What Is the Torah?

The Torah contains the books known in English as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. It runs from the creation of the world through the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the escape from Egypt, and the wandering in the wilderness.

It also contains a great deal of law and instruction, covering worship, festivals, food, farming, justice and the treatment of strangers. That mixture of story and instruction is why teaching fits the word better than law alone.

In a synagogue the Torah is kept as a handwritten scroll, produced by a trained scribe on parchment using traditional methods. Producing one takes about a year, and a single error can require correction or the sheet to be replaced.

The scroll is treated with great care. It is kept in an ark, dressed in a cover, and read using a pointer rather than a finger. These practices are about respect for the text as an object as well as for its content.

The Torah is read publicly on a set cycle, so that the whole text is completed and immediately begun again each year. That cycle shapes the Jewish calendar in several ways:

• •A weekly portion is read and studied in communities worldwide
• •The annual completion is celebrated at the festival of Simchat Torah
• •Study of the weekly portion is a common shared activity
• •Readings are chanted using a traditional system of markings

Jewish tradition speaks of a written Torah and an oral Torah. The oral tradition, later written down in the Mishnah and Talmud, records generations of discussion about how the written text should be understood and applied.

This matters for understanding Judaism. The Torah is not usually read in isolation but through centuries of argument and commentary, and disagreement between rabbis is preserved rather than tidied away.

A kosher Torah scroll must be handwritten by a trained scribe, called a sofer, on parchment from a ritually acceptable animal, using a quill and specially prepared ink. It contains just over three hundred thousand letters.

The standards are exacting. Letters must be formed correctly and must not touch each other, and the scribe traditionally states an intention before writing the divine name. A single incorrect letter can render a scroll unfit for public reading until it is corrected. A completed scroll takes around a year and is correspondingly valuable, which is why synagogues treat theirs with such care.

In Hebrew, each of the five books is named after an early word in its opening verse rather than its subject. Genesis is Bereshit, meaning in the beginning, and Exodus is Shemot, meaning names. The English titles come through Greek, and Christians often call the five books together the Pentateuch, from a Greek phrase for five scrolls. Jewish tradition also counts 613 commandments in the Torah, 248 positive and 365 negative, a number discussed in the Talmud. Medieval scholars, including Maimonides, compiled detailed lists, although they did not always agree on which verses counted.

Reading from the scroll is also part of a well known moment in a young person's life. At a bar mitzvah, traditionally at thirteen for a boy, the young person is called up to read or chant a section of the Torah in the synagogue, often followed by a related passage from the prophets. In many communities girls mark a bat mitzvah at twelve or thirteen, and the ceremony varies between traditions. Preparing usually means months of learning the Hebrew text and its chanting marks, which gives the young reader a personal link to the yearly cycle.

The Torah is the first of three parts of the Hebrew Bible. Jewish tradition calls the whole collection the Tanakh, a name formed from the first letters of its sections: Torah, Nevi'im, meaning prophets, and Ketuvim, meaning writings. The Christian Old Testament contains the same Hebrew books but arranges them in a different order, and Catholic and Orthodox Bibles add further books. The word Torah can also be used more broadly to mean the whole body of Jewish teaching, not just the five books.

Some Torah passages are carried into everyday life quite literally. Deuteronomy contains the Shema, which begins with a declaration that God is one and is recited in daily prayers. The same passage instructs that these words be written on the doorposts of the house. Many Jewish homes therefore have a mezuzah, a small case fixed to the doorframe holding a handwritten parchment with verses including the Shema. People often touch it when passing through. Tefillin, small leather boxes worn during weekday morning prayers, contain related passages.

A Torah scroll contains only consonants. It has no vowel signs, no punctuation and none of the marks used for chanting, so the reader must already know how each word is pronounced and sung. Those signs were developed later by scholars known as the Masoretes, who worked mainly in Tiberias, in the land of Israel, during the early Middle Ages. They also added notes counting letters and words to protect the text from copying errors. Readers therefore prepare from a printed book called a tikkun, which sets the plain scroll text beside a version with vowels and chanting marks.

Old manuscripts let scholars test how carefully the text was handed down. The oldest complete Hebrew Bible, the Leningrad Codex, was copied in the early eleventh century and follows the Masoretic system. Then, from 1947, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in caves near Qumran produced fragments of the Torah books more than a thousand years older. Many match the later text very closely, while others show variant readings, which proves that several versions circulated in the centuries before the text became standardised. Comparing them helps scholars understand how a fixed sacred text emerged over time.

Traditional Jewish teaching holds that the Torah was given by God to Moses, who wrote it down. The Talmud even discusses the final verses of Deuteronomy, which describe Moses's own death. One opinion there says Joshua wrote those lines, while another says Moses wrote them in advance, in tears. Medieval commentators remained alert to such puzzles. The twelfth century scholar Abraham ibn Ezra hinted, in deliberately guarded language, that a few verses seemed to come from a later period. Orthodox Judaism today maintains that the whole Torah is of divine origin.

From the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, critical scholars noticed features such as stories told twice with different details, changes of style, and different names for God in different passages. The German scholar Julius Wellhausen gave the best known explanation in the late nineteenth century, the documentary hypothesis, which proposed four main sources, often labelled J, E, D and P, combined by editors over several centuries. Many scholars now question parts of that model, arguing over how many sources there were and when they were written. Different Jewish movements relate to this research in different ways, from rejecting it to studying it alongside traditional commentary.

The Torah is the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, kept as a handwritten scroll and read on a yearly cycle, and it functions as both a foundational story and a body of teaching at the centre of Jewish life.