Torah

• 1. Introduction

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  The Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, is copied by hand from a text of 304,805 letters. A scribe who slips on a single letter, ornament, or symbol leaves the entire scroll unfit for use. That exacting standard tells you how much weight a community can place on a text. The name itself is Hebrew for instruction or teaching, yet English readers meet it as a word that means something quite different. Who wrote these five books, and when? Why does a text that is already written need a second, spoken companion to be understood? And how did a scroll guarded by one people come to matter to several faiths?

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• 2. Teaching Not Law

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  In Hebrew, the word Torah grows from the root yod-resh-heh, which in one verb form means to guide or to teach. Its natural sense is instruction or doctrine, and the familiar rendering as law gives a wrong impression.

  The Alexandrian Jews who produced the Septuagint chose the Greek word nomos, which means norm or standard and later hardened into law. Greek and Latin Bibles then adopted the habit of calling the five books The Law. Some scholars think that rendering obscures the ideal behind talmud torah, the study of Torah.

  The word also stretches well beyond five books. Rabbinic literature uses it for the Written Torah and for the Oral Torah, the spoken tradition now embodied in the Mishnah, the Talmud, and the Midrash. Occasionally it names the whole Hebrew Bible.

  The earliest title for the first part of the Bible seems to have been The Torah of Moses. That phrase appears in neither the Torah itself nor the pre-Exilic literary prophets. It turns up in Joshua and Kings, though not clearly as a name for the whole collection. Other early titles included The Book of Moses and The Book of the Torah.

  Scholars today usually prefer Pentateuch. The term comes from the Greek pentateuchos, meaning five-volume work, and it was first used in the Hellenistic Judaism of Alexandria. A Torah in bound form is called a Chumash, and it is usually printed with rabbinic commentaries. Each of the five scrolls carries a Hebrew name taken from its opening words.

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• 3. The Five Scrolls

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  Bereshit, meaning In the beginning, is the Hebrew name for the book English readers call Genesis, from the Greek word for creation. The book splits into a primeval history in chapters 1-11 and an ancestral history in chapters 12-50. The first half describes a good world that humanity corrupts, a flood, and the righteous Noah who is saved with his immediate family. The second half follows Abraham, who travels to Canaan at God's command, then his son Isaac and grandson Jacob. Jacob receives the name Israel, and through his son Joseph the family goes down to Egypt, 70 people with their households. Along the way, a series of covenants narrows from all humankind to Abraham and his descendants through Isaac and Jacob.

  Shemot, or Names, is the book called Exodus, from the Greek for exit. Here the Israelites leave slavery in Egypt under Moses, after the Plagues of Egypt strike their captors. At Mount Sinai they enter a covenant with Yahweh, receive laws, and are given instructions for building the Tabernacle. The biblical scholar Carol Meyers suggests it may be the most important book in the Bible. In her view it presents the defining features of Israel's identity, from a memory of hardship and escape to a binding covenant.

  Vayikra, meaning And He called, is Leviticus, named in Greek for matters relating to the Levites. Chapters 1-10 explain how the freshly built Tabernacle is to be used. Chapters 11-15 sort the clean from the unclean, including which animals may be eaten. Chapter 16 sets out the Day of Atonement, and chapters 17-26 gather moral and ritual rules often called the Holiness Code. Chapter 26 closes with a detailed list of rewards for obedience and punishments for disobedience.

  Bemidbar, In the desert, is Numbers, a title that comes from two censuses of the people. The Israelites march from Sinai, grumble about hardship and about the authority of Moses and Aaron, and God destroys approximately 15,000 of them. At the border of Canaan they send in spies. The spies' fearful report persuades the people to refuse the land, and God condemns that generation to die in the wilderness. The book ends on the plains of Moab, with a new generation waiting to cross the Jordan River.

  Devarim, Words, is Deuteronomy, from a Greek name meaning Second-Law. Chapters 1-30 are three speeches that Moses delivers on the plains of Moab. The first recounts forty years of wandering, the second urges loyalty to Yahweh, and the third promises that repentance can restore even a lost land. Within them sits Deuteronomy 6:4, the Shema Yisrael, which became the definitive statement of Jewish identity. Jesus quoted the verses that follow it in Mark 12:28-34 as part of the Great Commandment. The final four chapters hold the Song of Moses, the Blessing of Moses, the handover of leadership to Joshua, and the death of Moses on Mount Nebo.

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• 4. Who Wrote It

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  According to the Talmud, Moses wrote the Torah, apart from its last eight verses. Those verses describe his death and burial, and the Talmud credits Joshua with them. The Mishnah treats it as an essential tenet that God transmitted the text to Moses across the forty years in the desert. In this picture Moses acted like a scribe taking dictation. The Midrash goes further and says the Torah existed before the world and served as the blueprint for Creation.

