The first five books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—have had a formative influence on ideas about God, humankind, and the cosmos, as well as understandings of ethics, family, history, and nationhood, in Judaism, Christianity, and Western culture more broadly. Termed the Torah in Jewish tradition and the Pentateuch in Christian tradition, these books contain some of the most familiar and famous biblical tales, alongside laws and precepts that shaped Jewish and Christian views of piety and proper ritual practice. At the same time, these books provide precious evidence of the history, religion, and culture of ancient Israel. As such, their study opens a window onto the specific socio-historical circumstances that shaped the words that Jews and Christians would come to cherish as divine Scripture. In this course, we will read through the entirety of these five books. Approaching them from an academic perspective, we shall trace the processes by which these texts came to be formed and consider the multiple socio-historical contexts that informed them, while also analyzing their narrative structures and meaning in their present form.