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[First posted 2012, reposted 2015.
This is from Jewish Literacy: The Most Important Things to Know about the Jewish Religion, Its People and Its History, by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin.
What is strange to us gentiles who stand to gain from an informative book like this, is the fact that the book was actually intended for Jews who are— what Telushkin calls —“Jewishly illiterate,” meaning “the most basic terms in Judaism, the most significant facts in Jewish history and contemporary Jewish life, are either vaguely familiar or unknown to most modern Jews.” Oy vey, we know a bunch of Jewish men who formed a Jewish Club in our city, but we Gentiles know more about the Hebrew Scriptures than they do. They need to read this post, eh? Reformatting and highlights added.–Admin1.]
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TANAKH
TORAH
Nevi’im/Prophets
Ketuvim/Writings
TA-Nakh – RHYMES WITH BACH – IS AN ACRONYM FOR THE THREE categories of books that make up the Hebrew Bible: Torah, Nevi’im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings). Observant Jews do not commonly refer to the Hebrew Bible as the Old Testament—that is a Christian usage.
The first five books of the Hebrew Bible comprise the Torah, and are regarded as Judaism’s central document. Along with the stories about the *Patriarchs and *Moses and the Exodus from Egypt, they contain *613 commandments, the backbone of all later Jewish law. In Hebrew the five books are also called Chumash, from the Hebrew word chamesh (five). According to Jewish tradition, the books were dictated to Moses by God sometime around 1220 B.C.E., shortly after the Exodus from Egypt.
In Hebrew, each book of the Torah is named after its first or second word, while the English names summarize the contents of the book.
- Thus, the first book of the Torah is called Genesis in English, because its opening chapters tell the story of the creation of the world. In this one instance, the Hebrew name is very familiar, since the Torah’s opening word, Brei’sheet, means “In the beginning.”
- In Hebrew, the Torah’s second book is called Sh’mot, or Names, because its opening verse reads “Ay-leh shemot b’nai yisrael—And these are the names of the children of Israel.” In English the book is called Exodus, because it tells the story of the liberation of the Jewish slaves from Egypt. Leon Uris wisely choose to call his novel Exodus rather than Names.
- The Torah’s third book, Leviticus (Va-Yikra in Hebrew), delineates many of the laws concerning animal sacrifices and other *Temple rituals, which were supervised by the Israelite tribe of *Levites.
- The fourth book, Numbers (Ba-Midbar in Hebrew), is named for the census of Israelites that is carried out early in the book. It also tells the story of *Korakh’s rebellion against Moses’ leadership.
- The final book of the Torah is Deuteronomy (Devarim in Hebrew). Virtually the entire book consists of Moses’ farewell address to the Israelites as they prepare to cross over to the Promise Land. He knows that he will not be permitted to enter it, but before he dies, he imparts his last thoughts to the nation he has founded.
The second category of biblical books is the Nevi’im, twenty-one books that trace Jewish history and the history of monotheism from the time of Moses’ death and the Israelites’ entrance into Canaan, around 1200 B.C.E., to the period after the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple and the ensuing exile of Jews from Jerusalem to Babylon (586 B.C.E.).
The early books of the Nevi’im (Joshua; Judges; I and II Samuel; I and II Kings) are written in a narrative style and remain among the most dramatic and vivid histories that any civilization has produced. These books are sometimes referred to as the “Early Prophets.”
The later books, written in poetic form, are what we commonly think of when referring to the prophetic books of the Bible. They primarily consist of condemnations of Israelite betrayals of monotheism’s ideals, and of calls for ethical behavior. Here you find nonstop ruminations about evil, suffering, and sin. In English the primary meaning of “prophet” is one who predicts the future; however, the corresponding Hebrew word, navi, means “spokesman for God.”
The final books of the Tanakh are known as Ketuvim, and have little in common. Some are historical; the Books of *Ezra and Nehemiah, for example, tell the story of the Jews’ return to Israel following the Babylonian exile, while I and II Chronicles provide an overview of Jewish history. Ketuvim also contain *Psalms, 150 poems, some transporting in their beauty, about man’s relationship to God.
Another book, Job, grapples with the most fundamental challenge to religion: Why does a God who is good allows so much evil in the world? (see The Trial of Job and Theodicy). In Ketuvimare also found the Five Scrolls, which include perhaps the best-known biblical book aside from the Torah, *Esther.