  Jewish tradition adds a second figure. Ezra, it says, recompiled the Torah during the Second Temple period and changed its script to the so-called Assyrian one. The medieval commentator Maharsha held that Ezra altered no actual wording, pointing to the prohibition on additions and deletions in Deuteronomy 12:32. Orthodox tradition dates the giving of the Oral Torah at Sinai to 1312 BCE. All classical rabbinic views treat the text as wholly Mosaic and divine. Reform and Liberal movements reject Mosaic authorship, as do most shades of Conservative Judaism.

  Modern scholarship broadly agrees on the opposite point. It holds that the Torah had multiple authors and took shape over centuries. For most of the 20th century the dominant explanation was the documentary hypothesis. It proposed four independent sources, named J, E, P, and D, later joined by an editor. J, the Jahwist, would be the earliest, composed in the late 7th or the 6th century BCE, while P, the Priestly source, came around the 5th century BCE.

  That consensus collapsed in the last decades of the 20th century. Researchers found that the written sources themselves grew out of oral composition, which made the creators of J and E collectors and editors rather than authors. Rolf Rendtorff argued that the Pentateuch began as short, independent narratives that merged into larger units over two editorial phases, first Deuteronomic and then Priestly. John Van Seters proposed instead that new material was added piece by piece to an existing body of work. Joel S. Baden, among others, defends an updated documentary model, which still has adherents in Israel and North America.

  Some ground remains shared. Most scholars still treat Deuteronomy as a source, rooted in a law-code from the court of Josiah and later framed during the exile as the words of Moses. Since the 1990s, though, the biblical account of Josiah's reforms has itself been heavily debated. Most scholars also accept that some Priestly source existed, but nobody is sure where it stopped.

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• 5. The Persian Period

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  Between 539 and 332 BCE, and probably between 450 and 350 BCE, lies the window in which most scholars place the final Torah. This agrees with the old Jewish view that gave Ezra, leader of the community returning from Babylon, a pivotal role in presenting it.

  Peter Frei proposed in 1985 that Persian authorities required the Jews of Jerusalem to present a single body of law in return for local autonomy. According to Eskenazi, an interdisciplinary symposium in 2000 systematically dismantled that idea. The relationship between Persia and Jerusalem nonetheless remains a central question. Joel P. Weinberg offered a different theory, the Citizen-Temple Community. In it the Exodus story served a post-exilic community organised around the Temple, which acted in effect as a bank for its members.

  A minority would date the final form later, to the Hellenistic period of 332-164 BCE or even the Hasmonean period of 140-37 BCE. Russell Gmirkin points to the Elephantine papyri, records of a Jewish colony in Egypt from the last quarter of the 5th century BCE. They mention the festival of Passover but say nothing of a written Torah, the Exodus, or any other biblical event.

  A separate question asks when people began to live by the Torah. Julius Wellhausen, in his Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, pointed to 444 BCE. In the account in Nehemiah 8, the scribe Ezra reads the Mosaic Torah to the people gathered in a Jerusalem square. Wellhausen found it credible because it sounded plausible, writing that the credibility of the narrative appears on the face of it.

  Yonatan Adler has challenged that view, arguing that no surviving evidence shows the Torah was widely known, authoritative, and practised before the middle of the 2nd century BCE. He suggests such Judaism first emerged under the Hasmonean dynasty. John J. Collins answers with Hecataeus of Abdera, who reportedly described the written Mosaic law as authoritative at the start of the Hellenistic period. Adler replies that Hecataeus's original work is lost, so it is unclear what later authors truly took from him.

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• 6. The Oral Torah

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  Deuteronomy 6:8 commands that tefillin be placed on the arm and on the head between the eyes. The text never says what tefillin are or how to build them. Rabbinic tradition fills that gap with the Oral Torah, which it holds was passed to Moses alongside the written text during his 40 days and nights on Mount Sinai.

  Exodus 23:19 forbids boiling a young goat in its mother's milk. The Torah text carries no vowel marks, and the Hebrew consonants for milk are identical to those for animal fat. Without the oral tradition, nobody would know whether the ban concerns mixing meat with milk or with fat.

  The Sabbath offers a third example. Violating it carries the death penalty, yet the Torah gives little guidance on how to keep it. Most of the rules come from the Talmud and related works.

  According to classical rabbinic texts, writing this material down was originally forbidden, because any written version would be incomplete and open to abuse. Exile, dispersion, and persecution lifted the ban. Around 200 CE, Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi compiled the Mishnah. Traditions he left out survived as Baraitot, the Tosefta, and the Midrashim. Later generations expanded the few hundred pages of the Mishnah into the thousands of pages of the Gemara, written in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. The Mishnah and Gemara together form the Talmud. Rabbis in the Land of Israel compiled their own Jerusalem Talmud, but the Babylonian Talmud takes precedence in a conflict, since most rabbis lived in Babylon.

