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In his book, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History professor James Kugel discusses the idea that each and every word (letter?) in the Torah posses significant meaning (pp. 104-105), in terms of halacha or moral teaching, termed omnisignificance.

What is the source for this idea? Has it historically been accepted by major commentators?

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    This seems to be the implicit logic of the Talmud. There are no superfluous words, everything has an important teaching. – Kazi bácsi Nov 06 '19 at 19:10
  • THis is a very interesting question. The answer is yes and no - yes, we want to believe that every letter and every word means something and we'll know it once (the Messiah comes), but that's just a dogma, practically, the Gemmorah says the opposite - there are repetitive words, just because people speak that way, our Torah scroll has extra letters nobody know a meaning of. The idea of the Torah's significance comes from the idea that it was given by the Creator and He knows what He's doing. – Al Berko Nov 06 '19 at 20:34
  • Halachicly it is way wrong - there are very long passages bearing absolutely no Halachic significance, for example, most of Bereishit, some of Exodus. – Al Berko Nov 06 '19 at 20:37

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