Читать книгу The Torah - Max Margolis - Страница 5

According to all critics, regardless of the schools to which they belong, the Torah forms a single work, which is represented, even at the present day, by the synagogal Scroll of the Law; nor does history know of any other Torah scroll. The fivefold division of the Pentateuch was due to purely external causes, and not to a diversity of content; for in volume the Torah forms more than a fourth of all the books of the Bible, and contains, in round numbers, 300,000 letters of the 1,100,000 in the entire Bible. A work of such compass far exceeded the normal size of an individual scroll among the Jews; and the Torah accordingly became a Pentateuch, thus being analogous to the Homeric poems, which originally formed a single epic, but which were later split into twenty-four parts each.