It was the beginning of a 40-year exodus from Egypt, and his people's hunger for spiritual leadership -- only briefly fed by bowing to a golden calf -- would be satisfied upon Moses' second descent from Mount Sinai.

Moses delivered to the people of Israel the laws by which they would live for millennia to come. He gave them the 10 commandments and, it is believed, the Torah, the five books of the Old Testament.

Today, near the flat, grey crossing of Heron and Walkley roads, hunched over a basement drafting table in a bungalow across from Leon's furniture emporium -- a setting decidedly less dramatic and romantic than Sinai in biblical times -- Elie Benzaquen is continuing the work Moses began 3,300 years before.

Benzaquen, a painter, computer animator, husband and father of three young sons, is a Torah scribe. He is the latest link in a chain of people through the ages who have preserved the words of God by writing sacred Torah scrolls.

Benzaquen is the only scribe in Ottawa who writes Torahs (there are three others who do less arduous scribing tasks). And he is one of only a handful of Torah scribes across Canada.

Scribing is an ancient, painstaking art that is as beautiful as it is difficult. It can take years to complete a single Torah, though strict rules mean that one mistake could render the entire work useless.

In strict terms, a Torah is the first five books of the Bible, written in Hebrew on scrolls of animal parchment and usually read in synagogue. But in its broader definition, Torah -- which literally means ``teaching'' -- is also the law, ethics, tradition, philosophy, religious writings and interpretations of the Old Testament that have guided Jews since the time of Moses.

Torah, to Jews, is the planet around which they have orbited through times of peace and persecution. It is the ``centrepiece of Judaism and the key to Jewish survival,'' wrote Alfred Kolatch in a 1988 book. It is their ``moral guide.''

Despite the historic import of his work, Benzaquen, 32, doesn't see himself as a modern-day Moses. He became a scribe for very practical reasons -- he needed to support his family. He knew he couldn't do so solely as a painter, so he used his ``God-given skills'' to learn another art, the art of scribing.

Benzaquen is finishing work on his first Torah, one that his father, also a scribe, could not finish because of failing eyesight. He follows the exact minutiae of process that have guided scribes for ages, yet he is a believer in the progress of today, earning part of his income producing software animation for a local high-tech firm, Artech Digital Entertainments.

Sitting at his drafting table, Benzaquen can hear his three boys, aged 3, 4 and 5. He wavers between wanting to explain his work with a stranger, and wanting to go upstairs to help his wife, Elana, put the children to bed.

For the moment, he stays downstairs. It is important to him to make the point that being religious today does not necessarily preclude people from living a full, modern life. ``There is no contradiction,'' he says, and proves it by the way he fills his busy life with everything from God and family to computer animation and art.

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When he speaks of the Torah, he speaks in computer and art metaphors. On the need to ensure a Torah scroll is error-free -- kosher -- Benzaquen explains that one mistake can be like a tiny glitch in a computer program: ``The whole system can crash.''

On what it means to him to labor over the Torah, a personal spiritual journey that has lasted 4 1/2 years so far, he says: ``There's a sense of giving life to something. The way an artist will take a blank canvas and give it life.''

And what a life it is.

A completed Torah will be kissed and caressed with fingers wrapped in the fringes of a Jewish prayer shawl. It will be given a position of honor in a specially made ark at the front of a synagogue. If damaged beyond repair in a fire, it will be buried in a funeral befitting a human.

It is a scribe's responsibility to make sure a Torah follows the myriad of laws that make it worthy of this status. There are rules on the number of letters in a line (30), lines in a column (42), and columns in a scroll (248). There are regulations on what to write on (kosher animal parchment soaked in limewater, scraped, stretched, dried and ironed). What to write with (carefully carved reeds or quills). And what ink to use (a black mix of gall nuts, copper sulphate, gum arabic and water).

Minor mistakes can be erased with a knife and pumice stone, then corrected -- except for the name of God. The 60 to 80 squares of parchment must then be sewn together by hand with special thread made of tendon tissue from the foot of a kosher animal.

Working full time, a scribe can finish a Torah in less than a year. But Benzaquen's scribe work competes with his day job, his painting and his family. He began working on his father's Torah soon after his five-year-old son was born and has at least six months more work to do. (A Torah scroll can sell for nearly $40,000, but the materials alone could cost nearly half that amount.)

Benzaquen was born in Scotland to a religious family, was raised in London, moved to Venezuela, then, at 14, was sent off to New York with his brother to study in a yeshiva, a school of Jewish learning. He went to Israel to become a rabbi, following in the footsteps of his Moroccan father, who is a rabbi, a Torah scribe and a ritual (kosher) animal slaughterer.

Three of his uncles, who live in the United States, are also rabbis and scribes, although they have congregations and are too busy to write Torahs.

The Torah that Benzaquen is finishing has not been sold. When he is done, he will subject it to the ultimate confluence of past and present: his ancient script will be scanned and put through a computer program that will sweep for errors.

``And maybe,'' Benzaquen laughs, ``I'll put it (on sale) on the Internet.''

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