Notes on Aliyot

Author: Ben Denckla

Revision: 4 Oct 2021 / כ״ח בְּתִשְׁרֵי תשפ״ב

Introduction

This document describes the aliyot of the Torah, as they appear in mam (Miqra According to the Masorah). The mam text is annotated with two systems that hierarchically divide the Torah. Both systems have the following in common:

• The 5 books of the Torah are at the top of the hierarchy.
• The 5,844 verses of mam’s Torah are at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Where things get interesting is at the level(s) of hierarchy between book and verse. This is where the two systems vary.

• One system has 187 chapters as the sole level of hierarchy between book and verse.
• The other system has the following two levels between book and verse:
  • 54 parashiyot immediately below the level of the book
  • 378 aliyot (7 for each parashah) immediately below the level of the parashah

Schematically, we can compare these two systems as follows:

These systems reflect quite different notions of where the significant boundaries of the text lie, as illustrated by the following “stats”:

• Only 32 of the 54 parashiyot start when a chapter starts.
• Only 87 of the 187 chapters start when an aliyah starts.

The parashah/aliyah system is the focus of this document. In truth, this system is more complicated than what we have described above. The two main complications are as follows, and will be discussed in the next two sections.

• While it is true that there are 54 single parashiyot, 7 neighboring pairs of them can be combined form dual parashiyot.
• While it is true that there are exactly 7 numbered aliyot for every parashah, there are non-numbered aliyot that don’t belong in this hierarchy.

Dual parashiyot

The dual parashiyot are as follows:

1. ויקהל–פקודי
2. תזריע–מצֹרע
3. אחרי מות–קדֹשים
4. בהר–בחֻקֹתי
5. חֻקת–בלק
6. מטות–מסעי
7. נִצבים–וילך

We can think of the dual parashiyot as forming an alternate hierarchy. This alternate hierarchy:

• retains the 40 “single and unpairable” parashiyot
• uses the 7 dual parashiyot to fill in the space otherwise occupied by the 14 “single but pairable” parashiyot

The parashah level of this alternate hierarchy is illustrated by the table below. To keep the table compact, we use numbers rather than names to identify the parashiyot. We identify a parashah by its number within its “parent” book. Thus בראשית-2 is נֹח, בראשית-3 is לך־לך, etc.

This alternate hierarchy:

• has only 47 rather than 54 divisions in its sub-book level
• has only 329 rather than 378 numbered aliyot (each dual parashah still has exactly 7 numbered aliyot, just like a single parashah)

In truth, the way dual parashiyot are used in practice is more complicated than this alternate hierarchy would suggest. The truth is that in any given year, some dual parashiyot are used, and others are not. But the simplified “all or nothing” model (use all 7 duals, or use none) suffices for our purposes here.

As mentioned above, each dual parashah has its own 7 numbered aliyot. These 7 aliyot simply consist of 1 to 4 neighboring aliyot from the “single but pairable” halves of the dual parashah. The table below shows the partitioning of all 7 dual parashiyot, expressed in terms of these constituent aliyot.

Some explanation of the table above:

• Prime & double prime marks label the halves, making, for example,
  • 3′ the 3rd aliyah of the 1st half
  • 4″ the 4th aliyah of the 2nd half
• In addition to its schematic representation of the partitioning, the table above also represents the partitioning in a compact, 7-digit form, with each digit representing the length of a partition.
  • For readability, we have dash-separated the digits into groups of 3 & 4.
  • Since the lengths sum to 7, we could leave off the last length, using only 6 digits, but that seems too implicit.

Some notes on the data in this table:

• Only in 2 of the 7 dual parashiyot is the partitioning uniform (compactly represented by 222-2222). Those 2 are אחרי מות-קדֹשים and חֻקת-בלק. Contrast these with the the 5 dual parashiyot with non-uniform partitioning, e.g. בהר-בחֻקֹתי (compactly represented by 221-4113).
• One consistent feature of the partitioning is that the 4th aliyah always spans the halves of the parashah. I.e. the 4th always contains at least one aliyah from the 1st half of the parashah and at least one aliyah from the 2nd half of the parashah.
• The 4th aliyah starts with aliyah 7′ in 6 of the 7 dual parashiyot. The exception is בהר-בחֻקֹתי. Its 4th aliyah starts with 6′. The 4th aliyah of בהר-בחֻקֹתי is also exceptional because it is the largest: it is the only aliyah consisting of 4 aliyot from its halves.

