Parashat Ki Teitzei, and the numbers in it

The portion with the most commandments, the longest promise on the cheapest of them, fringes the text calls cords, and a count of forty the court strikes as thirty-nine.

The reading after Shoftim is Ki Teitzei, Devarim 21:10 through 25:19, and it arrives deep enough into Elul that the month is doing its work. Its fame among people who count is of a particular kind. By the reckoning the enumerators use, no portion of the Torah carries more commandments than this one. The tally most often quoted is the Sefer HaChinuch’s, seventy-four, better than one commandment in nine of everything the Torah commands, packed into five chapters of lost oxen, roof rails, first-born shares, honest stones and a bird’s nest.

The index has its own way of weighing a portion, so here that is first: 110 verses, 1,582 words, 5,858 letters, and a standard value across every letter of 403,751. As ever, the last figure is a measurement rather than a teaching, and nobody should build anything on it.

The name, and where those two words have been before

The name is two words, when you go out, and taken together they come to כי תצא=521. Two words rather than one, because that is how the portion is named everywhere and the arithmetic does not mind a space.

The pair is worth a concordance moment before it is worth a value. Those two spellings stand side by side five times in the twenty-four books, and the portion holds two of the five: this opening, and the law of the camp that goes out against your enemies two chapters later. A third stands at the head of the previous portion’s chapter of war, Devarim 20:1, which opens with the same five words as this one, word for word: when you go out to battle against your enemies. Shoftim sends the army out; Ki Teitzei picks up the sentence and follows it into the camp. The remaining two are not wars at all. One is a fire breaking out in Shemot, and one is a law of the body in Vayikra. A word as ordinary as goes out belongs to whoever needs it, which is the standing reason this site counts spellings and then reads.

Seventy-four, and the arithmetic under all six hundred and thirteen

The seventy-four is the Sefer HaChinuch’s count, and it can be counted on his own pages, which this site holds. The Chinuch walks the Torah portion by portion and numbers the commandments as it goes. In its sequence the last commandment of Shoftim is the five hundred and thirty-first, the heifer’s valley that may not be worked; Ki Teitzei opens at the five hundred and thirty-second, the captive woman taken in war, and closes at the six hundred and fifth, not to forget what Amalek did; and Ki Tavo begins with the declaration over the first fruits. Seventy-four, more than any other portion. Other enumerators do not all slice a verse the same way at the margins, so the figure is his and not the Torah’s own arithmetic. What this site can open beside it is older and stranger: the count that the seventy-four are a share of stands, at its root, on a gematria.

The Gemara makes it in Makkot. Rabbi Simlai expounds that six hundred and thirteen commandments were spoken to Moshe, and Rav Hamnuna asks for the verse and finds it in Torah tziva lanu Moshe. And the prooftext is arithmetical. תורה comes to תורה=611, so the Torah Moshe commanded us is six hundred and eleven; the first two of the Ten, I am and You shall have no other, were heard from the Almighty’s own mouth rather than Moshe’s, and 611 with those 2 is 613. The Rambam opens the enumeration of his Sefer HaMitzvot by quoting that very passage, and draws from it that I am is itself one of the 613. It is the classical shape of a Talmudic gematria: the count was already established, and the letters arrive to carry it. The portion with the largest single share of the 613 seems the right place to say where the 613 itself keeps its letters, and the article on 613 reads the whole daf.

The nest

Among the seventy-four is the commandment the tradition itself priced at almost nothing, and then paid more attention than almost any other.

קן comes to קן=150, and the bare spelling stands just 3 times in the twenty-four books: this nest, the scattered nest Yeshayahu sees the daughters of Moav become, and the nest the swallow finds for herself beside the altars in Tehillim 84. A small word with good company.

The Gemara in Chullin, whose last perek is given to this law and which this site holds entire, reads the opening words closely: if it chance before you excludes the nest that is ready at hand, the dovecote in the yard, and nobody is asked to comb hills and heights to find one. The commandment is for the nest that happens to you. Then comes the verse that made this little law famous.

