What type of book is the Torah?

How to read the Torah — 1

One of the questions that people often ask when reading the Torah is “is it true?” What they mean by this, I think, is “did the stories in this book really happen?”

This is an interesting but entirely misleading question, for it makes an assumption about the type of book that the Torah is.

In How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler points out a basic fact abou…