What is the Torah?
The term Torah is derived from the Hebrew word for “to teach”. This teaching includes various stories: the Creation of the World; the Flood, the Tower of Babel; the story of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah; the story of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt; and the stay of the Hebrews in the desert. It also contains a full legislation, hence the name of Law.
“Torah” refers primarily to the Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses, i.e. the first part of the Bible.

Names of the Five Books of Moses or Pentateuch	Hebrew names, based on the first words of each Book
Genesis	Be-rechit (In the beginning)
Exodus	Chemot (Names)
Leviticus	Va-yiqra (And He called)
Numbers	Ba-midbar (In the desert)
Deuteronomy	Devarim (Words)

The whole text is written on the Torah scrolls, which are read in the synagogue and stored in the Holy Cabinet.

What is the Bible in Judaism?
“Bible” is derived from the Greek translation of the Hebrew words Miqra’ and TaNaKh.

• Miqra’ means “reading”. The same Semitic root gave the Arabic word Kur’an for Koran.
• TaNaKh is the acronym for Torah (Pentateuch), Nevi’im (Prophets) and Ketouvim (Writings, i.e. Hagiography).

Christians renamed part of the Hebrew Bible “Old Testament”, in the sense of an “Old Covenant” made null and void by the “New Covenant”, i.e. the New Testament. Christians have recently decided to use the term “First Covenant” to stop the controversy with the Jewish community and go back to the original meaning of the Greek word diathēkḗ.
The Hebrew Bible canon and its division into chapters are slightly different in the Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition, but the text remains the same in both traditions.

The Written Torah and the Oral Torah
For believers, the Torah was revealed by God to Moses, and shared with the Hebrew people on Mount Sinai. According to Biblical research, the texts were compiled and written down at the time of the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BC.
An important fact is the way Jews - believers and nonbelievers – have used this text: they have studied it. According to Jewish tradition, there are seventy possible interpretations for each letter of the Torah. This explains why the meaning of the word “Torah” has been extended. To study the Torah is not only to study the Pentateuch, but also to study the entire Hebrew Bible. The whole collection is called Torah che-bi-ẖtav (Torah that is written).
The Torah che-be-al-pe (Torah that is on the mouth) includes all the comments added by the oral tradition. These comments are various interpretations and discussions of the texts that were orally transmitted from generation to generation. After the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the end of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi (circa 138 – circa 217) began to classify and organise these teachings in order to preserve this heritage and the unity of the Jewish people despite the fact they mostly lived in exile. This was the birth of the Mishnah (Repeat), the first attempt to write down the Oral Law.

The Mishnah consists of six orders:

1. Seeds (blessings and agricultural laws);
2. Festivals (Shabbat and festivals);
3. Women (marriage and divorce);
4. Damages (civil and criminal laws, idolatry);
5. Holy things (service of the Temple, sacrificial rites for animals);
6. Purities (laws of purities and impurities).

These commentaries are classified in two fields:

1. The halakhah(walk) for legal matters;
2. The aggadah (from the Aramaic word for “tales”) for non legal matters such as parables, stories or aphorisms.

The Mishnah also includes the teachings and commentaries from one hundred and fifty wise men, called tannaïm (those who teach). Commentaries that are not included in the Mishnah are called baraïtot (plural of the Aramaic word baraïta, meaning “external teaching”).
The Gemara (completion) was the work of the amoraïm (those who explain). Its purpose was to clarify the link between the Mishnah and the Torah with new commentaries.
The Mishnah and the Gemara form the Talmud (talmoud in Hebrew, meaning “study”). There are two Talmuds: the Jerusalem Talmud, completed in the fourth century in academies from Galilee, and the Babylonian Talmud, completed in the fifth century in academies after the Babylonian exile. The more complete Babylonian Talmud has stayed the reference book. The main writing language is Aramaic, used by the Middle Eastern world in the first centuries of our era, and a language so close from Hebrew that many words are similar.

