Parashah Names
Nobody is really certain when the tradition to name a Torah portion based on, usually, a word or two from the first sentence.
But the fact that there are names and not simply numbers, which were applied later, is very telling.
For example, the Book of Matthew was designed to be a linear story, with a beginning, middle, and end. And so, having a book composed of sequentially numbered chapters makes sense.
The Talmud (Bava Batra 14a-14b) tells us that there was a portion called "Balaam", which we can assume is speaking of the lengthy story of King Balaak in the Book of Numbers summoning and working with Balaam until the King wants nothing more to do with him and they go their separate ways.
This is a stand-alone story, and it is likely a single scroll of it's own. And it is also quite likely that the Book of Numbers was composed of a number of separate scrolls and at some point, they were arranged into an order, and eventually unified into a single scroll. The scribes would use gaps and indicators to show when one scroll ended and another began.
Because of the way that the Torah developed, and because it was never a linear text (hence the Rabbinical saying that "there is not before and after [order] in the Torah"), and so having named scrolls made sense. And who knows, perhaps each scroll had a title, such as "The Story of Balaam, by Alexander, the son of Jannai" or some such thing.
It is likely that when these stories were stitched together in a single scroll, that having the names of the stories became unworkable since the decision was made to combine some stories under a single chapter number.
Chapter Numbering
Later, when small scrolls were joined into a larger one, the story was still referred to by name.
And still, later, the story was only referred to by a word or two found in, usually, the first verse of that story.
And even later still, the story, now that it has been made linear and joined with other stories, would be referred to by chapter and verse.
And the Septuagint was created using the format of chapter and verse.
And afterwards, that Masorites changed many of the chapter positions, and Christians would accepts some of these, and reject others, which is why the Christian numbering system often doesn't match up exactly with the Jewish texts produced today.
Parashah Devarim
Given all of that, each of the five books of the Torah is named after the first parashah name in that book. And each parashah name is based on a word or two, usually, of the first sentence.
So what about this week's portion?
The first 5 verses is the Narrator setting the stage for Moses speaking. And unlike the other books, the narrator will be speaking primarily from the point of view of Moses, speaking in the first-person, most of the time, starting in verse 6.
But the actual scroll seems to have been from, what is now called, Deuteronomy 1:1 to 4:43 rather than what we use today, which is 1:1-3:22. Others contend that it could have been from 1:1-3:29, since that portion is a recount, and 4:1-4:43 seems to be a preamble to the Torah that Moses is going to be presenting.
Either way, 3:22 seems like an odd place to break the story, which would be before the end of the initial scroll. It is obviously for ideological reasons, and we can only conjecture the reason why.
Summary
The naming of the Torah portions has changed over time as well as the inclusion and changing of chapter delimiters. Initially composed of several scrolls, the Torah would eventually become assembled as a non-linear collection of folklore that, in turn, would be rendered into Greek, adding chapter and verse numbers that the Masorites would later modify, giving us the Torah that we have today.
This is not a changeless text, which explains why the ancient sages had a problem trying to determine where the middle of the Torah actually began.
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