Torah - SpeedyLook encyclopedia

The Torah, heart of the Judaism

The Torah was, according to the tradition, dictation with Moïse by God with the foot of the mount the Sinai.
For the Jews, it was traditionally accepted like such: the literal Word of God to the entire Jewish people with the Sinai.
Pour mount much, it acts neither exactly of Histoire, neither of Théologie, nor of code, legal or ritual, but of an unclassable document having of the features of each one. It is in any case the primary guide of the relation between God and the man, significance of such a relation, and its goal, an alive document that each one, with each generation, must, according to Talmud, to turn and turn over because all is in it.

The Torah thus indicates strictly speaking the first section of the Tanakh - the first five books of the Hebraic Bible - but the term is also employed to indicate so much the Written Law (SheBeKtav Torah) that the oral Loi (Torah SHeBe' Al EP), which contains the whole of the religious Jewish lesson through the history, including the Mishnah, the Talmud, the Midrash, and others.

The teaching of the Torah

The étymon of the word “Torah” is the same one as that of Morèh , מורה, “the teacher”: Lirot , לירות, “to draw”, within the meaning of “aiming at an objective”.

Which are the lesson of the Torah?

the world was created in seven days (from including one of abstention) by an Entity, that it initially reveals us by His attribute of The Almighty , or according to the translation of the Rav Askénazi, of He them gods , before giving us His Name, a unutterable Tétragramme, and indicating that He judged His creation like very good .
the Adam, which indicates originally the couple before being restricted with the man, is installed in the Gan Eden (the Garden of the Delights) but is driven out by it to have violated only the instruction not to touch with the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of the good and the evil. Thereafter, humanity déchoit so much so that God decides to erase terrestrial creation by absorbing it under water of the seas and the skies.
the descendants of Noah, only survivor with his, are mislaid in their turn, except one of them, Abraham, which redécouvre God and, alive in agreement with that, will be a model of charity. God establishes a Alliance with him, whose circumcision will be the trace in the descent, which will be numerous like stars. His/her son Isaac will be a model of rigor, the son of this one, Jacob, a model of mercy. In spite of their human weaknesses and failures, they manage to be sublimated and live in the virtue, like their descendants, which carries out one of them, Joseph, of the statute of slave to that of Minister for the Pharaon.
the population is liked in Egypt, until a Pharaon decides to take again the things in hand. Then appearing with a shepherd who lived like a prince in Egypt and will be the Master of the children of Israel, God causes new miracles in the history of humanity, and releases His people of election, in order to give him the ground of Canaan, Promised land , but too the heritage of the nations .

Regulations

They will enjoy it however only by serving It, by complying with Its regulations, without what, they will be driven out by it as Adam was driven out Garden of Eden.

One can (artificially) subdivide the service in:

regulations towards Elohim , creative God: To recognize and proclaim It, which results in refusing the polytheism and the idolatry, to respect a day of weekly rest, to sanctify its food by eating only “pure” animal, to sanctify its marital reports/ratios by refusing prohibited unions (e.g. the inceste) or “against nature” (homosexuality, zoophilie, etc), to reserve to Him the first steps of its harvest, its fruits, its wine, etc
regulations towards YHWH , providential God and parking free will: respect and love of its next, and abroad, rigorously moral and ethical behavior, refusal of excesses (excess “by excess” like excess “by defect”), refusal of personal enrichment if it impoverishes the other, or do not take part in collective enrichment, etc
Cependant, this subdivision is completely artificial, YHWH EAST Elohim , It Is YHWH Elohim, and it is not a chance if the sentence I Am YHWH your Elohim punctuate the “éthico-social” regulations as well as the “ritual and sacerdotal” regulations. It is also the sentence to be proclaimed biquotidiennement is Listening Israel, YHWH is (our) God, YHWH is a is in Hebrew Chema, Israel, Adonaï Elohenou, Ehad Teenager-naï : all the remainder results from this, for which thinks of these words, including You will like your next like yourself : your next, it is the man, but it is also, constantly and in any place, omnipresent God and eternal.

