Moreh comes from the root yarah, to throw or to aim, the archer's word. Torah comes from the same root. A moreh is not a lecturer filling a room with information. He is the one who aims you, who points the direction, the way an archer points an arrow. Torah is the aimed instruction; the moreh is the one doing the aiming. English "teacher" keeps the classroom and loses the bow.

The word carried weight in the Second Temple world. The community behind the Dead Sea Scrolls traced itself to a Moreh ha-Tzedek, a teacher of justice, and the Hebrew text tradition of Matthew reaches for moreh to describe the kind of teaching Yeshua did. Teaching, in this sense, is work. Any number of people can do it in the same village without permission from each other, which is exactly the kind of name Yeshua accepted. It described what he did without installing him, or anyone after him, as the one necessary man through whom the aiming must pass.