Through June, we will be wrapping up our study of the Torah. With that in mind, I thought this would be the perfect time to explore exactly what the Torah is and why it matters to us.

Technically, the Torah consists of the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. While Christians sometimes use the term "Torah" to refer to the Old Testament as a whole, it actually only applies to these first five books.

Traditionally, Moses is credited with writing them. While this claim isn’t explicitly made within the scripture itself, appearing instead in the Talmud (a collection of Jewish rabbinic teachings), these books have been attributed to Moses since the time of Christ.

In fact, during Jesus’ earthly ministry, many influential Jewish groups viewed only the Torah as authoritative Scripture. The other books of the Hebrew Bible were seen as valuable and meritorious, but not on the same level as these first five books. This highlights the immense weight the Torah holds.

These books serve as the foundational core of the Jewish faith, which means they are the building blocks of our faith, too, since Christianity grows directly out of Judaism. For the earliest Christians in the decades following Jesus’ resurrection, the Torah was their primary Holy Scripture, as the books of the New Testament had not yet been written!

While the laws and genealogies in these books might seem antiquated to us today, they are still vital to our spiritual journey. Without the foundation laid in the Torah, we cannot fully understand our faith. It is here that God first formed His covenant relationship with humanity, a relationship that was built upon by each generation until its ultimate fulfillment in Christ. To have the fullest understanding of our relationship with God today, we must understand the Torah.