Unfortunately, the people believing that Moise died, a small portion of the people manufacture a new intermediary by a golden calf. Especially, the practices contracted in Egypt have the hard life: while Moïse is on the Sinai, part of the people wishes to build a Golden calf to honor it like its god. It will thus be necessary to wander in the desert during 40 years, the time which dies the generation which knew Egypt, to Moïse itself, time that Israel learns how to live according to the Torah. And still, one, Moïse prefers is never too careful the to recall him to the threshold of Canaan, before dying in an unspecified place.

The five books thus contain a system of laws and ethics, at the same time complete and ordered (according to the rabbinical tradition, the Torah comprises 613 “commands” distinct, positive - “make” - or negative - “do not do”, each one not called Mitzvah , “regulation”), as well as a historical description of the beginnings of what would become the Judaïsme.
The five books (in particular Bereshit /Gen èse, the first part of Shemot /Exode, and most of Bamidbar /Nombres) at first sight seem rather a whole of apparently historical narrations that like an enumeration of laws; however, much of concepts, of toranic ideas and commands are contained in these “stories”, so much so that some dispute their historicity (cf will infra).
The Deutéronome is different from the preceding books: he is written with the first nobody, and not once God is not mentioned. It is acted in fact, as higher indicated of the last speech and the last recommendations of Brace to the children of Israel before dying.

Many laws however are not directly mentioned in the Torah: they were deduced from it by interpretation and oral traditions, before being compiled in the Mishna, the Talmud, the Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmaël and other treaties less often studied. The Karaïtes not recognizing the authority of the rabbis, they do not follow quite simply these laws.

In addition, according to the rabbinical tradition at least, the stories in the Torah necessarily do not proceed in the chronological order, but sometimes by order of concept (“future explaining the past”, for example). This sight is summarized by the talmudic maxim (treaty Pessa' him 7a): “there does not have “early” and “late” in Torah”.

Production and use of a deliver Torah

The book of the Torah exists in two different forms according to its use:

if it is ritual, i.e. for the reading at the time of the offices, the shape of the book is that of the Torah in the beginning: a parchment fixed at two wood handles, which one progressively unrolls of his reading (and which, being given the greatest convenience to hold and unroll this roller by means of the right hand, the majority of the mankind being droitière, is read from right to left). This parchment is called Sefer Torah (“Book Torah”).

The writing of these Sifrei Torah , or Sefarim (in Yiddish, seforim ), is done according to extremely constraining and precise rules, and are entrusted consequently only to highly qualified professional scribes. It is under the terms of these rules that this text plurimillénaire arrived to us practically unchanged, and that copies going back from several centuries, even to millenia, are virtually identical between them. The accent was developed on this preoccupation with a precision to say that each word, each letter, each sign even is of divine origin, and that if it missed only one of them, “the world would collapse”.
It is true that in Hebrew, certain letters strongly resemble each other, and that vocalization can change the direction of a mot. In a system based on the analysis until the most subtle nuances of these words, a misreading can lead to an error of comprehension and a perversion of the message. The analogy with the recent concept of genetic Code was évoquée.
many times The Sifrei Torah are regarded as one of the largest treasures of a community, and the acquisition again is pretext with festive celebrations. All the Sifrei Torah are arranged in the holiest place of the Synagog, the holy Arche (אֲרוֹןהקֹדשׁ aron hakodesh in Hebrew).
For more details on the production of the ritual rollers, to see the article Sefer Torah .

Since the Printing works, the text of the Torah was industrially reproduced for the daily and particular use. These printed versions are known under the name of Houmash (plur. Houmashim ) (“Fifth of the Five Books”). They generally contain translations in French, English, German, Russian, etc, as well as comments in margin: classically, a Houmash contains the Targoum Onkelos and the comment of Rachi. Some Houmashim , joining together several traditional comments (Rachi, Rashbam, Ramban, Ibn Ezra, Keli Yakar, Sforno, etc) are called Miqraot Guedolot (“Great Readings”).

