Torah

Five books of story, law, and poetry divided into 54 weekly portions.

The Torah (Hebrew for “the teachings”) is the name given to the Five Books of Moses which come at the very beginning of the Bible. These books form the basis of all Jewish law and practice. A Torah scroll is a parchment scroll on which all five books have been inscribed by a specially trained calligrapher. Torah scrolls are typically kept in synagogues, in a special cabinet called an ark.

For Jews, the concept of “Torah ” is much broader than the books themselves, the delimited concept of the Torah. “Torah” can refer to all of traditional Jewish learning, but “the Torah” usually refers to the Torah she’bi’ktav, the written Torah, also known as the chumash (the five volumes or Pentateuch, sometimes referred to as the Five Books of Moses).

There are 79,976 words in the Torah. The oldest part of the Dead Sea scrolls, the Isaiah Scroll, found relatively intact, is 1000 years older than any previously known copy of Isaiah. In fact, the scrolls are the oldest group of Old Testament manuscripts ever found. Out of the 79,976 words there only nine differences between Teimani and Ashkenazi/Sefardi sifrei torah where a different letter (style and layout differences aside) appears in modern scrolls are:

1.     מנש(ו)א Genesis 4:13 Ashkenazi/Sephardi vs. Temoni

2.     מעינ(ו)ת Genesis 7:11 Ashkenazi/Sephardi vs. Temoni

3.     ויהי(ו)‏ Genesis 9:29 Ashkenazi/Sephardi vs. Temoni

4.     ת(י)עשה Exodus 25:31 Ashkenazi/Sephardi vs. Temoni

5.     האפ(ו)ד Exodus 28:26 Ashkenazi/Sephardi vs. Temoni

6.     בשמ(ו)ת Numbers 1:17 Ashkenazi/Sephardi vs. Temoni

7.     חדש(י)כם Numbers 10:10 Ashkenazi/Sephardi vs. Temoni

8.     בע(ו)ר Numbers 22:5 Ashkenazi/Sephardi vs. Temoni

9.     דכ(ה|א)‏ Deuteronomy 23:2 Some Ashkenazi/Sephardi vs. Some Ashkenazi/Temoni