Torah

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The Torah is the first division of the Hebrew Bible: the five books of Moses — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy — known together in Greek as the Pentateuch. The Hebrew word means teaching or instruction more nearly than law, though it is regularly translated that way; it carries both the narrative of the world’s beginning and Israel’s origins and the body of commandment that Judaism takes as binding. In a wider use the same word can mean the whole of revealed teaching, written and oral together — and in the widest use of all, the use that the mystical tradition presses to its limit, it names the blueprint by which the world itself was made.

These five books are one continuous arc with two registers braided through it. The first is story: the creation of the cosmos and of humankind, the flood, the call of Abraham out of Mesopotamia, the descent of his descendants into Egypt, the exodus under Moses, and the forty years in the wilderness that end with the people poised on the far bank of the Jordan and Moses dead on the mountain, never having crossed. The second is law: the commandments given at Sinai, the Ten Commandments cut into stone, the elaborate legislation of sacrifice, purity, festival, and justice that fills the central books. The narrative and the legislation are not kept apart. The law arrives as an event — given to a named people at a named place in the middle of a story — so that obligation is grounded not in abstraction but in a covenant struck once in history and renewed in every reading.

Two Torahs

That the word Torah should mean more than the scroll is itself a doctrine of the first importance. Rabbinic Judaism holds that two Torahs were given at Sinai: the written text, and an oral teaching handed down alongside it, transmitted from Moses to Joshua to the elders to the prophets to the men of the Great Assembly, and finally — under the pressure of dispersion and the fear that it would be lost — set down in writing. The oral Torah crystallized first in the Mishnah, the topically ordered code of law compiled under Judah ha-Nasi around 200 CE, and then in the vast commentary built around it, the Gemara, which together with the Mishnah forms the Talmud in its Babylonian and Palestinian recensions. The claim is radical: the scroll is unreadable without the tradition, because the written text deliberately withholds the detail of its own application. The written Torah commands rest on the seventh day but does not define labor; it commands the binding of words upon the hand but does not say how; it speaks of a fruit of a goodly tree at the autumn festival without naming it. The oral Torah supplies what the written Torah encodes only by gesture, and on this view the two are not text and gloss but a single revelation issued in two forms, the second as ancient and as binding as the first.

The whole edifice of Jewish religious law — halakha, literally the way of walking — descends from this twofold structure: a written core, an oral amplification, and the long subsequent labor of jurists who read the one through the other across two millennia. To live inside the tradition is to live inside an argument about the Torah that never closes, because the text was given precisely so as to be unfolded.

The scroll and the year

As an object the Torah is handled with a care that is part of its meaning. The scroll used in worship is written by hand on parchment by a trained scribe, a sofer, according to rules that govern every letter — the form of the characters, the spacing of the columns, the words that must be crowned with calligraphic flourishes, the passages that must begin a new line. A complete scroll runs to 304,805 letters, and a single error in any of them can render the whole unfit until it is corrected; a scroll worn past repair is not discarded but buried, as a body is buried. The scribe does not work from memory but from a tikkun, a model text, and the labor of producing one scroll occupies the better part of a year.

The scroll is not read silently but chanted aloud in the synagogue, to a fixed system of cantillation, on a cycle that carries the congregation through the entire Pentateuch and begins again without pause. The dominant cycle, inherited from the Babylonian communities, completes the reading in a single year, divided into weekly portions — each a parashah — so that the death of Moses at the very end of Deuteronomy and the creation of the world at the opening of Genesis are read on the same day, the festival of Simchat Torah, the rejoicing of the Torah, when the scrolls are carried in seven circuits around the synagogue. An older practice, kept in the Land of Israel, spread the reading across three or three and a half years. Around the public reading the scroll is dressed in embroidered mantles, crowned with silver, pointed to with a hand-shaped pointer so that the parchment is never touched, processed, kissed, and raised aloft for the assembly to see — treated, in short, less as a book than as a presence.