The printed versions of the Torah are treated with large respect, but their holiness is regarded as lower than that of the Sifrei Torah : for example, an unobtrusive letter returns a unsuitable Sefer Torah with use ( passoul ), which is not the case of the Houmashim .

Judaism, in the middle of the Torah

The Torah is the document around whose the Judaïsme is articulated: it is the source of all the biblical commands within an ethical framework.

According to the Jewish tradition, these books were revealed with Moïse by God, of which a part on the mount the Sinai on a date estimated at 1280 AEC.
Various opinions circulate in the rabbinical Littérature at the time when it was revealed whole:

for some, it was given of a block on the Sinai mount. In this vision, known as “maximalist”, Moïse was informed not only of all the words of God ( and God called to Moïse ) but also all later events with the Sinai mount until its death, even beyond;
of other sources thinks that the Torah was revealed on the Sinai to the Sinai even, and that the remainder would have come “by episode” and would have concluded itself only with died from Brace;
another school of thought (of which Rav Avraham ibn Ezra is holding it more known, but it was preceded in this way since high antiquity) is that the Torah, although having been written by Moïse in its near total, was supplemented after its death by Josué.

All agree however on the origin entirely (or quasi-entièrement) mosaic and completely divine of the Torah.

According to this same tradition, the message of the Torah is infinite, not stopping with the words. There the least letter, the smallest preposition, even the Cedilla of the letter youd ( koutzo Shell youd קוצושליוד, the youd being the letter י), the decorative marks, the repetitions of words, were placed by God in order to conceal a teaching there. This is valid whatever the place where that appears.

Exemples :

in the case of koutzo Shell youd , the youd appears in I Am the Eternal your God or frequently repeated occurrence and God spoke in Moïse .
one says that Rabbi Akiva, died towards 135 EC., had deduced a new law from all the occurrences of the particle ett (את) in the Torah (Talmud, treated Pessa' him 22b); however ett is an accusative particle without clean significance. However, if it had not been writing “created God ett the skies and ett the ground”, one could have believed that “skies” was the name of God he in the treaty Haguiga says (14a). But not, Rabbi Ishmaël answers him, ett skies to include all there that is there, stars and spheres celestial, ett ground to include there what populates it . In other words, ett mark “gasoline of the thing”.

Contre-exemples :

Talmud, with a humor of which it is not deprived, reports (treated Mena' hot 49) that Moïse, residing on the Sinai, sees God adding to the letters of the Torah of the graphic marks which do not modify the reading of it. Being astonished by this apparent futility, he intends himself to answer that in a few centuries, wise named Akiva Ben Joseph (still him) will deduce the direction and the rules from them.

Exauçant the prayer of Brace to include/understand that, God dispatches it with the eighth rank of the Yeshiva of Rabbi Akiva, where precisely, this one teaches these laws. In front of the difficult talk, Moïse feels exhausted, when a pupil goes so far as to ask from where Rabbi Akiva learns these lessons. And this one to answer: “It is a law given to Moïse on the Sinai”!

although one does not discuss the validity of the koutzo Shell youd , this one became synonymous with “French trifle”. To say somebody who it is the koutzo Shell youd is one of the most marked formulations of contempt.

A kabbalistic interpretation of this principle teaches that the Torah constituted one Nom length of God, who was broken in words so that the human spirits can include/understand it. In addition, although this way of breaking up the Name is effective, since we manage to apprehend it, it is not only.

Written Torah and oral Torah

According to the Jews rabbanites, descendants of the Pharisees, and whose orthodoxe Jews maintain the ideology most accurately, an oral Law ( Torah SheBe' Al EP ) was given to the people at the same time as the written Law ( Torah SheBeKtav ), as suggest it of many verses, in particular. It probably acted at the base, in addition to explanations as for the regulations, of oral paraphrases of the Text, explanations of so-and-so word, discussion around such idea in such verse, but in any case closely related to the written Law, and supplementing it: many concepts are not clearly defined in the text. This concern of reminding the words of the Masters went hand in hand with a scrupulous exactitude in the respect and the application of the laws.

