Who knows where this blog will lead? I’m going to start it by asking the basic question: “What is the Torah all about?” It seems to me that there is no simple answer. On the one hand, the reader could say, “It’s about God–the Creator–and about God’s relationship with Israel,” which would be true but that leaves aside the question of the rest of humankind. After all, the Torah does not begin with a story about how God created Israel; that doesn’t arise until Exodus 14 and after; it begins with a narrative about God creating the entire cosmos and then assigning humankind to be its caretakers. So, we might then say that the Torah is about God, creation, and humankind, which would be true–but then that way of putting the issue doesn’t say much about Israel. So, I’ll try putting it this way: The Torah is about God–the Creator–and God’s relationship with humankind and Israel.
The Judahites of 587 BCE feared that God had either lost control of the cosmos or that God had abandoned them, and by extension, the cosmos they lived in. Either way, the Judahites faced the possibility that the universe was about to return to primeval chaos. If the Torah began to emerge and develop into what we now have, in part, as a response to the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, then the Torah must have some thematic purpose that relates primarily to a theology of creation. That the Torah, therefore, begins with creation accounts is not because that seems the most likely place to begin, but because the creation accounts provide the initial thematic key to interpreting the Torah, namely, that God is Creator. That is why I framed my initial question above by including the qualifier “—the Creator—“ after referring to God. The “primacy effect” has the task of keeping this one single theological datum on the reader’s mind throughout the Torah.
Given all this, the Torah is nevertheless a complicated narrative—and a long one. Its length and complexity seems to belie the simplicity of the general comment that The Torah is about God–the Creator–and God’s relationship with humankind and Israel. However, I’m going to go with this as a guide, not as an iron-clad template to force on the narrative, but as a way of shaping or toning my thinking about more specific themes. The Torah is, thus, bubbling with a variety of what one might call secondary themes such as fertility (Sarah and Rachel cannot bear children), sibling rivalry (Abel and Cain, Jacob and Esau), Israel’s/Jacob’s relationship with the Canaanites (the enigmatic story of Dinah and the Shechemites). The theme of blessing is sewn into the narrative beginning in Gen. 1:28 and running through Gen.12:1-3; 26:4; 28:14; 30:29, 30 et. al. Readers might also think of the narratives that portray Israel as complaining (Exodus 16:2; Numbers 20:3, 4) as relating to the theme of human intransigency in the face of divine provision. The diffusion of sub-themes testifies to the Torah’s concern to be relevant in every human situation.
There is a glaring omission of a theme in the above comments and that is the theme of covenant. The Sinai Covenant takes up more space in the Torah than do the stories of creation. The material in Exodus 20-Numbers 10 is a huge chunk of text that sets forth the stipulations of the covenant. By virtue of the sheer amount of space the Torah gives to the Sinai Covenant, would not it be more to the point to say that the Torah is about the Covenant God—Yahweh–and Israel as opposed to saying that the Torah is about God–the Creator–and God’s relationship with humankind and Israel? Does the Sinai Covenant subordinate creation as the over-arching theme of the Torah? Or could it be the other way around? Which is more important for determining theme: the amount of space a narrative gives to a certain component or the sequence in which the components are arranged? You can guess how I would answer that question.