Torah & Texts

Tanakh, Talmud, Midrash, and the library of the tradition

The Tanakh in One Article

Tanakh is the Hebrew Bible: Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim. Twenty-four books, one canon, the foundation of everything else.

The Talmud is the rabbinic literature that develops the Oral Torah into the Halacha and the worldview of normative Judaism.

The Torah contains 613 commandments — 248 positive and 365 negative. They are the operating program of a Jewish life.

Orthodoxy holds that Moshe received both a Written and an Oral Torah at Sinai. The doctrine is the foundation of Halacha.

“Ethics of the Fathers” — the tractate of Jewish ethical wisdom traditionally read between Pesach and Shavuot.

The rabbinic genre of creative biblical interpretation — filling gaps, drawing moral lessons, and reading the text in surprising directions.

Three classical categories of mitzvot — laws beyond reason, laws of reason, and laws of testimony.

The five biblical scrolls read on five different occasions — most famously the Megillat Esther on Purim.