This parallel material was originally transmitted to Moïse from the Sinai, and of Brace in Israel orally. With the aim of maintain the Judaism dynamic and to avoid the mésinterprétations, it was interdict to consign the oral traditions. However, in front of the accumulation of material, the divergences of interpretations, which sometimes held with negligible nuances on the one hand, and on the other hand the destruction of Judaea by the Babylonians, the high rate of assimilation, etc, the interdict was raised, when it became obvious that the writing became the only means of preserving the oral heritage of Old.

The first to systematize the laws of categories, was Rabbi Akiva. Its disciple Rabbi Meïr contributed to it largely. However, the large one of work is the fact of Rabbi Juda Hanassi, which completed this compilation towards the end of second century EC., and named it Mishna (“Repetition”). The traditions not include in Mishna were consigned like Baraïtot (“external”) or in the Tosefta (“Supplement”). Later traditions were also codified like Midrash im.
During four centuries which followed, this small corpus of laws and ethical lesson are enough to provide the signs and codes necessary to allow the continuity of the teaching of the mosaic traditions, while maintaining their dynamism, and their transmission at the communities mainly dispersed between Babylon and the ground of Israel (become the Roman province of Syria Palestina ).

However, the historical circumstances forced the communities galiléennes initially, Babylonian then to compile the corpus of comments of Mishna, of which allusions, lessons, traditions etc synthesized in a few hundreds of pages were developed in thousands of pages, called Guemara . Important change, whereas the Torah and Mishna are written in Hebrew (although mishnaïque Hebrew is not similar any more with biblical Hebrew), Guemara is in Araméen, having been compiled in Babylon. The concept of Guemara is about equivalent to that of Talmud in Hebrew, term much more connu.
Two “versions” of Talmud exist, Talmud of Babylon and that of Jerusalem, actually the result of compilations of the discussions held in the Babylonian academies on the one hand and galiléennes of the other. Talmud of Jerusalem having been finished with haste, under the pressure of the historical circumstances, two centuries before that of Babylon, it is the latter which makes authority when both are contradicted (including two versions different from the teaching of a Rabbi).

The Jews practitioners (rabbanites) follow the traditional explanations of these texts. Karaïtes, they, follow only Miqra, i.e. the Torah.

Other sights on the Torah

Christian point of view on the Torah

See Old Testament

The Christianisme affirms traditionally that the toranic laws are of divine origin, and constitute the Old Testament, although certain Christians estimate that all the laws of Pentateuque do not apply to them as Chrétiens. The Confession of faith of Westminster (1646), for example, divides the mosaic laws of categories civil, moral and cérémoniale, the only obligatory ones being morals. If the Christian reconstructionnism wanted to very restore them in order to build a modern theocracy, others consider that no civil law applies to them, those having been written in completed times and circumstances, which is not the case of the moral obligations nor of the religious principles.

The Christian positions can be summarized as follows:

New Testament indicates that Jesus contracted a new Alliance between Him and Its people (Hebrew 8; Christian interpretation of Jérémie 31:31 - 34), and that in this one, it is known as that the Torah is engraved on the heart of the individual.
It declared all foods pure (Marc 7:14 - 23), which was interpreted like an abolition of the food laws. However, of many Christians tend to return to the precepts of sanctification of the life (or, according to some, of hygiene), included there the laws on the diet. One could see an allusion to teaching also there.
According to the author of the Hebrews, the sacrifices and the priesthood precedes the death of Jesus on the Cross as an expiatory sacrifice, which was interpreted by certain like an invitation giving up the Jewish rites and ritual after him. (Hebrews 8:5; 9:23 - 26; 10:1).

