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(The original question asked if there are any, but there aren't, hence the update).

The famous ו דגחון Sugiah in Kiddushin 30a:

"א"ל: ניתי ס"ת ואימנינהו, מי לא אמר רבה בר בר חנה לא זזו משם עד שהביאו ספר תורה ומנאום? א"ל: אינהו בקיאי בחסירות ויתרות, אנן לא בקיאינן"

Said the scholars to him, Let a Scroll of the Torah be brought and we will count the letters! Did not Rabbah b. Bar Hanah say They did not stir from there until a Scroll of the Torah was brought and they counted them? [and the letters did not match, so they said] — They [the Sofrim] were thoroughly versed in the defective and full readings but we are not.

  1. Clearly, the Sefer Torah they possessed was different from one of the Sofrim (some 400 years earlier), and they attributed the difference to יתרות וחסרות (writing Hebrew words in short or in full) in other words to actually altering the letters of the Torah scroll in some way. But this fact didn't surprise the Sages, they attributed it openly to their insufficient knowledge of spelling the Hebrew words according to the tradition.

  2. It seems, that the divine Torah given by Hashem could easily contain means of foolproofing/anti-altering codes, for example, start every line with the same letter line, have fixed skip-length words for the whole Torah (like ת-ו-ר-ה every 50 letters) and more.

  3. Considering the importance of every letter in the Torah and the most stringent Halachah about invalidity of a scroll that lacks a letter, I would expect the Torah to include those marks (which would also make it very different from a regular book).

Why, after all, those measures are absent in the Written Torah?

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  • Although at least 500 later, but Ben Asher marked short and long spelling, dagesh and rafe etc. in the masorah. Aug 10, 2018 at 7:53
  • "Considering the importance of every letter in the Torah and the most stringent Halachah about invalidity of a scroll that lacks a letter, I would expect the Torah to include those marks." I don't see how the second part of that sentence follows from the first part. If every letter in the Torah is immensely important, why change many of them? That would almost certainly require more alteration than could ever be attributed to accidents.
    – Daniel
    Sep 16, 2018 at 10:52
  • @Daniel I didn't say "change" I meant "include in the first place", the same Torah but we know the codes so we can check every book independently, and not comparing it to some other book.
    – Al Berko
    Sep 16, 2018 at 11:58

1 Answer 1

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The Torah did have a means of foolproofing it. As Ralbag explains in his commentary to Parshat Vayeilech, this was the purpose of the Torah that Moshe wrote for the kohanim. Moshe would presumably write a perfect Torah, and all future Torahs could be based on this one:

התועלת הי"ב הוא להודיע שכבר כתב משה ספר התורה ונתנו לכהנים כדי שלא יפול ספק בספר תורה בשום מלה ממלותיו ולא טעות כי משם ידקדקו אותו ולזה דקדק בספר שיכתוב המלך עבור עצמו שיועתק משם או יוגה משם כי בטעות שיקרה במלה אחת או באות אחת תפסד הרבה מכוונות התורה או יפול בו ההשמע לפנים הפוכים

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  • do we have a single example of this use, when the scroll was removed from the Arc and K"K to compare?
    – Al Berko
    Oct 6, 2019 at 9:07
  • We do, short of. In Mesecet Sofrim it brings taking out the Sifrai HaAzara and comparing them. They found three differences, if I remember correctly. That is of course in the Second Temple period, without Moshe Rabeinu's sefer.
    – Mordechai
    Nov 24, 2019 at 12:57

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