Torah

In Judaism, the Torah in its strictest sense is the collection of five books said to have been given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai. The five books are the same as the first five books of the Christian Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, called the Pentateuch in Christian belief. Both Jews and gentiles often refer to the Torah as the Pentateuch (Greek: "five books") or Chumash (a Hebrew word, meaning "a collection of five").

The terms Torah, Chumash, Pentateuch and "five books of Moses" all refer to the same thing: these five books.

Jews also use the word Torah, in a wider sense, to refer to all authoritative Jewish religious teachings. This includes Tanach, the Mishna, the two Talmuds, the accepted midrashic literature, and the works of all Rabbis who are accepted as such by Orthodox Judaism.

The Samaritans have their own version of the Torah, which contains many variant readings. Many of these agree with the Septuagint against the Massoretic Text, leading many scholars to believe that parts of the Samaritan text may have once been common in ancient Palestine, but rejected by the Massoretes.

Traditional view of inspiration

The traditional Jewish perspective has been that the entire Torah was verbally dictated by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. However, this dictation included not only the "quotes" which appear in the text, but ever word of the text itself, including phrases such as "And God spoke to Moses..."

The rabbis held that not only are the words giving a Divine message, but the words were also indicators of a far greater message that extends beyond them. They held that even as small a mark as a kotzo shel yod, the serif of the Hebrew letter yod (which happens to be the smallest letter), was put there by God to teach scores of lessons. This is regardless of whether that yod appears in the phrase "I am the Lord thy God," or whether it appears in that oft repeated "And God spoke unto Moses saying."

In a similar vein, Rabbi Akiva, who died in 135 A.D., is said to have learned a new law from every 'et in the Torah--the word et is meaningless and is used to mark the direct accusative subject of a sentence. In other words, the Orthodox view is that "And God spoke unto Moses saying..." is no less important than the actual statement.

One kabbalistic interpretation is that the Torah constitutes one long name of God, and that it was broken up into words so that human minds can understand it. While this is effective since it accords with our human reason, it is not the only way that the text can be broken up. For Orthodox Jews, the Torah is that rush of letters and sounds that can mean so many different things.

Organization

An interesting feature of Torah is the fact that it does not contain a complete and ordered system of legislature, but rather, a general philosophical basis, and a great number of particular laws, which are often reminiscent of the existing customs in the Ancient East, but have important conceptual varations from them. This means that in the legislative sense, the written Torah was intended as a complement to an existing oral legal tradition.

After the destruction of Jerusalem as the center of Jewish cultural life and the beginning of the Jewish diaspora, it was decided to write down this oral tradition in the form of the Mishnah and the Talmud. Therefore, most Jews follow the traditional explication of these laws that can be found in this later literature. Karaites, who reject the oral law, and adhere solely to the laws of the Torah, are a major exception.

According to Jewish and Christian tradition, these books were dictated by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, and constitute a word-for-word transcription of God's words. Modern day scholars point out that the text of the Torah appears to be redacted together from a number of earlier sources; this is known as the Documentary hypothesis or JEDP theory.