Unit 8 · The Shape of the Tanakh

The word Tanakh is made from three Hebrew letters: T, N and K. Each one stands for a part of the book. T is for Torah, which means teaching. N is for Nevi'im, the Prophets. K is for Ketuvim, the Writings. Say the three letters together and you get Tanakh.

The Torah has five books. In Hebrew they are named for their first words: Bereshit, Shemot, Vayikra, Bamidbar and Devarim. In English they are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Jewish tradition holds the Torah as the heart of the whole book. It is the part read from a scroll every week in the synagogue.

The Prophets come next. Jewish tradition splits them in two. The Former Prophets tell a story: Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. The Latter Prophets hold the words of prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve. The Twelve short books count as one book in the Tanakh.

The Writings come last. They are a mixed shelf: Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the five short scrolls, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles. Counted the Jewish way, with Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah and the Twelve each as one book, the whole Tanakh has twenty-four books.

The books Christians call the Old Testament are the same books as the Tanakh. But the order is not the same. Protestant Bibles put the books in four groups: law, history, poetry and prophets. So Chronicles sits near the front with the history books, and the prophets come last. The last book is Malachi.

The Tanakh keeps Chronicles at the very end of the Writings. Its last verse is a call from the Persian king Cyrus to the exiles: let anyone who belongs to God’s people go up to Jerusalem. So the Tanakh closes with a return home. Jewish readers have often noticed that the book ends on a journey that is about to begin.

The count differs too. Protestant Bibles list 39 books. They split Samuel, Kings and Chronicles into two books each. They split Ezra from Nehemiah. They count each of the Twelve prophets as its own book. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles add other books, such as Maccabees and Sirach, that the Tanakh does not include.

Historians explain the difference by history. Early Christians mostly read the Bible in a Greek translation called the Septuagint, and its order became the Christian order. Jewish communities kept the three-part Hebrew order. Neither order is more correct. They are two ways of arranging the same shelf.

A canon is a list of the books a community holds as its scripture. The Tanakh’s canon did not appear all at once. Scholars and Jewish tradition agree that the Torah was accepted first. The book of Nehemiah tells of Ezra reading the Torah aloud to the whole people in Jerusalem, around the 5th century BCE.

The Prophets were gathered next. By about 200 BCE, Jewish writers were already speaking of "the Law and the Prophets" as a set. The Writings took longest. Books like Esther, Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs were still being discussed by the rabbis in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE.

Jewish tradition remembers rabbis meeting at Yavneh, a town near the coast, after the Temple fell in 70 CE. The Mishnah records their debates about whether certain books "make the hands unclean," a phrase for holy books. Older scholars spoke of a council at Yavneh that closed the canon. Most scholars today think the process was slower and less formal.

What the debates show is that the community was asking careful questions. Which books belong? Which were written under prophecy, as the rabbis put it? By the 2nd century CE the list of twenty-four was settled, and it has not changed since.

Open a Hebrew Bible and the first thing you notice is direction. Hebrew is read from right to left, so the book opens from what an English reader would call the back. The alphabet has 22 letters, and every one of them is a consonant. In the oldest texts there were no vowel marks at all.

Hebrew words are built on roots, usually three letters. The root K-T-V has to do with writing. From it come ketuvim (writings), ketav (script) and katav (he wrote). Once you know a root, you can spot a family of related words across the whole Tanakh.

Reading without vowels sounds hard, and sometimes it is. The three letters D-V-R can be read as davar, a word, or as dever, a plague, or as dibber, he spoke. Readers used context and tradition to know which was meant. Later, as you will see, scholars added marks to fix the reading.

Hebrew names in the Tanakh often carry meaning. Genesis says Isaac was named for laughter, and Moses for being drawn out of water. When a translation gives you only the sound of a name, the wordplay is lost. That is one reason many students of the Tanakh learn some Hebrew.

Not every page of the Tanakh is Hebrew. About half of the book of Daniel is in Aramaic, from chapter 2 through chapter 7. So are parts of the book of Ezra, mostly letters to and from Persian kings. One verse of Jeremiah and two words in Genesis are Aramaic too.

Aramaic is a cousin of Hebrew. It uses the same alphabet and many similar words. In the centuries after the Babylonian exile, Aramaic was the everyday language across much of the Middle East. Many Jews spoke it at home and used Hebrew mainly for prayer and study.

That created a problem in the synagogue. The Torah was read in Hebrew, but not everyone understood it. So a translator would stand beside the reader and give each verse in Aramaic. These spoken translations were later written down. They are called Targums, from a word meaning translation.

