 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
[ 40 ] the rise and fall of soul and self
for “sacred writings”). The Torah, which is also called the Pentateuch (Greek
for “five books”), consists of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, from Gen-
esis to Deuteronomy. Tradition has it that the Torah was written by Moses
under divine inspiration. Parts of the Torah were in use by the Jews by 600 b.c.e.,
the whole by 400 b.c.e. It contains accounts of how the world and its creatures
were created. It also includes a history of the flight of the Jewish people, under
the leadership of Moses, from their bondage in Egypt to the Holy Land of
Israel, where they settled. And it lays down many “laws,” including the Ten
Commandments. These laws were intended to govern virtually every aspect of
Jewish life.2
In addition to the Hebrew Bible, the Jews also wrote commentaries on the
Torah, known as the Talmud (literally
teachings ) and commentaries on the Talmud,
known as the Mishnah. These consist of biblical interpretation and practical appli-
cations of Scripture, as well as parables and stories that present Jewish ethics in
more humanistic (less legal) ways. The Mishnah also includes discussion of some
topics, such as the immortality of the soul and its superiority to the body, which
receive scant treatment in the Hebrew Bible but were taken up later by Jewish
philosophers.
The Talmud exists in more than one version. The one completed in Babylon
at the end of the fifth century c.e. came to be accepted by subsequent Jews as
the basic document fixing Jewish law and ritual. Explicit in this version of the
Talmud is the belief both in the immortality of the soul and in the resurrec-
tion of the body. For instance, in the Birkhot Hashahar, or “Early Morning
Benedictions,” the following plea occurs: “My God, the soul that You have
given me is pure. You created it, You fashioned it, You breathed it into me,
You safeguard it within me, and You will eventually take it from me and
return it to me in time to come. . . . Praised are You Lord who restores souls to
dead bodies.”3
Jewish philosophy, as opposed to the sort of scriptural commentary and
elaboration found in the Talmud, began in the Diaspora community of the
Hellenistic world, where beginning in the second century b.c.e. Jewish thinkers
produced a philosophical literature in Greek. The point of departure for this
philosophy was the attempt to understand the meaning of events related in the
Hebrew Bible, especially what these events reveal about the ongoing relation-
ship of the Jewish people and their God. Whereas Greek philosophers went out
of their way to divorce their new philosophy from their old religion, Jewish
philosophers went out of their way to integrate their old religion with their new
philosophy. Christian and Islamic thinkers did the same. This task, then,
 |