WHAT IS TORAH?
The words studying Torah are somewhat ambiguous. They refer to studying sacred scripture, but Torah can actually mean a few different things. In the narrowest sense, study of the Torah concentrates on the first five books of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles (sometimes called the Five Books of Moses) – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. There is also a broader meaning of Torah that includes the study of later books of the Bible, such as the Prophets and the collection known as Writings (Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, 1 Chronicles, and 2 Chronicles). Some use the term Torah in an even broader sense, to describe the study of any traditional Jewish text such as the Talmud (the oral law, which reads like a series of academic classroom discussions of the Rabbis).
In this chapter, we use the term Torah to refer primarily to the first five books of the Bible. It is important to note that, while Christians often refer to the Hebrew Scriptures as the Old Testament, Jews usually refrain from doing so. That would be tantamount to admitting that a new testament superseded it. Further, the Christian ordering of the books of the Old Testament differs markedly from the Jewish order of the same books because of a difference in the process of canonization and a decision as to which books should be included in the canon. For example, the books of the prophets come at the end of the Old Testament, while in the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophets are placed in the middle section.