The best known is Targum Onkelos on the Torah. It is more than a translation. Where the Hebrew says God’s hand or God’s anger, Onkelos often softens the picture, since Jewish tradition holds that God has no body. Reading a Targum shows you how ancient Jews understood the text, not just what it said.

For centuries the Hebrew Bible was copied with consonants only. The right way to read each word was passed down by teachers, mouth to ear. Then, between about the 7th and 10th centuries CE, scholars in Tiberias, by the Sea of Galilee, and in Babylonia set out to write that tradition down. They are called the Masoretes, from masorah, meaning what is handed on.

The Masoretes did not change the letters. Instead they added small dots and dashes under, above and inside them. These vowel points tell the reader which vowel to say. With them, D-V-R can only be read one way. The system used in Tiberias became the standard, and it is the one printed in Hebrew Bibles today.

They also added accent marks, called te'amim. These marks do three jobs at once. They show which syllable is stressed. They show how the verse breaks into phrases, like punctuation. And they tell the reader which musical notes to chant. You will learn more about that chanting later in the chapter.

The most respected Masoretic family was the Ben Asher family of Tiberias. Aaron ben Asher worked in the early 10th century. His text became the model for Jewish tradition and for later scholars. Maimonides, the great 12th-century scholar, wrote that he relied on a Ben Asher codex. He used it when writing his own Torah scroll.

Look at a page from a Masoretic codex and you see more than the Bible text. Around the edges, in tiny letters, run notes. This is the masorah. It is a kind of security system for the text. The notes say things like: this word appears four times spelled this way, or this is the middle letter of the Torah.

The Masoretes counted everything. They counted the verses in each book. They counted the words. They noted the exact middle verse of the Torah, in Leviticus, and the middle word. Why? If a copy had the right counts, the copyist could trust that nothing had been added or dropped.

The notes also record places where the reading tradition and the written letters differ. The written form is called ketiv, what is written. The spoken form is called qere, what is read. The scribe keeps the ketiv in the text and puts the qere in the margin. The reader says the qere aloud. Neither one is erased.

Modern scholars find the masorah valuable for a different reason. Because the notes freeze a snapshot of the text as it stood around 900 CE, they let scholars check later copies against it. The notes were meant to guard the text for the community. They also became a tool for the historian.

A scroll is long and hard to search. Around the 8th century, Jewish scribes began also copying the Bible into a codex, a book with pages. Scrolls stayed in use for the synagogue reading. Codices were for study, and they had room in the margins for the masorah.

The most famous is the Aleppo Codex, written in Tiberias around 930 CE. Tradition says Aaron ben Asher himself added its vowels and notes. Maimonides praised it. For about six hundred years it was kept in a synagogue in Aleppo, Syria. In 1947 the synagogue was attacked, and when the codex reached Israel in 1958 about a third of its pages were missing, including most of the Torah. What remains is in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

The Leningrad Codex was written in Cairo in 1008 CE, according to its own note. It is the oldest complete Masoretic Bible in the world. Since the 19th century it has been in the national library in St. Petersburg, Russia, which was called Leningrad for much of the 20th century. Most scholarly Hebrew Bibles today print its text.

Something surprising comes from comparing these codices with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are about a thousand years older. The Great Isaiah Scroll from about 125 BCE matches the Masoretic Isaiah in nearly every word. There are small differences in spelling and a few in wording. But the text the Masoretes fixed was very close to what scribes had copied a thousand years before.

Every synagogue keeps at least one Torah scroll in a cabinet called the ark. The scroll is not printed. It is written by hand by a sofer, a scribe trained for years in the rules of the work. Jewish law lays out those rules in detail, and most go back to the Talmud and the centuries after it.

The writing surface is parchment, made from the skin of a kosher animal such as a cow, goat or deer. The sheets are sewn together with thread made from animal sinew. A full Torah has about sixty sheets and is roughly the length of a school hallway when unrolled. The ink is black and made from a traditional recipe.

The scribe writes with a quill, usually from a turkey or goose feather. Before beginning, the scribe scores faint lines into the parchment so the letters sit straight. Each letter is formed in a set way. Some letters carry small crowns, called tagin. The scribe must copy from a correct model and may not write from memory.

The numbers are large. Jewish tradition counts 304,805 letters in a Torah scroll, and about 5,845 verses. A scribe writing full time may take a year or more to finish one scroll. That is why a scroll is costly, and why a community treats a new one like a member of the family, dancing it into the synagogue.

