Halakah for scribes

Translations of some of the halakhic treatises that a sofer must know. The two major ones are complete; the ancilliary ones partially so.

Why translations?

A sofer has to know Hebrew, period. If you don’t know Hebrew, you’re not going to spot a mistake if you made it – and just so many other reasons. You need Hebrew. Don’t think that because these texts are here in English, you can skip out on learning Hebrew. You can’t.

That said, biblical Hebrew is a different thing from rabbinic Hebrew; rabbinic Hebrew uses a lot of vocabulary and idiom which aren’t so easy to pick up without being taught. There are people who know biblical Hebrew pretty well, but just don’t have the yeshiva tools to handle the halakhic texts because they’re in rabbinic hebrew, and don’t have the resources to get to yeshiva any time soon. These people want to do things as per the halakha, but the rule books aren’t accessible to them. I know that there are people who would keep the rules if they could only read them – these translations are for you. There are also people who want to learn the rabbinic idioms by studying these texts. The translations are for you too.