Volume 67, Issue 2

The article assumes a formal difference of understanding of the Torah in Judaism and the biblical theology of the Old Testament. The Jewish understanding of the Torah as a self-contained complex of meaning could be identified by the fact that law and legal regulations formed the actual core of the cult and communal life. The leading idea therefore is the Torah as a corpus of law and as the spiritual-religious center of Judaism in history. Events and narrations would be secondary. In the center of the Torah there would be not the personal luck of the individual, but the means of existence of the people of Israel.

“Tora” is to be seen as an originally Jewish key concept interpreting the first section of the Hebrew Bible. Adopting this concept within Christian Theology offers a range of fresh learning opportunities to Christian learners - it would help them to appreciate Jewish reading of the Bible, it would stress a canonical approach as well as a theological interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. The author of this contribution underlines such an adoption to be a helpful tool for raising the status of Old Testament texts in RE.

The article traces the different reception histories of the Book of Leviticus in Judaism and Christianity. By overcoming the ecclesiastical “Antileviticus“ (Krochmalnik), the Third Book of Moses gained a new position in Theology and church life. Subsequently, the author shows varied ways and contexts in which the “Mitte der Thora“ (Zenger) can be made accessible, preached and taught for Christianity.

The article deals with the question how the Torah can become a relevant topic in learning and teaching processes in religious education. In doing so, the motif of „godly and humanly commemoration“ is used to elaborate on the idea that learning is commemoration in a two-fold sense: „It is the commemoration of god and the commemoration of the human being, in which the shared memory of the human being and god form a oneness.“ Derived from this idea the thought is developed, that such a learning remembrance is on the one hand aimed at the interpretation of the present, but on the other hand also aimed at creating perspectives for the future. Commemoration aims at concretion in the present with a glance at the future.

The importance of the Torah for both present and future is developed by using patterns of interpretations formulated by referring to Emmanuel Levinas’ thoughts on the idea of „Election“. According to Levinas, the task of Judaism is to take responsibility and accountability for others in cases where a different rule is not available or applicable. The ideas of Levinas oscillate between particular-historical and universalistic-moral perspectives. The idea of advocatory learning therefore is characterized by the deeply rooted trust in God as a first step and critical reflection as a second step.

The research report introduces different models, which were - and are still - used to explain the formation of the „Torah“ in the historical-critical biblical scholarship of the Old Testament. Giving the example of the story of Abraham and the tale of Jacob, exemplary analyses for further acts of interpretation for the different texts are outlined, drawing the conclusion that the “concept of the Torah“ was not applied to the Law at the end of its genesis, but was always part of its „genetic code“.

This article argues that a methodically instructed unabridged reading of biblical books (Unabridged Reading) is specifically useful for a sustainable acquisition of competencies in religious education classes, therefore using a compilation of the fragmentary use of texts from the Torah in books for religious education and curricula for all classes. Unabridged reading matches with narrative theology as it is especially visible in the Torah. In this context different models for unabridged reading (Obst, Müller, Zimmermann/Weißphal, Dern, Miethke) are introduced and discussed in this article.