It's a remarkable revolution: he talks, they listen. D'varim means "words", and the book relates all the words shared by the once wordless Moshe with the children of the Bamidbar generation. The Torah's final book is D'varim (Deuteronomy). Had the Torah ended here, as some scholars suggest it once did, it would have been a very different book.and we would be a very different people. Filled with screaming and shouting and whining, it is the noisiest, most disturbing book in the Bible. And finally, ironically, he is betrayed by God.and for what?.for hitting the rock instead of speaking to it! But what else could be expected? Nowhere in Bamidbar do words function properly! In Bamidbar, there are no shared words.
Everyone in his life betrays him: his people, his tribe, even his own family. The tragedy of Bamidbar falls heaviest on Moshe. The base physical desires of hunger, thirst, and sexual lust overcome the Vayikra vision of the people's holiness and duty. Every tie that binds the People Israel falls apart: The driving dream of the Promised Land is violated by the people's fear and doubt. But more than the geographic wilderness, this book describes a social wasteland. Sinai, through the wilderness wanderings of the Israelites to the boundaries of the Promised Land. Va'yikra, (Leviticus) the book we begin this week, translates "and He called." which is precisely the book's content: God's call to the people Israel to attain holiness - to live up to God's dream to become a "nation of priest and a holy people", and Israel's response through mitzvot and worship.īamidbar, (Numbers) means "in the wilderness." The book's story takes us from Mt. But at the center of Sh'mot are those events that give us our identity as a people: the Exodus from Egypt and the Giving (and Receiving) of Torah on Mt.
Sh'mot, (Exodus) means "names", because the book opens with names of Jacob's clan who went down into Egypt. More, B'reshit sets the foundation of Jewish faith - our fundamental attitudes about God, the world, the human being, nature, gender, family, and evil. But by some powerful coincidence, these randomly chosen names capture and express the character and content of each book:ī'reshit, (Genesis) is a book of beginnings - recounting the origins of the world, of humanity, and of Israel. How do the books of the Torah get their names? It's really rather arbitrary: Each name is simply the first significant word found in the first lines of the book.
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