When people talk about the first five Books of The Old Testament, you’ll commonly hear the words “Pentateuch” and “Torah” thrown around. But what exactly do they mean?
Well, first of all, “Torah” comes from the Hebrew word Torah, which literally means “instruction” or “law”. This was the word that the Jews would typically use to talk about the “five Books of Moses”.
But, when Alexander the Great spread the Greek language across the region of Israel, this new class of Greek speaking Jews also wanted a word in Greek to refer to these first five Books. So, they named it the Pentateuch, which just means “the five books”. You can clearly see the root word Pente, which is Greek for “five” (think how a “pentagon” has five sides). And the teuch part is from Greek teukhos, which means “book” or “a case for scrolls”.
However, the Jews also had another way to refer to these Books in Hebrew. They could call them the Chamishah Chumshei Torah, which means “the five fifths of the Torah”. (they could also just call it the Chumash, which means “a fifth”, but that was less common).