Torah means teaching, not law, and a translation choice changed that
The five books opening the Hebrew Bible are usually called the Law in English. The Hebrew root actually means to guide or to teach. Greek translators in Alexandria picked the word nomos, and centuries of Bibles followed, quietly reshaping how outsiders understood Judaism's most sacred text.
The Torah gathers Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, also known as the Pentateuch, a Greek label meaning five scrolls that arose among Hellenistic Jews in Alexandria. Its Hebrew book names come from their opening words: Genesis is Bereshit, In the beginning, while Numbers is Bemidbar, In the desert. The English names follow the Septuagint; Numbers, for example, takes its title from two censuses of the Israelites.
The story runs from the creation of the world through Abraham's journey to Canaan, the descent into Egypt, the escape led by Moses and the covenant at Mount Sinai, and it closes with Moses dying just before Israel crosses into the Promised Land. Laws are woven into the narrative, some stated outright like the Ten Commandments, others embedded in episodes such as the Passover instructions in Exodus. Leviticus adds rules on clean and unclean food, the Day of Atonement and a moral code sometimes called the Holiness Code.
In rabbinic usage the word stretches further. Besides the written books there is the Oral Torah, interpretations said to have been passed down across generations and now found in the Talmud and Midrash. Rabbinic tradition holds that Moses received all of it from God, some at Sinai and some at the Tabernacle. One Midrash even claims the Torah existed before the world and served as its blueprint. Modern scholarship, though the question is widely debated, tends to see the text as a unified work built from earlier sources and largely finished by the Persian period; Exodus, for instance, is thought to have taken shape during the Babylonian exile of the 6th century BCE.
A scribe called a sofer writes each scroll by hand in Hebrew. Portions are read aloud in synagogue on Monday and Thursday mornings and on Saturdays, and most Jewish movements now accept any ten adult Jews as the quorum for a reading. The text is sacred beyond Judaism too: Samaritans keep their own version in their own script, and Muslims revere it as the Tawrah.
Source: Torah
