The Torah Part I: Creation to Adam & Eve

The Torah is the name given to the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. It is by far the most important collection of books ever written.

Without the Torah, humanity would not know about the God most human beings worship. Without the Torah, there would be no Old Testament and no New Testament—in other words, there would be no Bible. And there would be no Quran. So, without the Torah there would be no Judaism, no Christianity, and no Islam.

Without the Torah, there would be no Western civilization.

Without the Torah, we would never have heard of the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, Moses, the Exodus, the Ten Commandments, or even a loving God.

It is the Torah that gave humanity the idea that every human being is precious—because, in the words of the Torah, we are all “created in God’s image.”

The most famous moral rule we have—“Love your neighbor as yourself”—is from the Torah.

So, what exactly is the Torah about?

It is about six basic things:

1. The Torah is a book that tells stories about events, most of which took place more than three thousand years ago.

2. The Torah is a book about God: Who is God? What does God want from us? How can we relate to Him?

3. The Torah is a book about human beings, especially about the problem of human nature. 

4. The Torah is a book about a Chosen People, a small nation known as the Jews whom God chose to receive the Torah, to live by its laws, and to spread its teachings to the rest of humanity.

5. The Torah is a book of laws, 613 of them, divided into two parts: laws governing morality—how people should behave toward other people, and laws governing how people should relate to God.

6. Finally, the Torah is a book that teaches wisdom, the most important thing people can possess. Without wisdom, people cannot be good. Good intentions do not produce good people or good actions. In fact, without wisdom good intentions are worse than worthless; they often produce evil. 

The Torah begins with the story of Creation. Though the Torah is a Jewish book, it doesn’t begin with the story of the Jews. In fact, no Jew shows up until Chapter 12. 

The Torah doesn’t begin with Jews because the Torah begins with God, and the God of the Torah is the God of all people.

Unlike every other creation story, the Creator in Genesis is in no way human. This God is not born, doesn’t engage in sex with another god or with a human being, is not part of nature, is moral, and cares about human beings.

In every religion before, and at the time of the Torah, gods were born, had sex, were not moral, did not particularly care for, or about, human beings, and were part of nature—which is why human beings worshiped nature and nature-gods.

This last point is extremely important because nature is amoral, while the God of the Torah is moral. Nature doesn’t say, “Love your neighbor;” God does. Nature says, “Let the fittest survive.”

In the Creation story, the last thing God creates is man, or to be more precise, woman, who therefore might be considered the pinnacle of creation. God places the man, Adam, and the woman, Eve, in the Garden of Eden where life is pain-free and there is no death. 

Adam and Eve are allowed to eat of every tree in the Garden except the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God tells them that if they do, they will cease to be immortal; they will die. But the human beings disobey God and eat from that tree.

Whether the story is believed literally or taken as an allegory of the human condition is not important. What is important is to understand why human beings would eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, knowing the consequences if they did so. Philosophers, writers, and theologians—of every religion and no religion—have discussed this question for thousands of years.

Of the many possible reasons, here are two: 

One is that human beings prefer free will—the ability to choose between good and evil—with its inevitable suffering and death to an immortal, painless life without free will. 

The second reason is that human beings not only want to know good and evil, they want to determine what is good and evil. They want, in the words of the Adam and Eve story, to be “like God.”

But whereas the first reason is noble, the second reason is not. Human beings lose their way when they think that they, not God, are the source of morality. It’s a story that plays out again and again in the Torah, and throughout human history.

I’m Dennis Prager, author of a five-volume commentary on the Torah, The Rational Bible.