  The movements of Judaism weigh these texts differently. Orthodox and Conservative Judaism treat them as the basis of halakha, the binding body of Jewish law. Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism deny that they can fix binding law, but call them the authentic Jewish way of understanding the Torah. Humanistic Judaism treats the Torah as a historical, political, and sociological text and is willing to disagree with it.

  Kabbalists carry the reverence further. They hold that even the kotso shel yod, the tiny serif on the smallest Hebrew letter, was placed by God to teach lessons. Rabbi Akiva is said to have derived a new law from every et in the Torah, though that particle only marks a direct object.

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• 7. Scroll and Synagogue

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  A sofer, or scribe, writes a Sefer Torah by hand on gevil or klaf, both forms of parchment, using a quill dipped in ink. The work may take approximately one and a half years. Most modern scrolls have forty-two lines of text per column, while Yemenite Jews use fifty. Jewish tradition counts it as a mitzvah for every Jew to write a scroll or have one written. Finished scrolls rest in the Holy Ark, the aron hakodesh, in the holiest part of the synagogue. Translations and transcriptions are frowned upon for formal services.

  On Monday and Thursday mornings, a portion is read aloud at the shul, the synagogue. Reading also takes place on Saturdays, and some synagogues once required ten males above the age of thirteen. Today most movements accept ten adult Jews. Tradition credits Ezra with introducing regular public reading after the return from the Babylonian captivity, around 537 BCE. Orthodox Jews believe their procedure has stayed unchanged in the two thousand years since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE.

  On Shabbat mornings, a weekly section called a parashah is read, arranged so the whole Pentateuch is finished in a year. The division found in Torah scrolls of Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Yemenite communities follows a list by Maimonides, who based it on the Aleppo Codex. Some Conservative and Reform synagogues read on a triennial cycle instead. These movements have also adapted the practice with greater inclusion of women and the use of local languages.

  The scroll itself is dressed with a sash, a special cover, ornaments, and often a keter, or crown. Congregants traditionally stand as it leaves the ark, travels through the room, and returns. They may sit during the reading. The annual holiday of Simchat Torah celebrates the end of the year's cycle and its immediate restart.

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• 8. Beyond The Hebrew

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  The Book of Ezra refers to translations and commentaries into Aramaic, dated to the 6th century BCE. A special synagogue official called the meturgeman translated aloud as the text was read. A written Targum, officially recognised, belongs to the post-Talmudic period, not earlier than the fifth century CE.

  The Septuagint, a Koine Greek version for Greek speakers, dates from the 3rd century BCE and is associated with Hellenistic Judaism. Later Greek versions by Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion survive only as fragments. The early Latin Vetus Latina made ad hoc conversions of parts of the Septuagint, and in the 4th century CE Saint Jerome produced the Vulgate. From the eighth century CE, Jews living under Islamic rule spoke Arabic rather than Aramaic, and by the 10th century they needed a standard Judeo-Arabic Bible. The best known came from Saadia Gaon, and Yemenite Jewry still uses it today. Samson Raphael Hirsch produced a well-known German version, and Artscroll publishes English ones. As part of the Christian canons, the Torah has been translated into hundreds of languages.

  Around 600 BCE the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet gave rise to the Samaritan script. The Samaritans wrote their own Pentateuch in it, and it differs from the Jewish Masoretic Text in some 6,000 places. Most differences are minor spelling and grammar variations. A few change meaning, such as the uniquely Samaritan commandment to build an altar on Mount Gerizim. Nearly 2,000 variations agree with the Greek Septuagint.

  Christian denominations hold slightly different Old Testaments, but all include the Five Books of Moses. The editors of the Jerusalem Bible of 1966 suggest reading Leviticus alongside the closing chapters of Ezekiel and Deuteronomy alongside the Book of Jeremiah.

  In Islam the Torah is the Tawrah, an Arabic name for a book sent by God to prophets among the Children of Israel. The Quran says: "It is He Who has sent down the Book (the Quran) to you with truth, confirming what came before it. And He sent down the Taurat (Torah) and the Injeel (Gospel)." Muslims believe scribes corrupted the original revelation over time, yet the Quran always mentions the Torah with respect. Belief in the Torah and in the prophethood of Moses is a fundamental tenet. Commentators such as Abu al-Hakam Abd al-Salam bin al-Isbili of Al-Andalus and Ibrahim bin Umar bin Hasan al-Biqa'i read the Quran alongside the Torah, a method called tafsir al-Quran bil-Kitab.

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