Summary: Bible - The Pentateuch

The GIST

The Pentateuch is the name scholars give to the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. In Judaism the same five books are the Torah, and they are also known as the Five Books of Moses. Rabbinic tradition holds that Moses wrote them down at God's dictation. Modern scholarship, by contrast, concludes that they have several authors and took shape over centuries, reaching their final form in the Persian period.

The word Pentateuch comes from Greek and means "five scrolls." Torah is a Hebrew word better translated "teaching" or "instruction" than "law," a rendering the research calls misleading. Together these books tell one long story. It begins with God creating the world, follows the beginnings of the people of Israel and their descent into Egypt, reaches its height with the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, and ends with the death of Moses, just before the people cross into the Promised Land of Canaan. Woven through the story are the religious obligations and civil laws that have shaped Jewish life ever since, and that Christians and Muslims also hold sacred.

What It Says

Genesis: beginnings

The English names of the five books come from the Greek translation and point to each book's theme, while in Hebrew each is known by its opening words. Genesis, in Hebrew Bereshit, "In the beginning," falls into two parts.

The first, the primeval history of chapters 1 to 11, sets out the writers' view of God and of humanity's relationship with its maker. God creates a world that is good and fit for mankind. When humanity corrupts it with sin, God decides to destroy his creation with the flood, saving only the righteous Noah and his immediate family in order to begin the relationship again.

The second part, the ancestral history of chapters 12 to 50, tells the prehistory of Israel, God's chosen people. At God's command Noah's descendant Abraham leaves his home for the God-given land of Canaan, where he lives as a sojourner, as do his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob. Jacob's name is changed to Israel. Through his son Joseph, the children of Israel go down into Egypt, seventy people in all with their households, and God promises them a great future.

The book is punctuated by a series of covenants that narrow step by step, from all mankind in the covenant with Noah to a special relationship with one people, Abraham and his descendants through Isaac and Jacob. Genesis ends with Israel in Egypt, ready for the coming of Moses.

Exodus: freedom and covenant

Exodus, "Exit," tells how the Israelites leave slavery in Egypt through the strength of Yahweh, the God who has chosen them. He strikes their captors with the plagues of Egypt. Led by the prophet Moses, the people travel through the wilderness to Mount Sinai, where Yahweh promises them the land of Canaan in return for their faithfulness.

There Israel enters into a covenant with God, who gives them their laws, among them the Ten Commandments, and instructions for building the Tabernacle, the means by which he will come from heaven to dwell among them, lead them to possess the land, and then give them peace.

One commentator cited in the research suggests that Exodus is arguably the most important book in the Bible, because it presents the defining features of Israel's identity: the memory of hardship and escape, a binding covenant with the God who chose them, and the founding of a community with guidelines for sustaining it.

Leviticus: holiness

Leviticus, a name meaning "relating to the Levites," opens with instructions on how to use the Tabernacle the people have just built. Rules about what is clean and unclean follow, including the laws of slaughter and of animals that may be eaten. Then come the Day of Atonement and a body of moral and ritual laws sometimes called the Holiness Code. Near the end the book sets out in detail the rewards for keeping God's commandments and the punishments for breaking them.

Numbers: the wilderness

Numbers takes its name from two censuses of the Israelites. It begins at Mount Sinai, where the people have received their laws and covenant and God has taken up residence among them in the sanctuary. Their task now is to take possession of the Promised Land. They are counted, preparations are made, and the march resumes.

It does not go well. The people murmur at the hardships of the journey and against the authority of Moses and Aaron, and many die for it. When they reach the borders of Canaan they send spies into the land, and on hearing the spies' fearful report they refuse to go in. God condemns that generation to die in the wilderness until a new one can grow up to carry out the task. The book ends with the new generation on the plains of Moab, ready to cross the Jordan.

Numbers brings to a head the themes introduced in Genesis and developed in Exodus and Leviticus: the promises that Israel will become a great nation, will have a special relationship with God, and will possess the land. It also shows the cost of failing in holiness, faithfulness and trust. Despite God's presence, Israel lacks faith, and the land is left to their children.

