The 5 Books of Moses

I finally finished the 5 Books of Moses in The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version.

First of all - I'm commenting on what I read. Not on modern Judaism or any other religion based on these books or the books that follow these.

Obviously I went into reading this with a reasonably strong bias. But even accounting for that as much as I can, I was quite surprised by what's actually in the Torah. First of all, I was expecting it to be somewhat boring, but just in an old stories are boring kind of way. I had no idea how many long lists of details there would be. I can sort of understand the detailed instructions for making an arc or how to diagnose and deal with leprosy, but long lists of names and ages of people who don't show up anywhere else or exactly what animal to sacrifice for a given event made reading the Torah very boring. Deuteronomy was also a bit odd since it was largely a recap of the previous books (as if it wasn't boring enough the first time), but some places it was consistent with the previous books and some places it wasn't.

Another bit of a shock was that prayer is barely mentioned. I sort of knew that prayer had replaced animal sacrifice. But since prayer is one of the biggest aspects of modern Judaism it seems like a bit of a disconnect. Especially since there are so many rules about who, when, where, how to pray. Which as far as I can tell the only aspect of that from the Torah is that it had a completely different very specific set of rules about who, when, where, how to sacrifice animals. It almost seems like the lesson taken from the Torah is that there should be lots of specific rules.

Once you screen out all the lists of details you're left with some stories and some declarations by The Lord. Stories are obviously open to interpretation so I'm willing to grant that even if some are disturbing and some seem to have really bad moral lessons and portray The Lord as jealous, vengeful, petty, short-tempered, and fallible, people can interpret them how they want. But the other big shock is the declarations by The Lord are very direct and while some of them have good morals, I'd claim that at a minimum the majority would be considered very immoral now. And The Lord is "loving" as long as you do exactly what he tells you and never doubt him, but stray a bit and he'll do horrible, horrible things to you. And sure you could claim that having it say a bunch of stuff forces the reader to sort out their own morals, but if that's all the Torah is, it could be replaced by a two page list of actions of varying degrees of good and bad. Although if the method for diagnosing leprosy is valid then you should also include that since up till very recently that could have been very useful (of course curing it by sacrificing animals could get left out).

I'm also a bit surprised by how not timeless it is. As Hitchens pointed out there is a whole lot of human history and the Torah really zeros in on a very specific place and period of time - at this point I'm sick of hearing The Lord go on and on about he delivered the people from Egypt - why not find something else to brag about, like creating the universe (not even to get into who put the people in Egypt to begin with).

I could go on and on, but I'll cut myself off here. Mostly because I know there is a huge amount of scholarship on understanding the Torah and I have made no effort to read any of it (and at this point don't plan to - I'm just so bored from reading the Torah I need to switch to a different topic). But I would encourage people to take a look and see what's really in there. And don't just look at Genesis and Exodus and figure the whole thing is a collection of stories. Get to Numbers and Deuteronomy where the lists of rules get into full swing.

I will say that people have questioned exactly what translation of the Torah is the right one to read. Obviously by reading one that is part of the bible I got different wording than a Jewish Torah would have. But I would claim that even if you picked up perfectly copied scrolls and read it in Hebrew you would be reading an interpretation. Because language changes a lot. Even if you just go back a few hundred years words and phrases have changed significantly, much less going back several thousand years. So I would claim that no one should be expecting to get the exact words or phrasing (or at least claim to know the exact meaning of those words). Although I will admit that it would have made more sense to get a Torah rather than just buy whatever they had at the book store.