One's perspective colors one's grasp of truth. The gentile Church's perspective of the Pentateuch is colored by its limited grasp of its Jewish roots. Rabbinic commentaries on the Torah only see their Jewishness and miss God's plan to redeem people from all the nations. This commentary, this Mishnah, is an attempt to see the Torah, the five books of Moses, in a broader and fuller grasp. It dares to call itself a Mishnah because of the meaning of the Hebrew word. Mishnah simply means instruction. This Monterey "instruction," hopefully peers back through the fog of sectarian dogma to a clearer meaning of the text. Volume I covers Genesis and Exodus. Volume II contains Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

One of those clarifying factors is that the Biblical chronology of the Hebrew scriptures is taken seriously. Biblical events such as the Exodus are matched with the proper rulers interacting with Israel. Set in the proper era, seeming inconsistencies with archeological finds vanish.

A central question in religious thought is: which does God prioritize, our love of Him or our compliance? Do we return to his favor by what we do for him, or by what he did for us-and how does halacha and dogma respond to that question?