The Torah within the canon

Within the Jewish ordering of scripture, the Tanakh, the Torah is the first and most authoritative of three divisions, standing before the Prophets (Nevi’im) and the Writings (Ketuvim); its primacy is liturgical as well as theological, since only the Torah is read in its entirety in the synagogue across the year, while the Prophets supply the supplementary weekly reading and the Writings furnish the scrolls read on particular festivals. When the church took over the Hebrew scriptures as the Old Testament, it kept the five books but reordered the canon around them and read them as the first movement of a story it understood to continue; the same five books thus sit at the head of two scriptures that diverge over almost everything that follows. The books outside the agreed canon — the Apocrypha and the wider pseudepigrapha — orbit the Torah without entering it.

Who wrote the Torah

On the question of the text’s origin two accounts stand opposed, and the tradition’s own answer is the older. From within Judaism the attribution is to Moses: the five books are the Torah of Moses, dictated to him or written by his hand at God’s command, and this ascription is assumed across the long centuries of Jewish and Christian reading, woven into liturgy and law alike. Critical scholarship reads the text otherwise. From the seventeenth century onward readers began to register seams in the surface — duplicated stories, shifts in the name used for God, contradictions of detail, anachronisms that look past Moses to a much later world. Out of those observations grew, by the late nineteenth century, the documentary hypothesis, given its commanding form in Julius Wellhausen’s Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (1883), which built on the earlier work of Wilhelm de Wette and Karl Heinrich Graf. The hypothesis treats the Pentateuch as a composite woven from four originally separate strands — conventionally the Yahwist (J), the Elohist (E), the Deuteronomist (D), and the Priestly source (P), distinguished by vocabulary, divine name, theological concern, and political assumption — combined by editors over centuries, with the work reaching something near its final shape only in the Persian period after the Babylonian exile. De Wette’s identification of Deuteronomy with the law-book found in the Temple during Josiah’s reform of 622 BCE remains the single firmest anchor in the scheme.

The classical four-source model has since loosened. Scholars such as Rolf Rendtorff and John Van Seters challenged the neat partition, proposing supplementary and fragmentary alternatives in which the text grew by accretion rather than by the splicing of complete documents; others, notably Richard Elliott Friedman in Who Wrote the Bible? (1987), have defended a revised documentary approach. The two large accounts — Mosaic revelation and editorial composition — are not easily reconciled, and the choice between them is finally a choice about what kind of thing the Torah is. What both agree on, in their different keys, is that the text is not flat: that it carries strata, voices, seams that reward the reader who attends to them. The mystical tradition would say the same thing and mean something else entirely by it.

The allegorical Torah: Philo

Long before the Kabbalists, the conviction that the Torah hides a second meaning beneath its first had been worked into a complete philosophical system. In first-century Alexandria, Philo read the Pentateuch as a sustained allegory — the patriarchs as living embodiments of the virtues, the migration of Abraham as the soul’s ascent from the body and the senses toward the contemplation of God, the literal narrative as a husk around a philosophical kernel cast in the vocabulary of Middle Platonism. Philo did not deny the plain sense or the binding force of the commandments; he held the literal and the allegorical together, the law observed in the body and read in the mind. His running commentary on Genesis is the largest surviving monument of Hellenistic-Jewish exegesis, and through his deep influence on the Alexandrian church fathers his method of reading scripture on multiple levels passed into the Christian tradition and, in altered form, into the wider stream of Western allegory. The Torah, on this reading, is a text whose surface is true and whose depth is truer.

The Kabbalistic Torah

In Kabbalah the text becomes something further still — not a record of creation but its instrument and its very substance. The mystical tradition taught that the Torah preceded the world, that God consulted it as an architect consults a plan, and that the letters and the divine names woven through it carry the structure of reality itself. The Sepher Yetzirah, the “Book of Formation,” the earliest extant Kabbalistic text, treats the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the ten primordial numbers as the elements out of which creation was assembled, combined and permuted into everything that is. By the high medieval period this intuition had hardened into a doctrine of the text as a body of names. Nahmanides, the great thirteenth-century exegete and Kabbalist of the Catalan school, taught in the introduction to his Torah commentary that the entire scroll may be read as one continuous concatenation of the names of God — that beneath its division into words lies a single, unbroken Name. On this reading the surface story is a veil, and what pulses beneath it is the inner life of God itself.

