Reviewing The Jewish Bible: A Material History by David Stern, Adam Kirsch writes:
[T]he ancient rabbis believed that [the Torah] preexisted the created world, which obviously cannot be true of any physical object. Unlike every other book, which comes into existence only in the act of writing, the text of the Torah is prior to its script. When the Talmud says that the Torah given to Moses was written βin black fire on white fire,β it again emphasizes the distinction between the language of the Torah, which exists eternally (or, as we now say, virtually), and its physical medium.
It is a kind of paradox, then, that the Torah scroll is the most changeless of Jewish objects. If the original Torah was made of fire, why should it matter whether we read it as a parchment scroll or a printed codex, or for that matter on an iPhone screen? Why do Jews reading the Torah in a synagogue today use exactly the same technology as their ancestors 2,000 years ago?
In the first chapter of . . . his brilliant and fascinating new book, Stern makes the point with a pair of images. One illustration depicts the oldest surviving complete Torah scroll, a product of Babylonia in the 12th century; the other shows a Torah scroll written in the United States in the 20th century. Both are open to the same passage, the Song of the Sea in Exodus 15, which is written in a distinctive pattern known as βa small brick atop a full brick.β The text and its layout are identical in both scrolls; the passage of 800 years has changed the physical appearance of the Torah not at all.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2925/black-fire-white-fire/