Britannica Encyclopedia of World Religions by Unknown

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that “second Torah” and produced not merely counterpart exegeses to those of

the Christians but counterpart compilations of such exegeses as well.

Symbol. As the generative symbol of the literary culture of the sages, the To-

rah stands for the system of Rabbinic Judaisms as a whole. The Torah was sym-

bolic of the doctrine that Moses received the Torah at Mount Sinai in two media,

written and oral. The written Torah was transmitted and is now contained in the

Pentateuch. The oral Torah was formulated for ease in memorization and then

transmitted through sages and their disciples, from Moses and Joshua to the most

current generation of rabbis today.

That doctrine of the dual Torah, that is, of the Torah in two media, came about

in response to the problem of explaining the standing and authority of the Mish-

nah. But broadening the symbol of the Torah was actually accomplished around

the figure of the sage. The symbol of the Torah accounted for the sages’ authori-

ty—the sage being the one in possession of God’s oral law. Only later on in the

pages of the Talmud Yerushalmi did the doctrine of the dual Torah reach expres-

sion. So in the evolution of the documents of the canon of Judaism, the generative

symbol of Torah reveals a striking change. Beginning as a rather generalized ac-

count of how sages’ teachings relate to God’s will, the symbol of Torah gained

concrete form in its application to the dual Torah, written and oral, Pentateuch

and Mishnah. What once stood for a few specific books came to stand for all the

teachings and laws of Israel, as well as the system that taught and promulgated

those laws.

Torah thus took on a multiplicity of meaning: standing for a kind of human be-

ing, connoting a social status and group, and referring to a type of social relation-

ship. It further came to denote a legal status, differentiating things and persons,

actions and status, as well as “revealed truth.” In all, the main points of insis-

tence of the whole of Israel’s life and history come to full symbolic expression in

that single word. If people wanted to explain how they would be saved, they

would use the word Torah. Torah stood for salvation and accounted for Israel’s

this-worldly condition and the hope, for both individual and nation alike, of life

in the world to come. For the kind of Judaism under discussion, therefore, the

word Torah stood for everything, symbolizing at once the whole.

After the appearance of the Mishnah, the Torah moved, in two significant stag-

es, from standing for a concrete, material object, a scroll, to symbolizing a broad

range of relationships. The first stage is marked off by tractate Abot, the second

by the Talmud Yerushalmi. As to the former, Abot regards the study of Torah as

what a sage does, while the substance of Torah is what a sage says, and likewise

what a sage says falls into the classification of Torah. At issue in Abot is not To-

rah but the authority of the sage. It is the sage’s standing that transforms a saying

into a Torah-saying, placing it into the classification of Torah. Abot then stands

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