To understand a book, one needs to know to which genre it belongs: Is it history or legend, chronicle or myth? To what question is it an answer? A history book answers the question: what happened?; a book of cosmology - be it science or myth - answers the question: how did it happen? [...]if we seek to understand the Torah, we must read it as Torah - as law, instruction, teaching, guidance. Torah is an answer to the question: how shall we live? [...]Torah is not a book of history, even though it includes history. It is not a book of science, even though the first chapter of Genesis - as the nineteenth-century sociologist Max Weber points out - is the necessary prelude to science: it represents the first time people saw the universe as the product of a single creative will, and therefore as intelligible rather than capricious and mysterious.