What Is the Torah?

Israel’s Founding Narrative and Laws

The Torah (from the Hebrew word for “teaching”), also called the Pentateuch or the Five Books of Moses, was the first part of the Bible to be canonized and is considered the most sacred in Jewish tradition. It is traditionally divided into five books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. According to a widely held scholarly view, the Torah was formed primarily by the interweaving of four originally separate, overlapping, and somewhat inconsistent sources, each of which recounted Israel’s early history and laws. Despite the traditional attribution of the Torah to Moses, the Torah itself does not claim to be written by Moses; it refers to him in the third person and closes with an account of his death.

The first four books of the Torah, sometimes called the Tetrateuch, tell a continuous narrative, beginning with the creation of the world and the early history of humanity and proceeding to the origins of the people of Israel, starting with Abraham, to whom God promises the land of Canaan and the progeny that will ultimately become the Israelite nation. Abraham and his descendants travel in and out of Canaan, finally settling in Egypt to escape a famine. A generation later, they are enslaved by Egypt’s king, but they are ultimately rescued by God through Moses, who leads them out of Egypt and through the wilderness to the land of Canaan. The fifth book of the Torah, Deuteronomy, consists of a farewell address by Moses before his death, delivered when the Israelites are poised to cross the Jordan River into Canaan.

This narrative, however, is only one component of the Torah. The majority of the Torah consists of laws, most of which are, within the Torah’s narrative framework, delivered by God to Moses and from Moses to the Israelites at Mount Sinai, three months after the Exodus from Egypt. An additional set of laws, the laws of Deuteronomy, are embedded in Moses’ farewell address. There are also individual laws that appear within narratives that recount the occasion that gave rise to them, such as the laws about circumcision in Genesis 17, the calendar year and Passover in Exodus 12, and the Sabbath in Exodus 16. In the Bible’s law collections, religious laws and moral exhortations are commingled with civil and criminal laws, based on the belief that all binding norms come from God.