The Torah is divinely revealed and binding

Torah min ha-shamayim is the traditional claim that the Torah is God's revelation, given at Sinai, and it functions in Judaism as the ground of obligation rather than as a proposition to be assented to in isolation. If the commandments were given by God to this people, they bind; if they are the accumulated custom of an ancient nation, they may be admirable but they do not command.

Maimonides made it the eighth of his thirteen principles, and stated it strongly: the whole Torah now in our hands is the one given to Moses, and it is all from God. Traditional Judaism also holds that the written text was accompanied by an oral Torah, given at the same time and transmitted by memory before being written down as Mishnah and Talmud, which is what allows the written text to function as law at all. The written Torah says to do no work on the Sabbath and does not define work; the oral tradition supplies the thirty-nine categories.

The claim is not that the text is read woodenly. Rabbinic Judaism has always held that the Torah has multiple layers of meaning and that its interpretation is entrusted to the sages, with a famous Talmudic story in which a heavenly voice endorsing one rabbi's position is overruled on the ground that the Torah is not in heaven and the majority decides. Nor did traditional commentators avoid textual difficulties: medieval exegetes noticed the passages that appear to postdate Moses and discussed them.

What Orthodoxy and Haredi Judaism will not accept is that the Torah is a composite of documents by different hands from different centuries. That is the modern documentary hypothesis, and it is the point on which the movements of modern Judaism actually divide.

Almost every institutional division in Judaism since 1800 traces to this question, and it is more consequential than any dispute about the existence or nature of God.

Orthodox and Haredi Judaism holds the revelation at Sinai as historical and the text as of divine origin, and therefore holds the commandments to be binding without remainder. Change happens through interpretation within the halakhic system, and the system is not open to revision from outside on historical grounds.

Conservative Judaism, descending from the positive-historical school of Zacharias Frankel, affirms that Judaism rests on revelation while accepting that the texts have a history and that the tradition developed. It teaches the critical scholarship in its seminaries and continues to legislate through halakha, which its critics on both sides regard as unstable and which it regards as the only honest option.

Reform Judaism treats the Torah as the record of Israel's encounter with God rather than as dictation, which is exactly why it can regard ceremonial and ritual law as non-binding while holding the ethical and prophetic content to be the enduring core.

Reconstructionism reframes the whole question, taking Judaism as the evolving civilisation of a people, so that the authority of a practice lies in its function within that civilisation rather than in a revelatory event.

Karaite Judaism, a thousand years older than any of these, accepts the written revelation in the strong sense and denies the oral Torah, which produces observance visibly unlike rabbinic practice.

The comparison with Christian arguments over biblical inerrancy is close in structure and different in stakes. In Christianity the question bears principally on doctrine; in Judaism it bears principally on practice, on whether one may drive on the Sabbath, who counts as a Jew, and who may be ordained. That is why the arguments have been sharper and the institutional separations cleaner.