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.

That double sense is itself a doctrine. Rabbinic Judaism holds that two Torahs were given at Sinai — the written text, and an oral teaching handed down alongside it and eventually set down in the Mishnah and Talmud — so that the scroll is read through a tradition of interpretation that is held to be as old as the scroll. Scholarship reads the text differently: since the nineteenth century most critical study has treated the Pentateuch as a composite, woven from several sources over centuries and reaching something near its final shape in the period after the Babylonian exile. The two accounts are not easily reconciled, and the site does not adjudicate between them.

As an object the Torah is handled with a care that is part of its meaning. The scroll used in worship is copied by hand on parchment, by a trained scribe, according to rules that govern every letter; a single error can render it unfit. It is read aloud in the synagogue on a cycle that carries a congregation through the whole text across the year, and it is dressed, crowned, and processed as a thing set apart.

In Kabbalah the text becomes something further. The mystical tradition taught that the Torah is not only an account of creation but its instrument and its substance — that the divine names and the letters themselves carry the structure of the world, and that beneath the plain sense lie further readings, allegorical and hidden, opening downward without end. The Zohar, the central work of medieval Kabbalah, reads the narrative as a veil over the inner life of God; the Sepher Yetzirah treats the Hebrew letters as the elements from which creation was assembled. This is a tradition-internal reading, held within particular schools, not a claim the wider Jewish world makes uniformly. What the different readings share is a conviction that the text does not exhaust itself on a first pass — that something in it keeps giving way to a further sense.

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

→ Related: Old Testament · Deuteronomy · Ten Commandments · Jewish Mysticism · Apocrypha