Though most frequently translated into English as 'law,' scholars now recognize that such a translation is quite misleading, opening the door to such misguided comparisons in which the law is likened to the legal provisions that give a police the authority to issue a summon to a speeding driver. The word torah means basically "teachings" or "instructions," whether this is a father or mother instructing their children, a teacher his students, or God instructing Israel.
As Israel became a nation and entered into covenant with Yahweh, Israel was given a corpus of instructions at Sinai. These instructions were a gift of grace, given by Yahweh to help Israel live the good life. As Deuteronomy repeatedly avers, to live life without torah is comparable to death; "choose life," Moses urges Israel (Deut 30:19). These torah, together with Moses' expositions on them, as well as the pre-history of the Hebrew people in what we now know as the book of Genesis, became a recognizable and acknowledged collection that came to be called the torah (i.e., the first five books of Moses, or the Pentateuch). Torah—in both senses of the word—therefore, encompasses more than just the moral-ethical and ceremonial laws of do's and do-not's, but includes history, sapential reflections, poetic celebrations and exhorations. As divine revelation, to know the torah is, therefore, to know the heartbeat of God.
Shocked and smittened by the horror of the exile—something the prophets were quite insistent would come because of Israel's covenant unfaithfulness—Israel turned to the torah with great adamance upon their restoration to the land. In a process we can see beginning with Ezra and Nehemiah, the torah soon became, not only a covenant document, but also a national polity. More and more the ethical elements of the torah acquired legal and forensic shapes. Instead of torah, 'instructions,' they became nomos, 'laws.' Covenant faithfulness became, sadly, a matter of satisfying the letter of the over-defined interpretations and provisions of the religious elite, that—unfortunatelys—left out much of the grace of divine presence that underpins the torah of the original covenant. It is the genius of Jesus that he rescued them from the restricting confines of these Pharasiac clothings in whihc they have been put and took the torah back into the freedom of true communion with and living after God's heart.
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