ICJudaism: A Teacher’s Guide to Judaism
Hosted by ICTeachers Formerly: Mike’s Rough Guide to Judaism
Disclaimer:
The contents of these pages represent the author’s personal views, experience and
understanding.
There are bound to be some things here that some Jews would disagree
with.
Torah
Judaism’s sacred writings are often referred to as the Hebrew Bible. Originally composed
in Hebrew it is a collection of 24 separate books. The Hebrew Bible is the original
text that was translated to form the Old Testament of the Christian Bible -
The Old Testament splits each of the Torah’s books of Samuel, Chronicles and Kings
into parts 1 and 2, and the Book of Twelve is divided up to produce the separate
12 books of The Minor Prophets (Hosea -
Jews do not consider the New Testament to be part of their holy writings so for us the term Old Testament has no meaning.
The books of the Hebrew Bible are grouped into 3 sections called Torah, Nevi’im and Ketuvim. Together the 3 sections are often referred to by the mnemonic, TeNaCH (usually written Tenakh).
Torah: Torah consists of The Five Books of Moses (sometimes known as The Pentateuch). The word means Teachings or Directions and it is this which is written in the scrolls that are read from in synagogue.
Torah is the key part of the Hebrew Bible because it contains both the foundational history of our people (From The Creation to the end of the life of Moses) and, even more importantly, Torah contains all the hundreds of mitzvot (the commandments given by God). A bound book containing the text of the Torah is called a Chumash (Hebrew for Five). A Chumash will usually also contain a translation of the text together together with commentaries on it’s meaning.
Nevi’im: Prophets or Spokesmen (eg Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jonah). A Chumash will also
contain the weekly readings of sections from Nevi’im (Prophets). These reading, known
as Haftarah (= taking leave) readings are chosen to compliment the week’s Torah reading
-
Ketuvim: (meaning simply Writings). The third part of the Hebrew Bible is a collection of other books such as histories (eg Kings 1&2, Judges, Maccabees 1&2), poetry (Song of Solomon, Psalms) and wisdom (eg Ecclesiastes).
Although, strictly speaking, Torah is just the 5 Books of Moses, the term is sometimes used to refer to the whole of the written law or even to the whole of the written and oral law (see below).
The five books of Torah are each named, in Hebrew, by their first significant words:
- Bereshit meaning Beginning (= Genesis)
- Shemot meaning Names (= Exodus)
- Vayikrah meaning And He called (= Leviticus)
- Bemidbar meaning In the Wilderness (= Numbers)
- Devarim meaning Words (= Deuteronomy)
The Oral Law
Traditional Judaism holds that at the same time that God gave Moses the Torah, He also gave him a great body of expansions and explanations which he was to pass on orally. This was eventually written down during the 2nd Century CE, and is known as the Mishnah. Over the following few centuries a huge collection of rabbinic commentary and interpretation, known as the Gemarah was added to the Mishnah.The Mishnah and Gemarah together are known as the Talmud.
Rabbinic interpretation continues to this day. The broader collection of Jewish Law, derived from Torah, Talmud and later rabbinic interpretation is known as Halacha (= The way to go). Note that Jewish observance is essentially based on Halacha rather than directly on the text of Torah.
