And for that matter, what is the Torah?

The Tanakh

Canonical Jewish scripture is called the Tanakh – this is an acronym standing for Torah (instruction), Nevi’im (prophets), and Ketuvim (writings). Sometimes referred to as the Pentateuch, the Torah is the first division of the Tanakh – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The Tanakh is also used by Christians, who refer to it as the Old Testament.

While the Torah is the ultimate source of Jewish law, it mostly contains narrative that acts as the background for the stories told throughout the rest of the Tanakh – specifically, the histories of two ancient Canaanite nations, Israel and Judah, both of whom saw themselves as being descended from a confederation of twelve tribes of conquering invaders. These tribes claimed to be the heirs of a family to whom the land of Canaan had been promised by Yahweh, their god. The Torah tells the story of this these tribes and their origins, from the creation of the world to the moments just prior to the invasion of Canaan – the mythological past of a collection of peoples variously termed Hebrews, Israelites, and Jews.

According to traditional accounts, the Torah was written by Moses, who led the Hebrew tribes from Egypt to Canaan in an event called the Exodus. The actual history behind the writing of the Torah is a little more complicated.

Monolatry and Monotheism

There’s really not much evidence to suggest any mass migration out of of Egypt, and archaeological and linguistic evidence places the origins and development of the Hebrew people in Canaan. Really, anything prior to the earliest kings of Israel and Judah can be pretty hard to pin down historically. The stories of the Torah, then, are well within the realm of mythology, but they aren’t completely isolated.

The early Hebrews, like their Canaanite neighbors, believed in a pantheon of deities, but they claimed to have a special, covenantal relationship with Yahweh. This system of belief is called monolatry – multiple gods are recognized, but one is favored. In the Tanakh, Yahweh himself speaks about, and in some cases directly to, these other deities, and much of the narrative of the historical sections of the Tanakh is framed around the pattern of Israel and Judah repeatedly abandoning Yahweh in exchange for other other gods.

As for who these other gods were, tablets from the city of Ugarit in Syria offer some perspective on Canaanite religious practice, including its similarities to and differences from the worldview presented in the Tanakh. A number of divine or mythological figures mentioned in the Tanakh (El, Baal, Asherah, Moloch, Leviathan) and some common motifs (creation as conquest over chaos, a high god presiding over a divine council of heavenly beings) show up in both the Hebrew and the Ugaritic accounts, implying a shared origin and mythological context. However, unlike the people of Ugarit, the people of Israel and Judah and their forebears are constantly encouraged by certain religious figures to worship only one of these gods.

Eventually, possibly during the time of the prophets in the 8th century BCE and definitely by end of the Babylonian Captivity around 540 BCE, the Hebrews developed a system of solid monotheism in which Yahweh was understood to be both the god of the entire world, not just the god of Israel and Judah, as well as the only deity to exist, not just the only deity that should be worshiped.

The interesting thing about the Torah and the rest of the Tanakh is that some of the stories may date very far back to these monolatristic origins (possibly as far back as 1500 BCE), but the actual date of their codification and collection in the forms we have now happened centuries later, well after the development of monotheism. In other words, by the time these stories were codified and canonized in the forms used today and historically, the many individuals who were doing the writing and collecting did not believe in the gods that were believed in by the individuals behind some the legends and stories themselves.

Even Israel and Judah produced their own traditions with subtle differences between their perceptions of the divine, both of which were eventually included in the final form of the texts. Reading the Torah critically is an exercise in identifying these ancient monolatristic portions within the tension of later monotheistic ideas, all while trying to understand how the various internal traditions fit together.

The Documentary Hypothesis

One modern framework for understanding the composition of the Torah is called the Documentary Hypothesis, which proposes that a variety of distinct sources were edited together over many centuries to produce the text we have today, in contrast to the traditional view that Moses wrote the entirety of the Torah himself. Four major sources are identified:

• J, or Jahwist
• E, or Elohist
• P, or Priestly
• D, or Deuteronomist

The Jahwist and Elohist sources are thought to be the oldest (written in the 10th to 9th centuries BCE), with the Jahwist source representing the traditions of Judah and the Elohist representing the traditions of Israel. Both differ in their characterization of the divine – J primarily uses the name Yahweh and presents an anthropomorphic god who can be bargained with, while E primarily uses the name Elohim and presents a more exalted god who often interacts through angelic messengers.

The more formal and orderly Priestly source, thought to have been written during the Babylonian Captivity of the 6th century BCE by priests in the tradition of Moses’ brother Aaron, emphasizes the importance of law and ritual. God in the Priestly source is undeniably omnipotent.

The reforms of King Josiah of Judah in the 7th century BCE are generally understood to be responsible for the Deuteronomist source. D is considered independent from the rest of the Torah, and it’s the first part of the Deuteronomistic History, a cohesive narrative including Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. The Deuteronomistic History sees the people of Israel and Judah to be in a covenantal relationship with Yahweh, whose authority is greater than any on earth.

The basic idea is that the northern E and southern J sources developed earliest, before being combined into JE. Later, possibly around the time of the Babylonian Captivity, P was developed and combined with JE to produce JEP. D, which had developed independently, was then added to produce JEDP, or the Torah as we know it (with D extending into the later books of the Tanakh).

The Documentary Hypothesis has lost some support over the last few decades, but the JEDP framework is still commonly used to attempt to understand the composition of the Torah.

Canonization

The date of the fixed canon of Hebrew scripture is unknown, and the range of possible dates could be anywhere between the years after the Maccabean Revolt (around 140 BCE) to the time of Josephus, a Jewish scholar who provided an early list of canon scripture and died around 100 CE.

The religious community at Qumran used their own collection of texts (the Dead Sea Scrolls); while incomplete, the texts themselves are older than the Maccabean Revolt, and they show variations in canonicity with the later accepted canon of the Tanakh. Ultimately, there’s no true consensus as to when the texts were formally canonized in the form used by Jews and Christians today.

According to tradition, the Torah was first translated into Greek around the 3rd century BCE by a group of 72 Alexandrian Jewish scholars upon the request of Ptolemy II, while the rest of the Tanakh was translated in the following centuries. This Greek translation, the Septuagint, was used by the early Christian apostles and Church Fathers, and it’s one version of Jewish scripture quoted in the Christian New Testament. It’s also the basis for the canonical text of the Old Testament as used by Catholic and Orthodox Christians.

The oldest complete Hebrew copy of the Tanakh that exists is the Masoretic Text, the product of a group of Jewish scholars (the Masoretes) that thrived between the 6th and 10th centuries CE. The oldest complete copy of the Masoretic Text is the Leningrad Codex, which was completed in 1008 CE. The Masoretic Text is the authoritative Tanakh in Judaism, and it’s also the basis for the canonical text of the Old Testament as used by Protestant Christians. There are sometimes significant differences between the Septuagint, the Masoretic Text, and the other incomplete copies of the Tanakh like the Dead Sea Scrolls, but that’s what makes it all so fun.