Torah

The Torah is the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, known in Hebrew by their opening words, Bereshit, Shemot, Vayikra, Bemidbar, Devarim, and in Greek and English as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Christians call the same five the Pentateuch. The narrative arc is single and deliberate: creation, the flood, the ancestors of Israel, slavery in Egypt, deliverance, the covenant at Sinai, forty years in the wilderness, and the death of Moses on Mount Nebo with the land in view but unentered.

Roughly half the material is not narrative at all but law. Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy carry legal codes covering sacrifice, purity, festivals, agriculture, debt, sexual relations, homicide, land tenure and the treatment of resident foreigners. Leviticus is almost entirely priestly instruction; Deuteronomy is cast as a farewell address by Moses and restates much of the earlier law in a different voice and with different emphases, a doubling that is itself one of the reasons scholars read the collection as layered.

Rabbinic tradition fixes the number of commandments in the Torah at 613, a figure attributed to Rabbi Simlai in the Talmud tractate Makkot and divided into 248 positive obligations and 365 prohibitions. The number is traditional rather than obvious from the text, and medieval authorities who tried to itemise it, Maimonides in his Sefer ha-Mitzvot most influentially, and Nachmanides arguing against him, produced lists that do not fully agree. The mitzvot are the raw material of Jewish law, but the law as practised is the rabbinic elaboration of them, not the bare verses.

Jewish tradition holds that the Torah was given to Moses at Sinai, written down by him, and transmitted intact, a position the Mishnah states at the opening of Pirkei Avot and Maimonides made the eighth of his thirteen principles of faith. Christian tradition inherited the same attribution. Orthodox Judaism continues to hold Mosaic authorship as doctrine, and it remains the working assumption of most traditional commentary.

From the eighteenth century onward, readers noticed features that are hard to reconcile with a single author: two creation accounts, two interleaved flood narratives with different animal counts and durations, alternating divine names, repeated stories with changed details, and an account of Moses's own death and burial. The classical answer was the documentary hypothesis, given its best-known form by Julius Wellhausen in 1878, which separated four continuous sources, J (using the divine name Yahweh), E (using Elohim), D (Deuteronomy) and P (the priestly material), and dated them across the monarchy and exile.

That four-source model is no longer the consensus it was for most of the twentieth century. Since the 1970s, work by Rolf Rendtorff, Erhard Blum, John Van Seters and others has argued that J and E in particular do not hold up as continuous documents, and supplementary models (a core text expanded by successive editors) and fragmentary models (independent blocks joined late) now compete with it, especially in European scholarship. A neo-documentarian school, strong in North America and Israel, defends a revised source division. What almost all critical scholars share is the conclusion that the Torah is composite and that the priestly material is distinguishable; where it came from and when is genuinely unsettled.

A Sefer Torah is not a book. It is a scroll of parchment sheets sewn with sinew and wound on two wooden rollers, written entirely by hand by a trained scribe, a sofer, using a quill and iron-gall ink on skin from a ritually clean animal. The rules governing it are unusually exacting: the columns are ruled in advance, the letter forms and the decorative crowns called tagin are prescribed, nothing may be written from memory, and the divine name once written cannot be erased. The text carries no vowel signs, no punctuation and no chapter numbers, those are all later aids that appear in printed Bibles but never in the scroll.

The consonantal text is conventionally counted at 304,805 letters. A single missing, extra or malformed letter renders the scroll pasul, unfit for public reading, until a scribe repairs it; a scroll beyond repair is buried rather than destroyed. Writing one takes most scribes about a year. In synagogue it is read from a raised platform, tracked with a pointer called a yad so that the parchment is not touched by hand, and chanted rather than spoken.

Reading follows a cycle. The Babylonian communities divided the text into 54 weekly portions, parashiyot, completing it in a year; the communities of the Land of Israel used a triennial cycle with the text cut into far smaller units and finished over roughly three years. The annual cycle won out and is now near-universal, though many non-Orthodox congregations have revived a modified triennial reading. The year ends and restarts in a single service on Simchat Torah, when the last verses of Deuteronomy and the opening of Genesis are read one after the other and the scrolls are carried in circuits around the synagogue.