Crowns on Torah’s Letters

The Aish Rabbi Replies

Thank you for raising the interesting issue. As you wrote, some of the letters, when written in the Torah, have tiny lines, rounded at the top, protruding from the tops of them. These lines look a bit like a crown and are accordingly called “tagin” in Hebrew. (“Taga” is Aramaic for “crown”, see e.g. Pirkei Avos 1:13.)

The letters which contain crowns made of three lines are:

ש        shin

ע        ayin

ט        tet

נ         nun

ז        zayin

ג        gimmel

צ        tzaddi

The Talmud (Menachos 29b) notes that these letters spell the words “shatnez gatz” (which is why I presented them out of alphabetical order).

The letters which have crowns of a single line are:

ב        bet

ד        dalet

ק        kuf

ח        chet

י         yud

ה        hei

These spell out “bedek chaya.”

I couldn’t find any very good examples of the crowns on aish.com, but on this page you can find a small copy of the parchment inside a mezuzah. You can also see a few clearer examples in this Wikipedia article.

These crowns appear to be mere decorations, but according to the Talmud (ibid.) they have deep esoteric meanings. The Talmud relates that when Moses ascended to Heaven to receive the Torah, He found God tying crowns onto the tops of the letters. Moses asked what they were for and God told him that in a future generation a great sage named Akiva son of Yosef will derive "mounds upon mounds" of laws from every little mark in the Torah. Thus, amazingly, the message of the Torah’s “crowns” is so deep that Moses himself didn’t know what it is. That was left for the greatest scholar of a later generation to uncover. Some explain that the crowns represent a level of understanding higher and more mystical than the Torah itself, and thus the crowns sit atop the Torah’s letters.

(The Torah commentator Or HaChaim [Leviticus 13:37] explains that although the entire Torah was given to Moses at Sinai including its every law, Moses wasn’t always told how each law may be seen in the text of the Torah itself. Many of the laws were simply given to Moses orally, without source, as part of the Oral Torah. R’ Akiva, however, was able to discern, using the Torah’s crowns, how every single law could actually be derived from the Torah itself. Thus, although R’ Akiva did not invent any new laws not known to Moses, he was able to connect the Oral Torah to the Written in a manner Moses himself was not aware of.)