When a scroll is finished, the work is not over. A second expert checks every column against a model text. Today many checkers also use a computer program that scans the scroll and flags any letter whose shape looks wrong. A missing letter, an extra letter, or two letters touching makes the scroll pasul, unfit for use in the synagogue service.

Most mistakes can be fixed. The scribe scrapes the dry ink from the parchment and writes the letter again. But one kind of error is different. If the scribe has written one of the names of God by mistake, it may not be erased. Jewish tradition treats the divine name as too holy to scrape away. The whole sheet must be set aside and replaced.

Scrolls wear out. Ink cracks and flakes, parchment tears. A scroll that can no longer be repaired is not thrown in the trash. Because it holds God’s name, Jewish practice is to store it in a special room called a genizah, or to bury it in a cemetery with the same respect given to a person.

A genizah once gave historians a gift. In the 1890s, scholars opened the genizah of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo and found hundreds of thousands of pages, some a thousand years old. They included Bible texts, letters, contracts and lost books. A room meant for retiring worn pages turned out to be a treasure house of Jewish history.

In the synagogue, the Torah is not read in a speaking voice. It is chanted. The reader follows the te'amim, the accent marks the Masoretes recorded. Each mark stands for a short musical phrase. Strung together, they turn a verse into a melody. English-speaking Jews often call this trope, and learning it is a big part of preparing for a bar or bat mitzvah.

The chanting does real work. Because the marks also show where phrases begin and end, the melody tells the listener how the sentence is built. A rising tune means more is coming. A falling tune means the thought is done. A careful reader can hear the grammar of a verse.

Here is the catch: the scroll itself has no marks at all. No vowels, no accents, no punctuation. The reader must learn the vowels and the melody from a printed book and then chant from the bare letters. A helper follows along and corrects any slip. That is why a reader practices for weeks.

The tunes are not the same everywhere. Jews whose families came from Germany and Eastern Europe, called Ashkenazi, use one set of melodies. Jews from Spain, North Africa and the Middle East, called Sephardi and Mizrahi, use others. And the same marks are sung to a different tune for the Torah, for the Prophets, and for Esther on Purim.

Every Saturday morning, in synagogues around the world, the same part of the Torah is read aloud. That part is called the parashah, the portion. The Torah is divided into 54 portions. Read one a week, with some weeks doubled up, and the whole Torah is finished in a year.

Each portion is named for one of its first words. The first is Bereshit, "in the beginning." The portion about Noah is called Noach. The one where Abraham is told to leave home is Lekh Lekha, "go forth." Many Jews know the year by its portions. Others know it by months.

The cycle ends and begins on one day. On the holiday of Simchat Torah, "rejoicing in the Torah," the reader chants the last lines of Deuteronomy, where Moses dies. Then, without a pause, another reader begins Genesis 1. The scrolls are carried around the synagogue with singing and dancing.

Historians note that this yearly cycle was the custom of Babylonian Jews. Jews in the land of Israel once used a cycle of about three years. The Babylonian custom won out by the Middle Ages, and today nearly every community follows the one-year cycle.

The Torah reading is not the last reading of the morning. After it comes the haftarah, a passage from the Nevi’im, the Prophets. The word means something like conclusion or dismissal. It is usually a chapter or so, chanted to its own melody.

Each haftarah is matched to its week. When the Torah portion tells of Noah and the flood, the haftarah is from Isaiah 54. That chapter mentions "the waters of Noah." When the portion describes the building of the Mishkan, the desert sanctuary, the haftarah tells of Solomon building the Temple. On holidays the haftarah fits the day instead.

No one knows for sure when the custom began. It is already assumed in the Mishnah, around 200 CE, so it is old. A later story says it started when a foreign king banned Torah reading and Jews read the Prophets instead. Historians treat that story as a guess, not a fact.

The haftarah does something important for the shape of the Tanakh. Most of the Prophets are never read from a scroll in a yearly cycle the way the Torah is. The haftarah is where the synagogue hears Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos and Hosea, a piece at a time, all year long.

In Jewish practice, the Torah is read out loud in a group, not silently alone. A public reading needs a minyan, a quorum of ten adult Jews. In some communities, that means ten men. In many others today, women count too. Without a minyan, the scroll stays in the ark.

The reading is split into sections, and for each one a member is called up to the scroll. Being called up is an aliyah, from a word meaning going up. On Shabbat morning there are seven aliyot. The person called says a blessing, the reader chants, and the person says a closing blessing. It is an honor, and it is shared around.

