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Western Religions: Judaism |
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Torah means, in the literal Hebrew, instruction, or guidance, and is used in this sense by the ancient prophets and sages. Prior to the first destruction of the great Temple in Jerusalem, by "Torah" the Hebrews meant the Books of attributed to Moses. Shortly after the time of the second Temple, the final settlement of the Canon was made at Jamnia about 100 A.D. leading to the Bible's present form as codified by the seventh century rabbis known as Masoretes. Therefore, the Hebrew Bible in toto, as well as all Talmudic and later literature was often referred to as Torah. The Hebrew Bible as it appears in our texts today is an anthology of thirty-nine books, reckoned as twenty-two, written for the most part in Hebrew, a little of it in Aramaic. (The uncanonized apocryphal sections are in Greek as well as Hebrew.) There is hardly any doubt that these books were written over a time stretching more than a thousand years. A much larger segment than commonly supposed is written in poetic and aphoristic form. In this sense the Torah is to be considered one of the world's greatest collections of pure literature. Basically it contains five types of material:
One is challenged to find anywhere, or at any time in the past, another volume of writings such as this, whose impact set aflame the lands between the Nile and the Euphrates more than three thousand years ago -- a flame that has never ceased to burn all these millennia and has leapt from continent to continent, from tongue to tongue, from heart to heart. Produce any village of people and one will find somewhere among them a trace of the Mosaic flame, be it in a book, a house of worship, a painting, a sculptured figurine, a phrase of music, or the memory of a sage proverb from Solomon, the king of kings. And even in places where the Torah has been defiled and its people erased, you will find the ashes of Israel still glimmering to remind the forgetful. The Torah cannot be forgotten nor can it be thrown aside. If one had such intent, he would have to rip out a thousand books from a thousand shelves, a thousand statues and portraits from a thousand walls, and a thousand temples and churches from land to land. For Millennia the people of the East and the West have grown and flourished in the breath of the Torah. The songs of its inspired sages reverberated in the poets, the dramatists, the painters, the sculptors, the fabulists, the preachers, the statesmen, the legislators, the philosophers, and the people at large, forever seeking justice. If there ever was a book that has moved the world, this is it. It was of this Torah that Jesus said, "I come to fulfill it, not to destroy it. And it was because of the Torah that Mohammed called the Hebrews the People of the Book. So much has been written on the subject of the authorship of the various Biblical books that one certainly does not wish to add to the already existing commentaries. There is no doubt that the majesty of Moses appears in many a page attributed to him, as does the wisdom of King Solomon in the writings named after him, and the incomparable poetry of his father in the Psalms. Little difference would it make today if these three greatest of the children of Jacob were princes in the palace, as in truth they were, or shepherds on a hill.
If you came here from the Jewish Philosophy section of Adventures in Philosophy, you can return to that Index by clicking HERE. |
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