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. 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").

It should be noted that the terms Torah, Chumash, Pentateuch and "five books of Moses" all refer to exectly the same thing, namely these five books.

Orthodox Jews also use the word Torah to refer to all authoritative 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.

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.