Tora w tradycji biblijnej i judaistycznej

Abstract

The Torah is the core work of the Hebrew Bible. It possesses artistry of form and depth of content, housing the ideas and values of a people over centuries. The Torah narrative moves from the creation of the universe to the establishment of the people of Israel as a free nation about to ebter the land promised to its ancestors. The Torah was composed by a number of authors. The originaly separate works of these authors were united in a seriens of editorial steps. The full process of composition and editing, from the earliest passage in the Pentateuch to the completion of the work, took approximately six centuries (11th to 5th century B.C.). According to the account in 2 Kings 22 in the time of king Josiah was found the law book (Deuteronomy) which influenced king's reform. Josiah plays an important role in the Deuteronomistic History. Much attention has been focused on the "book of the law" when Ezra was a scribe (Ezra 7,6). Artaxerxes sent Ezra to make inquiries on the basis of this law. The present text of Ezra-Nehemiah suggests that this law was the Pentateuch, but Pentateuch was not complete in the time of Esra. It was completed in the 4th century B.C. The term torah occurs 12 times in the book of Isaiah. It refers eight times to Israel, three times to people and one time to the inhabitants of the earth. The term Torah is very important in the rabbinic Judaism. The principal source of information about it is the Mishna. According to the rabbinic tradition, the Written Torah was revealed to Moses along with a set of unwritten explanations known as the Oral Torah (Avot 1,1). The traditional Judaism sees the Oral Totah as inextricably bound up with the Written Torah and indeed, without the traditions of the Oral Thora, the first five books of the Bible would hardly be comprehensible. In the rabbinic Judaism, the Torah refers not only to the Pentateuch, but to all the Jewish knowledge — the entire Bible and its intepretation.