The last mishnah of Chullin, the one the whole tractate closes on, makes the calculation out loud: a man may not take the mother even to purify the metzora, and if for a commandment as light as an issar, a small coin, the Torah said that it may be well with you and your days be long, how much more for the weighty ones. Rashi carries the same a fortiori onto the verse: an easy command that costs no money, and that reward stated beside it.

The same promise, twice in the Torah

The commandment the Gemara sets beside it carries the same double clause on its face, and it stands at the other end of the scale. Here it is in the Ten Words as Devarim repeats them.

Honouring parents is, by any accounting, among the heaviest duties in the Torah; sending a bird off a nest is the lightest thing in it. The Gemara noticed that the two share a wage before anyone could count commandments at all. R. Yaakov’s teaching, on the daf our cache holds, is built on the pair: there is no commandment whose reward is written beside it that the revival of the dead does not depend on. And the proof is a story the Gemara insists he saw. A father says, climb the tower and bring me chicks. The son climbs, sends away the mother, takes the young, and on the way down he falls and dies. He was inside both commandments at once, the honouring and the sending, with both promises open above his head. Where is the length of his days? So, says R. Yaakov, read the promises where they can be kept: that it may be well with you, in the world that is wholly good; that your days be long, in the world that is wholly long. The sugya tests the story from every side, a rickety ladder, a stray thought, and lets the reading stand.

The daf then adds the saddest footnote in the tractate. Rav Yosef says that had Acher expounded the verse the way R. Yaakov did, R. Yaakov whom the Gemara there calls his daughter’s son, he would not have sinned. What it was that Acher saw, the daf leaves in two versions and does not choose between them: a fall like this one, or the tongue of R. Chutzpit the interpreter lying in the rubbish. On that, and on the words of the sending itself, the tractate ends: all those chapters of slaughter, lungs and sciatic nerves, and the last line of Chullin is this parsha’s promise.

Rashi adds the neighbourly reading of the very next verse. Fulfil the nest, and you will come to build a new house and set the rail on its roof; from there the passage walks to a vineyard, a field, and fine garments. One good deed brings another in its train, and the evidence is nothing more than the order the verses already stand in.

The fringes, under another name

That walk through the wardrobe ends at a commandment everyone knows by a word this portion never uses.

גדלים, twisted cords, comes to גדלים=87, and the spelling stands 23 times in the books. Only two of those are cords: this verse, and the festoons on the bronze capitals of the Temple’s two pillars in Melachim. The other twenty-one are simply great ones, the plural of gadol written without its vav, one spelling wearing two words, which the reader of the article about thirty-six has met before.

The familiar word lives in Bemidbar, and even there not quite in the form everyone writes. Spelled the way it is printed today, ציצית stands in the twenty-four books 0 times. The Torah’s own spelling is shorter.

ציצת, twice in this one verse, and that spelling stands 3 times in all: those two, and once in Yeshayahu 28, where it is a fading flower. Rashi, on this verse, hears in the word the lock of hair by which Yechezkel was lifted, and in our text that lock wears a prefixed bet, so the bare spelling’s third stand really is the flower and not the hair.

Which matters one verse later, because Rashi’s next comment is among the most quoted gematrias in the world: the fringe recalls all the commandments, since ציצית is ציצית=600, and eight threads and five knots make six hundred and thirteen. The teaching is old and Rashi’s comment is in our cache. The index adds only one quiet fact to it: the sum stands on the filled-out spelling, the one that occurs nowhere in the written text, and the spelling the Torah does write, ציצת, comes to ציצת=590, which no count of threads and knots brings to 613. The 613 of the fringes and the 611 of the Torah are the same kind of arithmetic: a tradition first, letters second. Say that much, and the gematria is honest.