The Hebrew Bible has been the most influential book in human history; both Judaism and Christianity consider it to be one of their major religious texts. Several of its central ideas—
- that there is One God over all mankind,
- and one universal standard of morality;
- that people are obligated to care for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger;
- that people should refrain from work one day a week and dedicate themselves to making that day holy;
- and that the Jews have been chosen by God to spread His message to the world—have transformed both how men and women have lived, and how they have understood their existence.
Even the last of the ideas just enumerated, Jewish chosenness, has powerfully affected non-Jews. Indeed, the idea was so compelling that Christianity appropriated it, contending that the special covenant between God and a people had passed from the Jews (Old Israel) to the Church (New Israel). Islam, in turn, similarly insisted that *Mohammed and his followers had become God’s new messengers (see Chosen People).
The Bible influences the thought patterns of nonreligious, as well as religious, people. The idea that human beings are responsible for each other, crystallized by *Cain’s infamous question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9), has become part of the backbone of Western civilization. Our values in every area of life, even if we have never seen the inside of a synagogue or a church, are suffused with biblical concepts and images. We deride excessive materialists for “worshiping the Golden Calf” (Exodus 32:4), and forgetting that “man does not live by bread alone” (Deuteronomy 8:3). The appeal to a man’s conscience can be like “a voice crying in the wilderness” (*Isaiah 40:3). “Pride goes before a fall,” Proverbs (16:18) warns us, while the cynical, jaded *Ecclesiastes teaches: “There is nothing new under the sun” (1:9). In daily speech, when we refer to a plague, we are of course harking back to that famous series of *Ten Plagues that struck ancient Egypt.
The Bible is so basic to Jewish life that when I drew up a list of terms that make up basic Jewish literacy, almost twenty percent came from the Bible. And yet, as important as the Bible is, few people today read it. Even religious Jews generally restrict their reading of Tanakh to the Torah, the Psalms, and the Five Scrolls. Yet, without a knowledge of the basic textbook of Judaism, how can any person claim to be Jewishly literate?
SOURCES AND FURTHER READINGS:
- One of the finest Jewish translations of the Tanakh is that of the Jewish Publication Society. Throughout this book, I generally have relied on the very readable JPS translation, though occasionally I have used other translations, or translated the verses myself. The JPS Torah, by the way, comes to only 334 pages: One can actually sit down and read it like a book.
- In recent years, two important new translations, with brief commentaries, have appeared:
- Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses,
- and Richard Friedman, Commentary on the Torah with a New English Translation.
- There are a number of longer, excellent Torah commentaries available,
- including Joseph Hertz, The Pentateuch and Haftorahs (Orthodox),
- and W. Gunther Plaut, ed., The Torah: A Modern Commentary (Reform).
- Several prominent Bible scholars in the Conservative movement have recently produced a new commentary on the Torah, also published by JPS: While the books are all of high quality, I have had occasion to study Milgrom’s commentary in depth and found it to be brilliant.
- Genesis and Exodus (Nahum Sarna),
- Leviticus(Baruch Levine),
- Numbers (Jacob Milgrom),
- and Deuteronomy (Jeffrey Toogay).
- The late Nehama Leibowitz, a Torah scholar in Israel who popularized the study of Torah among many people, published six volumes of studies covering all five books of the Torah, entitled Studies in the Book of . . . At the end of each chapter, Leibowitz usually poses questions to prompt further study and discussion.
- Joan Comay has written a very useful and readable work, Who’s Who in the Bible, an encyclopedic dictionary of all the people who appear in the Tanakh.
- A general introduction to and overview of the Bible are contained in my book Biblical Literacy: The Most Important People, Events, and Ideas of the Hebrew Bible.
- A popular guide to the prophets is Hannah Grad Goodman, The Story of Prophecy, which actually is a text written for teenagers; I have found it very helpful in understanding what was distinctive in the messages of the various prophets.
- A very important work is Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets.
- A good one-volume history of the Hebrews during the biblical period is John Bright, A History of Israel.
- The list of common biblical expressions used in English found near the end of this entry is taken from Gabriel Sivan, The Bible and Civilization, p. 207.