Orthodoxy holds that the body of revelation is total and complete. Its interpretation and application under new circumstances, required of every generation's scholars, is an act of inferring and elaborating, not of innovation or addition. One clause in the Jerusalem Talmud asserts that anything that a veteran disciple shall teach was given at Sinai: a story in the Babylonian Talmud claims that Moses was taken aback upon seeing the immensely intricate deduction of future Rabbi Akiva in a vision, until Akiva proclaimed that Moses had received everything he was teaching. The Written and Oral Torah are held to be intertwined and mutually reliant. The latter is a source of many divine commandments, and the text of the Pentateuch is seen as incomprehensible. God's will may be surmised only by appealing to the Oral Torah, which revealed the text's allegorical, anagogical, or tropological meaning, rather than by a literal reading.
Orthodoxy holds that the body of revelation is total and complete. Its interpretation and application under new circumstances, required of every generation's scholars, is an act of inferring and elaborating, not of innovation or addition. One clause in the Jerusalem Talmud asserts that anything that a veteran disciple shall teach was given at Sinai: a story in the Babylonian Talmud claims that Moses was taken aback upon seeing the immensely intricate deduction of future Rabbi Akiva in a vision, until Akiva proclaimed that Moses had received everything he was teaching. The Written and Oral Torah are held to be intertwined and mutually reliant. The latter is a source of many divine commandments, and the text of the Pentateuch is seen as incomprehensible. God's will may be surmised only by appealing to the Oral Torah, which revealed the text's allegorical, anagogical, or tropological meaning, rather than by a literal reading.