Let us begin with an overview of the Bible—God’s word to man.
The Bible contains three parts, each with several books. In all, there are 24 books in the Bible: 5 in the Torah, 8 in the second part, and 11 in the third.
The first part of the Bible is the Torah, which consists of the Five Books of Moses. The message of the Torah is the expression and revelation of God’s will to man, to differentiate between good and evil—what should be done and what should not be done. The word “Torah” itself derives from the root that means “to teach.” Meaning, that the Torah is the teaching of God’s will for man. The five books were written by Moses.
The second general part of the Bible are the Prophets—the Nevi’im. The first 4 books of the Prophets—Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings—are basically stories. They give a historical reading of the first generations of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel after Joshua enters and conquers the land. They are full of ups and downs. At times the Jewish people follow the way of God, or at times do not. The prophets come to rebuke the people, but their inner intention is a call. The prophets are thus the Divine call to return. God is constantly calling us: “Return back to Me! My arms are open to receive you, to kiss you, just return to Me.” That is basically the message of the Prophets.
The greatest individual of the Prophets is King David. He is the archetypal figure of a ba’al teshuvah—one who returns to God. From the beginning he is a great, noble, and courageous figure. But he is not always upstanding, he falls from time to time. But he immediately acknowledges and confesses his fall and he truthfully and in humility returns to God. This is why God chooses him to be the eternal king of Israel. All the truly righteous kings reflect David’s personality and why the kingdom of Israel is called the House of David. The Messiah also descends from the House of David. In one place in the Talmud, the sages even say that the Messiah’s name will be David. David is the eternal expression of a ba’al teshuvah, which is the message of the Prophets in general.
Once again there were 4 historical books (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings) and then 4 prophetic books (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Minor Prophets). The greatest of the latter is Isaiah, whose soul derives from the highest level as explained in Kabbalah, and his book’s most well-known prophecies are those about the Messiah.
The third part of the Bible are the Writings which begins with Psalms written by David, and then Proverbs written by his son, Solomon. In Halachah, we learn that the Messiah must be a descendant of both David and Solomon. He must possess the power of prayer (David). Prayer expresses the heart of man. What is the service of the heart: that is prayer. The greatest example of this is David in the Book of Psalms.
Then Proverbs is the book of wisdom, which teaches that even insights that we have in the Torah come from our devout prayer to God. First, we must pray and then God gives the insight.
The next book in the Writings is Job—the eternal debate between God and man. At the end of the book, God reveals Himself to man and Job is convinced that God is right and that everything is directed towards the eternal rectification of the world. Then we have the books of Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah. Finally, the 24th book of the Bible is Chronicles, which tells the history again of the world, but this time with a greater emphasis on David and his descendants.
It is good to try to condense the entire structure we have seen into simple words. We will say that the Torah is the “teaching”—God’s teaching. Torah literally means “teaching.” The Prophets are the “Call of God” to return to Him. The word for that in Hebrew is “Teshuvah.” The Writings, the third part begins with the Book of Psalms which we repeat daily, far more than we recite any other book of the Writings, and it is “Prayer.”
So, the three parts of the Bible can be described as: Teaching (הָרוּת), Teshuvah (הָבּוּשְּת), and Prayer (הָּלִפְּת). The sum of these words in gematria is 1839, which means that their average value is 613, the exact number of the commandments in the Torah. In this way, we can see how both the Prophets and the Writings are contained within the Torah.
