Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] The Formation of the Hebrew the Common Scholarly View Today Written by Bart Ehrman Read by Ken Teutsch in my previous post I discussed the traditional view of when the Hebrew Bible became a fixed canon in stages, with the final decision being made at the end of the 1st century CE at the council of Jamnia.
[00:00:27] Today, scholars tend to present a somewhat fuzzier picture of when and why the canon came to be formed, although there do seem to be some fixed points.
[00:00:37] It is widely held that the first five books of the Torah were accepted by nearly all Jews as a set canon by the 5th century BCE in the early post exilic period.
[00:00:49] One piece of evidence comes from the Bible itself. In a post exilic book, Ezra the scribe Ezra himself is described as being skilled in the Torah of Moses that the Lord the God of Israel has given.
[00:01:05] This suggests that it was widely known that there was a Torah of Moses and that the educated elite were sometimes being trained in understanding and interpreting it. The Torah is and always has been the same five books and they have always been given in the same Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy because they trace a chronological tale. And so by the 5th century BCE most Jews probably accepted the Torah as an authoritative group of texts connected principally with Moses.
[00:01:40] The next sub collection to be finalized was the Nevi', Im, both former prophets Church, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings and latter prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the 12 and this appears to have happened by the 2nd century BCE.
[00:01:58] Evidence for this comes from a range of sources. The prologue to the non canonical book known as Sirach refers to the Law and the prophets and the others, and books that were later to become the New Testament speak of the Law and the prophets e.g. matthew 5, 17, Luke 16:16.
[00:02:19] The reasons for thinking that the Nevi' Im were finalized by the 2nd century BCE and not later is that there are books of the Hebrew Bible that could have been included in this collection given their subject matter, but in fact are not. Thus, for example, Daniel seems to be a prophetic book, but it is not included in the prophets. Why not? Probably because the canon of the prophets was fixed already by the time the Book of Daniel appeared on the scene in the middle of the 2nd century BCE.
[00:02:50] Daniel was accepted as a scriptural book. Eventually of course it just could not belong to a portion of the Bible that had already been fixed. It and the other books were loosely connected with one another. Unlike the Torah, the former prophets and the latter prophets were which all cohere closely to one another in terms of subject matter.
[00:03:11] But even after The Law and the prophets had been accepted as canonical texts. There were these other writings on the margins, the 11 books of the Ketuvim.
[00:03:22] That some of these were seen as authoritative by the second century BCE is shown in the passage from Sirach quoted earlier, which speaks of the others or the other books without giving them a firm designation.
[00:03:36] So too, Luke 24:44 speaks of the law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms, a threefold categorization of the sacred Scriptures, the third part of which is identified by its longest and presumably most important book, the Psalms.
[00:03:53] There were uncertainties about which books to include in this third group.
[00:03:58] This is suggested, among other things, by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
[00:04:03] Among the Dead Sea Scrolls were numerous copies of biblical books. Some 200 of the scrolls contain books of the Bible, usually in fragmentary state.
[00:04:13] Every book that eventually came to be included in the Bible can be found among these scrolls, except for the book of Esther, even though Esther is not found there. The scrolls contain numerous copies of a book known as Jubilees that some Jews considered to be a sacred text as well. Did the Jews at Qumran accept Jubilees as canonical, but not?
[00:04:35] It is hard to say.
[00:04:37] Other books of the Ketuvim were debated among Jews. The Song of Songs, for example, was a secular book celebrating the sexual love of an unmarried man and a woman. Was that really to be seen as part of canonical scripture? Even if Solomon did write it?
[00:04:54] Eventually Jews came to interpret the book in a different way, as we have seen, so that it no longer referred to human sexual love, but to God's deep and profound love for Israel. There remains, even today, the question of whether the Song of Songs was eventually accepted as part of the canon because it was interpreted in this way and so was relatively harmless as a love poem, or whether it was interpreted in this way because it was accepted as part of the sacred canon.
[00:05:23] Most scholars agree that by the time of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, most Jews accepted the final three part canon of the Torah, Neviim and Ketuvim. From that time on, books could not be added and books could not be taken away.
[00:05:40] This was a 24 book canon that came to be attested widely in Jewish writings of the time. Eventually the canon was reconceptualized and renumbered so that it became the 39 books of the Christian Old Testament. But they are the same books, all part of the canon of Scripture.
[00:05:59] Grounds for Inclusion it is very hard to know what criteria ancient Israelites used to decide which of their books should be accepted as parts of Scripture in no small measure, because we simply do not have any records of their discussions, debates, and disagreements. Unlike for the New Testament, some scholars have suggested that there were several criteria that were almost certainly applied by various Jewish leaders in making these decisions.
[00:06:28] Only books written in Hebrew, even if they had portions in Aramaic, could be accepted. None of the Jewish books written in Greek, for example, would be considered part of the sacred canon.
[00:06:40] Books had to have venerable authority. They could not be recent compositions, and so only books written before the 4th century BCE could be accepted.
[00:06:50] Books that were in fact written later, such as Daniel, were mistakenly taken to be older. As we have seen, the books that became the canon were the ones most widely used in Jewish communities as authoritative tradition. In some ways, the formation of the canon is a grassroots phenomenon. If books functioned as scripture for a wide range of Jewish communities, they were eventually accepted as scripture by the leaders who could make such decisions.
[00:07:17] The final product of the Tanakh, the result of the Hebrew canon, is what we have seen throughout our study.
[00:07:24] The Jewish Scriptures are a treasure trove of ancient Israelite writings. They were written at different times by different authors, using different sources, embracing different points of view and advancing different understandings of major issues. They embrace different genres, and they serve different functions.
[00:07:42] Together, they may make up one thing, the Hebrew Bible. But in fact, they are an entire array of things. The corpus of writings that cover the traditions, creations, thoughts, beliefs, and opinions of generations and centuries of ancient Israelite authors.