The Zohar, the central work of the Kabbalah that emerged in late-thirteenth-century Castile — written largely by Moses de Leon, though presented as the teaching of the second-century sage Shimon bar Yochai — makes this the explicit theme of its reading. The Zohar likens the Torah to a beautiful woman concealed in a palace who shows herself, by degrees, only to her true lover: the plain sense is her garment, and the one who mistakes the garment for the body has seen nothing. From this image comes the fourfold scheme of interpretation summed up in the acronym PaRDeS — itself the Hebrew word for orchard, and a pun on the pardes into which four sages entered in the famous Talmudic warning (Hagigah 14b), only one of whom emerged whole. The four are peshat, the plain sense; remez, the allegorical hint; derash, the homiletical and comparative searching; and sod, the secret, the mystical reading reserved for the prepared. The term in this fourfold sense was first put into circulation by Moses de Leon himself. The doctrine that the text opens downward without end — that no reading exhausts it, that beneath every sense lies a further sense — is the engine of the entire mystical hermeneutic, and it is closely allied to the techniques of gematria, the reading of the numerical values of the letters as a hidden layer of meaning. This way of reading runs back through the pre-Zoharic mystics (the early Jewish esoteric tradition) and forward into the theosophical Kabbalah of the Zohar, and it is the strand of the Torah’s reception that bears most directly on the Hermetic and esoteric currents this archive traces.

It should be said plainly that this is a tradition-internal reading, cultivated within particular schools and never the uniform claim of the Jewish world; the rationalist counter-tradition, given its most powerful expression in Maimonides, naturalized the Torah’s secrets into philosophy rather than into a mythology of divine names, identifying the forbidden esoteric subjects of the Mishnah with Aristotelian physics and metaphysics, and the friction between the philosophers and the Kabbalists over the true inner sense of the Torah is one of the defining tensions of medieval Jewish thought. What the readings share, across all their disagreement, is a single conviction: that the text does not exhaust itself on a first pass, that something in it keeps giving way to a further sense.

Scholarship and texts

The modern critical study of the Pentateuch begins with Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Berlin, 1883; English translation 1885), which fixed the source-critical paradigm for a century; the synthesis is laid out for general readers in Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (New York: Summit Books, 1987). The standard account of the way scripture reinterprets itself from within — the seedbed of all later exegesis — is Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). Wikipedia’s survey of the documentary hypothesis gives an accessible map of the four sources and the later supplementary and fragmentary models of Rendtorff and Van Seters.

For the allegorical Torah, the complete pre-critical English Philo is Charles Duke Yonge’s The Works of Philo Judaeus (London: Bohn, 1854–55), public domain and freely available, with the modern critical text and translation in the Loeb Classical Library edition of Colson, Whitaker, and Marcus; Erwin Goodenough’s By Light, Light (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935) remains the classic study of Philo’s contemplative reading. For the mystical Torah, the foundational modern scholarship is Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1941) and especially his essay “The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism,” collected in On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York: Schocken, 1965), which traces the doctrine of the Torah as the name of God; Moshe Idel’s Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) reframes the field. The primary texts central to this reading are available in the site Library: the Sepher Yetzirah in W. Wynn Westcott’s 1911 translation and in Isidor Kalisch’s philologically conservative 1877 bilingual edition, and the Zohar in the partial English of 1914. The structure of PaRDeS and the wider history of Jewish exegesis are surveyed in the standard reference treatment of the fourfold reading.

→ In the library: The Zohar (partial English, 1914) · Sepher Yetzirah (Westcott, 1911) · Sepher Yezirah (Kalisch, 1877)

→ Related: Old Testament · Pentateuch · Tanakh · Deuteronomy · Leviticus · Ten Commandments · Mishnah · Talmud · Jewish Mysticism · Jewish Mysticism Pre Zoharic · Jewish Mysticism Zohar · Kabbalah · Moses De Leon · Hebrew Gematria Kabbalah · Philo Of Alexandria · Abraham · Apocrypha