What is the Oral Law?
The Oral Law explains how to interpret the Torah verses by linking some verses to others and offering some developments for what is not explicit in the text.
Here is an example from the Haggadah. The Torah only said about Harān, Abraham's brother, that “Harān begot Lot; and Harān died in the presence of his father Tera’h” (Genesis 11:27-28). But a Midrash gave a new light to this verse: Harān’s brother, Abraham, came out alive from the furnace he threw himself in after having professed his faith in one God. Then the guards of King Nimrod seized Harān, who did not believe in God, and cast him in the same furnace. “His inwards were scorched, and he died in his father’s presence” (Bereshit Rabbah 38:13). Abraham overcame the trial because of his sincere faith, unlike Harān who was only guided by his interest.
Here is another example taken from the Halakhah. This verse said: “Fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth - the one who has inflicted the injury must suffer the same injury” (Leviticus 24:20). To understand this verse, we must read what precedes and follows. The whole chapter 24 of Leviticus deals with damages. The Talmud developed these verses and developed them into a full legislation. “Whoever harms his neighbor must compensate him for five things: the damage, the suffering, the treatment who healed him, the lost time, the humiliation”, in other words: physical harm, pain, medical costs, loss of income and moral damages. Whereas the literal meaning of the verse is immediate retaliation, the legislation developed by the Talmud followed God’s request to Abraham and his descendants for Yzedakah U'mishpa, meaning “equity and justice” (Genesis 18:19), i.e. the creation of courts to judge people.
The concept of murder (“Life against life”) refers to the sixth of the Ten Commandments (“You shall not kill”). The death penalty is part of the Jewish legislation, and is mentioned several times in the Torah. However, according to the Mishnah, a court would be considered bloodthirsty if one man would be sent to death every seven years (Tractate Avot 1:10). According to Elijah ben Azariah, it would be considered bloodthirsty if one man would be sent to death every seventy years. So we are far from the traditional image of the law of retaliation.

A four-level reading
The Jewish mystical tradition identifies four levels for understanding and interpreting the text of the Torah, showing the need for a non-literal reading of this text:

1. Pshat, (simple), a literal or obviated meaning for a first understanding of the text;
2. Remez (allusion), an allusive meaning;
3. Drach (interpretation),  an indirect meaning, and the origin of Midrash, a word that means “derived from drach”;
4. Sod (secret), an esoteric meaning.

The acronym for these four terms is PaRDèS, a word of Persian origin meaning “orchard” in Hebrew, and the origin of the word “paradise” in English.

The text reading techniques
The many text reading techniques for study and argumentation require a rigorous in-depth knowledge of the Torah, of the Hebrew and Aramaic grammar and syntax, and of the casuistry. The faithful respect the scholar who develops a ẖidouch (novelty), i.e. a commentary offering a new interpretation for a text.
The Oral Law has three original components:

• The Midrash refers both to an exegesis method (hermeneutics and homiletics) and to the stories themselves, with a rich literature. The history of Harān, Abraham's brother, is one of many examples. Most of the Midrash is part of the Aggadah (narrative). There is also a less developed legal Midrash.
• The Maẖloqet (controversy) is used to compare different perspectives on a given issue, without accepting or rejecting a particular opinion. The Talmud gives more credit to the opinion of a wise man for implementing the halakhah, but only because of its interest in developing an argument and a counterargument. This taste for exchanging views explains the buzzing noise in the study room of a yeshivah (Talmudic school).
• The Pilpul, meaning “a fine argument” (from the Hebrew word pilpel, pepper), is a derivative of the Maẖloqet. Despite being considered as an empty rhetoric by some rabbinical circles, it is intended to address and clarify the most complex texts.

The Talmud page
The centre of a printed Talmud page includes a passage of the Mishnah followed by a passage of the corresponding Gemara. The sides of a Talmud page include commentaries written in later times by some rabbis, mainly by Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitsẖaq, haTsarfati (Rabbi Solomon son of Isaac, the French), the most famous rabbi, better known under the acronym Rashi (Troyes 1040-1105). [See Judaism module I section 3 and Judaism module II section 3.] Other commentaires were written by Rabbi Hananel, an exegete who lived in Kairouan, Tunisia, in the eleventh century.
There are very few handwritten versions of the Talmud. Most of them were destroyed during fires ordered by the Catholic Church. The Talmud was printed for the first time circa 1520 in Venice by Daniel Bomberg, a Christian. The edition printed in 1886 in Vilna, Vilnius, is currently used as the reference edition.
As a complement to the Talmud and its huge influence over the years, here is a selection of other reference works:

• The Mishneh Torah (repetition of the Torah), a synthesis of the Talmud written by Moses Maimonides (Cordoba 1138 - Fustat 1204); [See Judaism Module I Section 3.]
• The Shulchan Aruch (dressed table), an abbreviated codification of the halakhah written by Rabbi Joseph Caro (Toledo 1488 - Safed 1575), and a reference work in Orthodox Judaism;
• The Kabbalah (reception), belonging to the sod (esoteric reading level), the reading of which is recommended after the age of fourty, when readers have extensive Biblical and Talmudic knowledge. Readers who study it “receive” the esoteric tradition. The several Kabbalah books include:
  • Sefer ha-Yetzirah (Book of Creation), with a list of the ten sephirot or creative powers.
  • Sefer ha-Zohar (Book of Splendor), a mystical reading of the Torah because "in every word lies a profound mystery, and the upper and lower worlds are weighed on the same balance"; all that comes from above must first take a human envelope to become accessible.