Forty, minus one

Forty he shall strike him, says the portion, and the court never struck forty. The Mishnah in Makkot rules: how many lashes, forty less one, for it is said in number forty, a count that approaches forty. The derivation joins the last word of the verse before to the first word of this one, across the verse boundary, and reads them as one phrase. It is worth pausing on what kind of move that is. This site’s own index never joins two words across a verse boundary; a phrase here ends where its verse ends, by rule. The Oral Law is free where the index is strict, and the number of lashes in Israel is a count the written page alone would give as forty. R. Yehudah, in the same mishnah, takes the page at its word: forty entire, and the fortieth lands between the shoulders. The Gemara on that mishnah, on the daf this site holds, draws the lesson in Rava’s name: how foolish are the people who rise for a Torah scroll and do not rise for a great sage, when the scroll says forty and the sages came and took one away. The number that everyone remembers, thirty-nine, is a reading, not a misprint, and the article about forty keeps this verse among its ten.

A whole stone, and what follows it

A perfect and just weight, and the wage should look familiar: the same length of days the nest carries, this time on a stone in a merchant’s bag. Rashi reads the suggestions folded into the paragraph: keep two sets of stones and you will have nothing, keep whole ones and you will have much. Then he asks the question the layout begs, because the very next passage is Amalek, and answers with the Tanchuma: if you used false weights and measures, be anxious about the provocation of the enemy. False balances first, then the memory of the attack. The placement is the sermon.

The name to be blotted out

עמלק comes to עמלק=240, and the bare spelling stands 23 times in the twenty-four books. It enters as a man, a grandson of Esav in the genealogies of Bereshit, and its last bare stand is David at Tziklag, recovering everything Amalek took. Every Elul, when this passage is read, a further equation is repeated with it: doubt, safek, is also two hundred and forty, and Amalek is the doubt that cools a person on the road. The reading belongs to a later literature that is not in this site’s library, so it is named here without an address and without a pretended source.

What our index can add is the part nobody quotes. ספק does come to ספק=240; the arithmetic is fine. But the noun doubt is rabbinic Hebrew. Spelled exactly so, the word stands in the twenty-four books 1 time, and there it is not a doubt at all. It is a verb, in Yechezkel’s lament.

Smite upon your thigh: a verb of striking, from a root the Tanakh uses for Balak’s clapped hands and Yirmiyahu’s smitten thigh. So the famous equation weighs a name the Torah writes against a noun it never does, which does not unsay the drash. It locates it: a comment in rabbinic Hebrew about a rabbinic idea, doing its arithmetic honestly on the far side of the line this site keeps between the text and the tradition. The one thing it should not be called is a gematria of Scripture against Scripture, and it costs one sentence to say so.

Where the nest meets Amalek

The portion’s gentlest law and its hardest memory have met before, on one page of the Gemara. The daf of Chullin that expounds the nest is interrupted by the men of Papunya, who ask Rav Matnah a string of riddles, beginning with a nest found on a man’s head, he answers from a verse about earth on a head, and running straight into the oldest word game in the yeshiva: where is Moshe in the Torah, where is Haman, where is Esther. The answer for Haman is a question asked in Eden.

Ha-min ha-etz, have you eaten of the tree: the Gemara hears the wicked man’s name in the first of those two words. It is a game and the Gemara knows it, but the thread it tugs is real. Haman in the Megillah is styled the Agagite, Agag is the king of Amalek whom Shaul spared in Shmuel, and the tradition reads the title as descent. So the daf that teaches you to send the mother bird also knows where Amalek’s line resurfaces, and this portion, which commands the one in its second chapter and the memory of the other in its last lines, keeps the same two thoughts five chapters apart.

The issar and the count

Seventy-four commandments by the Chinuch’s count, and the portion’s own numbers stay small: a two-word name at 521, a nest at 150, cords at 87, forty struck as thirty-nine, and 240 to be blotted out. The number this piece would keep for Elul is the Mishnah’s coin. The Torah set its longest promise on its cheapest commandment, the tractate that worked out the details chose to end there, and no arithmetic improves on that exchange rate. What the month does with promises of that shape is Elul’s own article.

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