Vowels

Rabbi Maimon, Moses Maimonides’ father, believed that the Torah’s exact wording and layout had been divinely dictated to Moses down to the smallest detail—including paragraph divisions (open vs. closed), spelling (defective vs. plene), and even the decorative taggin atop certain letters. Maimonides, despite his rationalist philosophy, largely maintained this stringent view, though he would not invalidate a Torah scroll due to missing taggin. His son, R. Abraham, further relaxed the requirements as the realities of medieval manuscripts made the older standards untenable.

A 2000-year-old question on how to read a single word in the Torah has generated different opinions on how a custodian for someone’s animal should go about proving that the animal was killed by a beast and not stolen.