What Is the Torah? The Jewish Holy Book, Explained

The Torah is the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, which Jewish tradition holds were given by God to Moshe (Moses) at Mount Sinai. It is the holiest text in Judaism: the source of its story, its laws, and its 613 commandments. The word itself means "instruction" or "teaching," from a Hebrew root meaning to aim or to point the way.

The five books of the Torah

Each book is named in Hebrew after one of its first words. The English names come from the ancient Greek translation.

Three meanings of "Torah"

The word stretches, and it helps to know which sense someone means:

• The Five Books, also called the Chumash (from the Hebrew for "five"). This is the usual meaning, and the text written in a Torah scroll.
• The whole Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, sometimes loosely called "Torah." (Here's how the Torah, the Tanakh, and the Old Testament differ.)
• All of Jewish teaching: the written Torah together with the Oral Torah, later recorded in the Mishnah and Talmud. In this sense, someone studying a page of Gemara is "learning Torah." See Torah vs. Talmud.

What's inside

Roughly the first half of the Torah is narrative: creation, the patriarchs and matriarchs, slavery in Egypt, the Exodus, and the Revelation at Sinai. The second half is mostly law, woven into the story of forty years in the wilderness. By the traditional count there are 613 mitzvot: 248 positive commandments and 365 prohibitions, covering everything from Shabbat and the festivals to honest weights, kindness to strangers, and the Shema.

The Torah scroll

A Sefer Torah is handwritten by a trained scribe (a sofer) on parchment, in black ink, with a quill. It holds all five books, 304,805 letters, with no vowels and no punctuation. Writing one takes about a year, and a single missing or malformed letter makes the scroll unfit for reading until it is fixed.

In synagogue the scroll is kept in the ark (the Aron Kodesh) and read aloud every Shabbat, on Monday and Thursday mornings, and on festivals. The reading is divided into 54 weekly portions, so the whole Torah is read every year, finishing and starting again on Simchat Torah. You can see this week's portion here.

When was the Torah written?

By Jewish tradition, the Torah was given by God to Moshe at Sinai in the Hebrew year 2448 (around 1312 BCE by the traditional reckoning), with the rest transmitted to him during the forty years in the wilderness, before his death. The Talmud (Bava Batra 14b-15a) records a discussion of who wrote the final eight verses, which describe Moshe's own death.

Modern academic scholarship generally dates the text's composition to the first millennium BCE, assembled from earlier sources. Bayit writes from within the tradition, and this guide follows the traditional account; if the historical question matters to you, it is well worth reading both.

What language is the Torah in?

Biblical Hebrew. Jews have read it in translation for over two thousand years, beginning with Aramaic and Greek, and today most English speakers read it with the Hebrew and English side by side. You don't need to be fluent to start: reading with the Hebrew beside the translation is how most people learn.

Where to start

The easiest door in is the weekly portion: read a little each day, and by Shabbat you've met the whole week's reading. If you'd like a guide for the first steps, start with how to start learning Torah every day.

Bayit gives you this week's parsha one aliyah a day, the whole Tanakh in Hebrew and English, and a place to ask what a verse means, with the sources quoted.