of volume instead of words.

The answer

The portion’s numbers stay close to the mouth: a two-word name at 439 that weighs the same as the judges’, a basket at 60 that the rest of the Tanakh never borrowed, a demand at 500 said exactly once, and an answer at 91 said twelve times by everyone at once. The number this piece would keep for Elul is the last one. Ki Tavo scripts every speech in it except the people’s, and to the people it hands one word, whose whole work is to make somebody else’s words your own. What the month asks of a person is not far from that, and Elul’s own article says the rest.

The portion’s full text, its aliyot and its haftarah are at Ki Tavo in the reader, and every value of every word in it is at the portion’s gematria desk.