Non-numbered aliyot

A non-numbered aliyah can have one of two types:

• One type of non-numbered aliyah is the maftir aliyah. Every parashah, be it single or dual, has a maftir except וזאת הברכה, the last parashah of the Torah. (As usual things are not quite that simple; וזאת הברכה has a maftir selection associated with it, but the selection comes from a different parashah of the Torah. Thus it might be more accurate to say that וזאת הברכה does not have a maftir from within its boundaries.)
• The other type of non-numbered aliyah is a “teaser” aliyah. Every parashah, be it single or dual, has exactly 3 teasers, identified as follows:
  • [כהן]
  • [לוי]
  • [ישראל]

(Like mam, we always put the name of a teaser in square brackets. This is to avoid confusion with the 1st three numbered aliyot, which are traditionally given to the same three groups as the teasers: kohen, levi, & yisrael.)

A dual parashah does not have its own teasers or maftir. Rather, it uses the teasers of its 1st parashah and it uses the maftir of its 2nd parashah.

The [ישראל] teaser is the only type of aliyah whose end ever needs to be labelled. Below are the reasons for this.

In 43 of 54 cases, the [ישראל] teaser ends when the 1st s-aliyah ends (s-aliyah = aliyah of a single parashah). In other words, in most cases, the 3 teasers partition the 1st s-aliyah. In these common cases, mam does not label the end of the [ישראל] teaser. Below, we describe the 11 cases that do not follow this pattern. I.e. below, we describe the 11 cases in which mam does explicitly label the end of the [ישראל] teaser.

• 3 of the 11 cases: The [ישראל] teaser ends before the 1st s-aliyah ends. These cases are בראשית, כי תשא, and נשֹא.
• 8 of the 11 cases: The [ישראל] teaser ends after the 1st s-aliyah ends.
  • 3 of these 8 cases: The [ישראל] teaser ends somewhere in the middle of the 2nd or 3rd s-aliyah. These cases are בחֻקֹתי, דברים, and ואתחנן. By coincidence, these happen to be the first 3 of the 8 cases, in normal reading order.
  • 5 of these 8 cases: The [ישראל] teaser ends when the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th s-aliyah ends. These cases are כי־תבוא, נִצבים, וילך, האזינו, and וזאת הברכה.

The table below presents:

• a summary row for the 3 cases in which the [ישראל] teaser ends before the 1st s-aliyah ends.
• a summary row for the 43 cases in which the [ישראל] teaser when the 1st s-aliyah ends.
• a row for each of the 8 cases in which the [ישראל] teaser ends after the 1st s-aliyah ends.

Rather than being in normal reading order, they are presented in an order which more clearly reveals their regularities. The column labels are really labels of their left side. The numbers after the dot are not tenths, as in decimal notation. Rather, they mean, roughly, “somewhere in the middle of.” For example 1.2 & 1.3 mean “somewhere in the middle of aliyah 1 and somewhere later in the middle of aliyah 1.” So, the 3rd row, the row for דברים, can be read as:

• The [לוי] teaser starts at 1.2: somewhere in the middle of aliyah 1.
• The [ישראל] teaser starts at 1.3: somewhere later in the middle of aliyah 1.
• The [ישראל] teaser ends at 2.1: somewhere in the middle of aliyah 2.

Column labels are repeated at the end of the [ישראל] teaser, for clarity.

Actually mam labels not so much the end of [ישראל] as the 1st verse after [ישראל]. For this, it uses the label [ע״כ ישראל], meaning “yisrael until here.”

In mam, the 1st aliyah is not labelled ראשון, nor is it labelled [כהן]. Rather, it is labelled with the name of the single parashah. Below is a table showing the 1st few aliyah labels mam uses for the parashah נֹח. The table also shows an expanded form of these labels, where everything is laid out explicitly, albeit with gray used for the parts that mam leaves implicit.

In the parashiyot עקב and נִצבים, the maftir aliyah is the same as the 7th aliyah. Every other parashah with a maftir, be it single or dual, has that maftir starting later than the start of the 7th aliyah.

End of document