A young person who reads from the Torah for the first time is marking a bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah, son or daughter of the commandment. Jewish tradition sets the age at thirteen for boys. For girls it is twelve in some communities and thirteen in others. The first bat mitzvah in the United States was Judith Kaplan’s, in New York in 1922.

Why read together? One answer from Jewish tradition is that the Torah was given to a whole people at Sinai, not to one person. Another is practical: a listener follows the reader and catches any slip, so the community, not just the reader, guards the text. Many Chicago synagogues also teach the reading to adults who never learned it as children.

The Tanakh leaves a lot out. It does not say what Isaac thought on the way up the mountain. It does not say why God chose Abraham. Jewish readers noticed these gaps early, and they answered them with midrash. The word comes from a root meaning to search or to seek. A midrash is what you find when you search a verse hard.

Midrash is not free invention. It starts from something in the text: an odd word, a repeated phrase, a detail that seems out of place. The rabbis asked why that detail was there. Their answers often took the form of a story. Those stories were collected in books such as Genesis Rabbah, edited around the 5th century CE.

There are two broad kinds. Midrash halakhah searches the Torah for law: how exactly to keep Shabbat, or what counts as fair weights in a market. Midrash aggadah searches for story and meaning: what Sarah said, what the angels argued about, why the letter bet begins the Torah. This chapter mostly deals with aggadah.

Jewish tradition does not treat every midrash as history. Rabbis often gave several midrashim on one verse, some of them contradicting each other. The point was to open the text, not to close it. A student who learns a midrash learns one way that readers long ago heard a verse.

Ask many people to tell a story about Abraham, and they will tell this one. Young Abraham is left in charge of his father’s idol shop. He smashes all the idols but the biggest one and puts a stick in its hand. When his father comes back, Abraham says the big idol did it. His father says idols cannot do anything. "Then why do you worship them?" Abraham asks.

Here is the surprise: that story is not in the Tanakh. Open Genesis 12 and you find God telling Abram to leave his land, with no reason given. The Torah says nothing about idols, a shop or a stick. The story comes from Genesis Rabbah, a collection of midrash edited about a thousand years after the events it describes.

So what gap is it filling? The rabbis asked why God spoke to Abraham and not to someone else. The Torah does not say. The midrash answers: because Abraham had already figured out, on his own, that idols were empty. It also builds on a hint in the text. Joshua 24:2 says Abraham’s father, Terah, served other gods.

The story has traveled far. A version of it appears in the Qur’an, where the prophet Ibrahim breaks the idols and blames the largest. Jewish and Muslim readers each tell it in their own way. For a student of the Tanakh, the lesson is to know which stories are in the text and which come from its readers.

A modern reader might expect a commentary to give one right answer. Rabbinic midrash does not work that way. On a single verse, Genesis Rabbah may give the views of three or four rabbis, one after another, with "another interpretation" between them. None is marked as the winner.

The rabbis had a picture for this. The Talmud compares a verse to a rock struck by a hammer: one blow, many sparks. A verse, they said, can carry many meanings at once. That did not mean anything goes. Each reading had to grow from the words and fit the rest of the Torah.

This habit shaped Jewish reading for good. Later commentators quote midrash freely, choose among midrashim, or reject one and explain why. A reader of Rashi learns to ask which midrash he picked and what problem in the verse it solved. The text stays open, and every generation adds to the conversation.

Historians see something else in the many-answers habit. It let a tradition change while feeling continuous. A new question could be answered from an old verse, and the answer took its place beside older ones. That is one reason the Tanakh has stayed alive for its readers across so many centuries.

Jewish readers have long spoken of levels in a text. The first is peshat, the plain sense. What do the words mean in their context, in ordinary Hebrew, in this story? If Genesis says Jacob wrestled with a man until dawn, the peshat asks who that man is in the story and what the fight is about.

The second is derash, the searched-out meaning. This is the level of midrash. It asks what more the words can hold. Why does the text say "a man" and not name him? Why until dawn? A derash might read the wrestler as an angel, or as Esau’s guardian, or as Jacob’s own fear.

The Talmud sets a rule: a verse never loses its plain sense. Whatever else a reader finds, the peshat still stands. The medieval commentators took that rule seriously. Rashi’s grandson Rashbam, in the 12th century, wrote that his grandfather admitted he would have written his commentary differently, with more attention to peshat, if he had had time.

Neither level is treated as the enemy of the other. A good reader in this tradition moves between them. First get the plain sense right. Then ask what the tradition has heard in it. A student who skips the peshat may build a tower on sand. A student who stops at the peshat may miss what the text has meant to its readers.

