Torah

Rabbi Maimon, Moses Maimonides’ father, believed that the Torah’s exact wording and layout had been divinely dictated to Moses down to the smallest detail—including paragraph divisions (open vs. closed), spelling (defective vs. plene), and even the decorative taggin atop certain letters. Maimonides, despite his rationalist philosophy, largely maintained this stringent view, though he would not invalidate a Torah scroll due to missing taggin. His son, R. Abraham, further relaxed the requirements as the realities of medieval manuscripts made the older standards untenable.

Writers in the Second Temple period portray Moses as the Torah’s author and master lawgiver, attributing commandments directly to him. The rabbis, by contrast, repeatedly depict Moses as forgetful, confused, and sometimes mistaken—downplaying his authority to emphasize the Torah’s divine authorship and elevate the rabbis’ own role as its interpreters.

Written by a Jew in the 2nd century B.C.E., The Letter of Aristeas tells how Demetrius of Phalerum advised King Ptolemy II (3rd cent. B.C.E.) that the Library of Alexandria should commission a Greek translation of the otherwise inaccessible Jewish Torah. At the king’s request, Eleazar, the High Priest of the Jerusalem Temple, sends high-quality manuscripts and seventy-two translators—six from each Israelite tribe—who so impress the Hellenistic king and his court with the Torah’s universal wisdom that he offers to pay them to remain in Egypt.

The Tikkunei Zohar, a kabbalistic work composed in 14^th-century Spain, offers seventy interpretations of the Torah’s first word, bereshit. This article traces how: The understanding of the Torah as multivocal culminated in its formulation, “the Torah has seventy faces,” in the 12^th-century Numbers Rabbah (Part 1). The Tikkunei Zohar saw this as a key theological principle and applied it programmatically (Part 2). R. Nathan Spira and Ramchal interpreted other words of Torah, and Rabbi Nachman of Breslov wrote his famous stories to prepare readers for the Torah’s seventy meanings (Part 3).

“The hidden matters belong to YHWH our God,” declares Deuteronomy 29:28, “but with overt matters, it is for us and our children ever to apply all the provisions of this Torah.” This verse stands in isolation, prompting mystical speculation about the nature of the “hidden” and “overt” matters… until we realize that the passage has been redacted, and that the verse has been detached from its original context, which explained its meaning clearly.

In a striking departure from prevailing notions of kingship in both the ancient Near East and early Israel, Deuteronomy introduces the separation of powers among distinct branches of government and subjects all political actors—including the monarch—to the rule of Torah. In effect, Deuteronomy provides a blueprint for the modern concept of the rule of law. These principles rest on an even more revolutionary idea: the establishment of an independent judiciary.

In the second century C.E., 4 Ezra and Irenaeus tell a story of how the Torah was burned by Nebuchadnezzar and reconstructed by Ezra through divine inspiration. Rabbinic texts know of this tradition, but in their version, Ezra’s contribution is changing the Torah into Aramaic writing, or even Aramaic language.

Was Abraham the founding father of what became the Jewish people, only the precursor of Moses? Alternatively, does he represent the human ideal, from which his descendants went astray, but that can be partially achieved through observance of the Torah?

To instill Jewish readers with a sense of pride in their religion, Rabbi Joseph Hertz, the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom in the early 20th century, challenged Wellhausen’s Documentary Hypothesis, especially the claim that rabbinic Judaism was a degraded form of Israelite religion. Instead, Hertz went on the offensive, comparing Christian values unfavorably to Jewish values.

Process Theology posits that God is not a static Being but evolves along with the universe and human action. Our ancestors saw the divine light in the Torah, which we can reclaim by continuing reinterpretation.

Pettiness and personal agendas characterize Persian law, called dat in the book of Esther. The Talmud, on the other hand, presents the Torah as ʾeshdat, given with “white fire etched on black fire,” and imagines the Jews in Shushan reaccepting the Torah after being saved from Haman’s dat to destroy them.

For most Second Temple scribes, the Torah’s sanctity did not translate into a requirement to avoid the imprecisions common in all books. The Paleo-Hebrew and Proto-MT scribes were an exception, although the latter were committed to precise copying of all biblical scrolls. Only with the emergence of scrolls containing all five books (2^nd cent. C.E.) did Torah scrolls take on their special level of sanctification.

In Deuteronomy, “these words,” “this torah,” and “this scroll” refer not to a specific delimited text, but point instead to the total revelation of YHWH to Israel that cannot be limited to one set of words or texts.

This fundamental question lies at the heart of two stories: God suspending Mount Sinai over the Israelites to compel them to accept the Torah, and Joshua, with the Jordan River suspended over the Israelites, compelling them to accept mutual responsibility for each other's private sins.

Before the Five Books of Moses were compiled as a complete work, evidence from Deuteronomy as well as from Joshua and Kings shows that Deuteronomy itself was known as “the Torah.”

No biblical text states that the Torah was given on Shavuot. What does it mean then that Shavuot is the “time of the giving of our Torah”?