Torah Trivia

On Simhat Torah we dance and sing with the holy Torah scrolls. Did you ever wonder what's really behind those velvet Torah covers?

  • The Torah contains 5,845 verses, 79,976 words, and 304,805 letters.
  • The most common letter in the Torah is yud. It occurs 31,530 times. The least common letter is tet, occurring only 1,802 times.
  • The last letter of the Torah is lamed. The first letter is bet. Together they spell the Hebrew word lev, which means heart.
  • The word "Torah" appears in the Torah 52 times.
  • There are 248 sheets of parchment in a Torah scroll, with 42 lines per sheet.
  • Hebrew is read and written from right to left, but when a sofer writes a Torah scroll, each individual letter is written from left to right. It takes a sofer about one year to write a complete Torah scroll, which can cost as much as $50,000.