Deuteronomy: the farewell of Moses

Deuteronomy, "second law," is made up largely of three speeches that Moses delivers on the plains of Moab shortly before the people enter the land. The first looks back over forty years of wandering and urges Israel to keep the teaching. The second reminds them that their hold on the land depends on following God and the laws he has given. The third offers comfort: even if Israel proves unfaithful and loses the land, repentance can restore everything.

The last four chapters contain the Song of Moses and the Blessing of Moses, the handing of leadership from Moses to Joshua, and finally the death of Moses on Mount Nebo.

One of the book's most significant verses is the Shema Yisrael, which has become the definitive statement of Jewish identity: "Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one." In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus quotes it as part of the Great Commandment.

Why It Matters

In Jewish life

The Torah stands at the centre of Judaism. Its words are written by hand in Hebrew on a scroll by a trained scribe, a sofer. A scroll contains 304,805 letters, an error in a single one makes it unfit for use, and writing one can take about a year and a half. The scrolls are kept in the holiest part of the synagogue, in the Holy Ark.

Public reading of the Torah is one of the foundations of Jewish communal life. Tradition says regular readings were introduced by Ezra the Scribe after the return from the Babylonian captivity. A portion is read on Monday and Thursday mornings and on the Sabbath, arranged so that the whole Pentateuch is read through each year, and the annual holiday of Simchat Torah celebrates the end of one cycle and the start of the next.

Rabbinic tradition also speaks of an Oral Torah, given to Moses alongside the written one, which supplies details the written text leaves undefined. After exile and persecution it was committed to writing in the Mishnah around 200 CE and later in the Talmud. According to the Midrash, the Torah existed before the world and served as the blueprint for creation.

Who wrote it, and when

The Talmud states that Moses wrote the Torah, except for the last eight verses of Deuteronomy describing his death and burial, which were written by Joshua. All classical rabbinic views hold it to be entirely Mosaic and of divine origin. Orthodox tradition maintains that position today, while Reform and Liberal movements and most shades of Conservative Judaism do not.

The modern scholarly consensus rejects Mosaic authorship and holds that the Torah has multiple authors and was composed over centuries, though the details are hotly contested. For most of the twentieth century scholars agreed on the documentary hypothesis, which proposed four independent sources, known as J, E, P and D, later combined by an editor. That consensus collapsed in the last decades of the century. Some scholars now picture short independent narratives gradually joined into larger units, others a series of additions to an existing core, and a "neo-documentarian" school has revived the older model in updated form. Most still recognise Deuteronomy as a distinct source and agree that some form of Priestly source existed.

The final Torah is widely seen as a product of the Persian period, probably between 450 and 350 BCE, a view that echoes the Jewish tradition giving Ezra a pivotal role. A minority place it later, in the Hellenistic or even the Hasmonean period. There is also debate over when ordinary Jews began to live by its laws. Many scholars have dated widespread observance to about the middle of the fifth century BCE, while a more recent argument finds no surviving evidence for it before the middle of the second.

Translations and other faiths

The Torah was translated early. Aramaic renderings called Targums were recited in synagogues, and the Greek Septuagint dates from the third century BCE. Jerome's Latin Vulgate followed in the fourth century CE, an influential Judeo-Arabic version was made by Saadia Gaon, and as part of the Christian Bible the five books have been translated into hundreds of languages.

Outside Judaism, the Samaritans have their own Pentateuch, written in the Samaritan script and differing from the Jewish text in some 6,000 places, most of them minor, though it includes a distinctive commandment to build an altar on Mount Gerizim. Among Christians, canons of the Old Testament differ, but the Five Books of Moses are common to all of them. In Islam, the Tawrah is revered as a book sent by God to the prophets among the Children of Israel, and belief in it and in the prophethood of Moses is a fundamental tenet, though Muslims hold that the original revelation was altered over time.

Who Should Read It

Read The Pentateuch if you want to start the Bible where its own story starts, with creation, the ancestors, the escape from Egypt and the covenant at Sinai. It is essential for anyone who wants to understand Judaism, and it gives the background to almost everything in the rest of scripture. Readers interested in law, in national origins, and in how an ancient text can be read aloud, copied letter by letter and argued over for thousands of years will find it endlessly rewarding.