However, New Testament prescribes with the Christians of the laws coming from the Torah, in particular Like your next like yourself (Lévitique 19:18; to compare with the Rule of Gold), Love your God of all your heart, your heart and your forces (inspired of Deutéronome 6:4, i.e. the Shema Israel) and all commands of the Decalog (Exodus 20:1 - 17). And Mathieu (5: 17) stipulates well that it did not come to abolish the Law, but to achieve it (" the compléter").

Since the end of the 20th century, certain Christian groups, inspired by the Messianic Judaism, affirmed that the laws of the Torah were to be followed by the Christians, from an optics and the point of view Christian women. The food laws, the seventh day, and the biblical feastdays are observed (see Quartodécimanisme), with however variations compared to the Jewish rites (ex: Easter 14 Nissan is celebrated, like the Jewish Passover, but for the reason that Jesus was crucifié this day)
These Christians do not see the Torah like a means of achieving the redemption, but like a means of obeying God more completely.

Sources

Jean-Marc Rouvière, Short meditations on the Creation of the world , ED. Harmattan, Paris 2006.
Berkowitz, Ariel and Of vorah. Torah Rediscovered . 4th ED. Shoreshim Publishing, 2004. ISBN 0975291408
Lancaster, D. Thomas. Restoration. Littleton: First Fruits off Zion, 2005.

Islamic point of view on the Torah

The Tawrat (Torah) is, with the Injil (Évangiles) and the Zabur (Psaumes) one of the three Books which were revealed by Allah before the Coran. The Islam thus affirms that Moïse accepted a revelation, Tawrat, which was modified during time by certain scribes and preachers (what some interpret like “covered” by Talmud). According to the Islamic faith, the current Jewish Writings are not the original revelation given to Moïse, and the Coran would be consequently the final revelation of Allah, which would supplement the preceding revelations.

Samaritan point of view of

See the Bible Samaritaine.

Academic point of view on the Torah: biblical criticism

These five books are traditionally allotted to Moïse. Nevertheless, this assertion was called into question as of the Antiquité. Various theories were proposed by the exégètes as for their formation, of which the documentary Hypothèse or theory of the fragments. None is without fault, all are unceasingly amended, and inlassablement called in question.

Certain researchers called into question the unit of Pentateuque and sometimes excluded the Deutéronome, speaking then about Tétrateuque, or added there the Livre of Josué, then forming the “Hexateuque”, even the whole of the Livres known as historical, speaking then about “Ennéateuque”.

The biblical radical critical receives little support at the orthodoxe Jews. The criticism of the biblical books out the Torah (Neviim and Ketouvim) is tolerated, though of an evil eye, but to apply it to the Torah itself is regarded as erroneous, even heretic. Nevertheless, certain orthodoxe rabbis clearly discussed documentary Hypothèse, though this one seems to contradict the profession of faith of the Chema Israel affirming the identity of YHWH and Elohim: the biblical comments of Rav Meïr Leibush Malbim and Rav Samson Raphaël Hirsch are examples of such debates.

Others dispute more simply archeology, showing that, contrary to the myth, the Torah seems to bring back habits accurately corresponding to the times that it is supposed to tell, and that could not have known later writers, and that in addition, archeology does not cease making lucky finds which, of not to correspond to the letter with the Bible, often dismount theoretical scaffolding of biblical criticism.

See too

Bible and Hebraic Bible (Tanakh)
Seventy
Parasha
Sefer Torah
Reading of the Torah
the festival of the gift of the Torah
the festival of the joy of the Torah
transmission of the Torah
Talmud
Midrash
History of research on Pentateuque

the tradition Judeo-Christian
Relations between Judaism and Christianity

External bonds

the bible of rabbinate (version in Hebrew and parallel French translation by Zadoc Kahn).
complete Tanakh, with the comment of [[Rachi], Judaïca edition Near]
Of the verses of the Torah in modern penmanship

Comments on the Torah

Comments on the Torah (of chiourim.com)

audio and video Course of Torah and Tanakh (even site)

" A letter of Thora"

Simple: Torah

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