Why the Pentateuch?

[nfinke]

Why do Catholics call the Torah the Pentateuch? Torah means law or teachings in Hebrew, neither of which seems to be a compromising name.

I understand Pentateuch means “five books”, but at some point someone had to decide “yeah we’ve called it the Torah for the last 1300 years, but I’m going to make this new name the standard.” What was the point? What makes Pentateuch better or Torah worse?

 

[SeekerOfTruth7]

I am not an expert on this, but i believe the Torah was called the Pentateuch first in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. There is was called Pentateuch, which is Greek for five books. But like I said I am not an expert and this is just what came to mind when I read this. I don’t think there was a specific reasoning like the one you mentioned. Just like Septuagint means the seventy, and that was the name for the entire Tanakh, so they called the Torah the Pentateuch. It was just the way the Greek scholars who translated it named it. Same as how we Catholics tend to call the Tanakh the Old Testament. I don’t think there was some plan to make Pentateuch a new standard.

God Bless

 

[nfinke]

Ah I didn’t realize it came from the septuigent. Interesting.

I could see the reason we’d use Old Testament, because it differentiates it from the New Testament.

 

[SeekerOfTruth7]

Here is a post on it from wikipedia about the Torah: “Christian scholars usually refer to the first five books of the Hebrew Bible as the ‘Pentateuch’ (Greek: πεντάτευχος, pentáteuchos , ‘five scrolls’), a term first used in the Hellenistic Judaism of Alexandria.”
It was in Alexandria that they translated the Septuagint, which is where the name Pentateuch would first be used. But like I said, I am no scholar on this, and I could be wrong.

God Bless

 

[phil19034]

I too am not an expert, however:

“Pentateuch” was the term used by Greek Jews in the Septuagint.

So that’s simply the term that stuck.

Furthermore, the Jewish people (after the Resurrection) went on a Hebrew only purification of the Jewish faith to eliminate non-Hebrew terms.

So it’s quite possible that Jews during Jesus’s time used BOTH words interchangeably - esp among the Greek Jews & in Greek settlements in Israel.

 

[BartholomewB]

Not all the five books of the Torah kept their original Hebrew names. Exodus, for example, is called “Shamot”, meaning “Names”, and Numbers is called “Ba-Midbar”, meaning “In the Desert”. In both cases these are words that occur in the first line, at the beginning of the book. The Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria who used the Septuagint chose to give the books new titles, that were more descriptive and conveyed a clearer idea of what the books were about.

 

[OurLadyofSorrows]

the Pentateuch?

5 books = the Pentateuch. They also make up the Torah. Or you could say the Torah, the way the Jews were required to live, by God, is laid out in the Pentateuch.