By the 13th century, some Jewish thinkers had added two more levels to peshat and derash. Remez means hint. It is the level where a verse points to an idea beyond its story, the way a parable points to a lesson. Sod means secret. It is the level of Jewish mysticism, called Kabbalah, where readers found hidden teachings about God in the words and even the letters.

Put the four together, peshat, remez, derash, sod, and take the first letter of each. They spell PaRDeS, a Hebrew word for orchard. The word choice is not an accident. The Talmud tells of four rabbis who entered the pardes, a mystical experience. Only Rabbi Akiva came out unharmed.

That story is a warning as well as an invitation. The rabbis who told it thought deep reading was powerful and a little dangerous. The four-level scheme kept the plain sense as the ground floor. A reader could climb, but was expected to know which floor he was on.

Historians note that the four levels are a medieval system, not something the Tanakh itself describes. Christian readers in the Middle Ages had a similar four-level scheme of their own. The idea that a sacred text has layers was shared across traditions, even when the readings themselves were very different.

The best-known Jewish commentator is Rashi. The name is short for Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki. He was born in 1040 in Troyes, a town in northern France, and died there in 1105. He studied in the Rhineland, came home, and wrote commentaries on nearly the whole Tanakh and on most of the Talmud. Tradition says he made his living from wine.

Rashi’s method is easy to spot. He quotes a word or phrase from the verse, then explains it in a few lines. Often he asks a short question the verse raises and answers it. When a midrash solves the problem, he brings it. When the plain sense is enough, he stays with that. He wrote that he came to give the peshat and the midrash that settles the words of the text.

His comment on Genesis 1:1 is famous. Quoting an earlier rabbi, he asks why the Torah begins with creation instead of with the first law given to Israel, in Exodus 12. His answer is that the story of creation shows that the whole earth belongs to God, who may give a land to whom He chooses. Readers have argued about that comment for nine hundred years.

Rashi’s commentary became the standard first companion to the Torah in Jewish study. It was the first dated Hebrew book ever printed, in 1475 in Italy. Ever since, it has been printed beside the text in a special typeface called Rashi script. A Jewish child learning Torah has usually learned Rashi at the same time.

In 1517 a Christian printer in Venice named Daniel Bomberg published a Hebrew Bible with commentaries around the text. A second, fuller edition came out in 1525. A Jewish scholar named Jacob ben Hayyim edited it. This Mikraot Gedolot, the Great Scriptures, set the pattern. It is the page you saw at the start of this chapter.

The layout is a conversation across time. The verse sits in the center. The Targum runs beside it. Rashi takes one margin. Around and below come Ibn Ezra, a 12th-century Spanish grammarian who often reads for the plain sense and pokes at Rashi; Ramban, a 13th-century Spanish rabbi who argues with both; and others. The reader watches them disagree.

The Talmud shows the older root of this habit. Rabbis in the Talmud rarely state an idea without a verse. They say "as it is said" or "as it is written" and quote the Tanakh. Sometimes the verse plainly supports the point. Sometimes the connection is a clever reading of one word. Either way, the verse is the anchor.

For a student, the page teaches a skill. Read the verse. Read Rashi’s question. See how Ibn Ezra answers it differently. Ask who is reading for peshat and who for derash. In Jewish study this is often done in pairs, a chavruta, two students reading and arguing together. The page is built for that.

In many settings, arguing with a sacred text sounds like disrespect. In Jewish tradition it is often the opposite. The pattern starts inside the Tanakh. In Genesis 18, Abraham hears that Sodom will be destroyed and pushes back. He asks whether the Judge of all the earth will not do justly, and bargains down from fifty righteous people to ten. The text does not scold him.

The rabbis made argument a method. Pirkei Avot, a collection of rabbinic sayings, teaches that an argument for the sake of Heaven will last. Its example is Hillel and Shammai, two teachers whose schools disagreed for generations. The Talmud records both sides of hundreds of debates. Often it keeps the losing view too.

The most famous story is about an oven. In the Talmud, Rabbi Eliezer argues a point of law against all the other sages. He calls on miracles, and even a voice from heaven agrees with him. Rabbi Joshua answers with a verse from Deuteronomy: the Torah is not in heaven. The sages rule by majority. The story ends with God, as the rabbis tell it, laughing and saying, "My children have defeated Me."

Historians read the oven story as the rabbis claiming that interpretation belongs to the community of readers, not to miracles. Jewish tradition reads it as a teaching about how the Torah lives in study. Either way, the lesson for this chapter is the same. To question a verse closely, and to argue about it with care, is to take it seriously. That is how the Tanakh has been read for two thousand years.