When was the Hebrew Bible Canonized? The Traditional View

[00:00:01] When was the Hebrew Bible canonized? [00:00:04] The traditional view? [00:00:07] Now that I have spent two posts explaining the contents, structure and organization of the Hebrew Bible Old Testament, I can move on to explain how it is we got these books in particular, why not other books? Who decided on what grounds and when? [00:00:25] This will take two posts. [00:00:27] In this one I give a brief overview of the understanding that was widely held for a very long time among scholars. It was the one I was raised on. [00:00:37] First, I need to explain what we mean by canon. [00:00:40] The term comes from the Greek word for reed or rod. A cannon was a straight edge that was used, for example, by a carpenter to make sure an alignment was correct. But it could also be used as a measuring stick. Eventually the word canon came to be applied in other contexts by analogy to refer to a rule or standard by which something could be judged. And in that sense it came to be applied to a collection or list of books. In particular, it referred to some kind of official or accepted or standard list of books seen to fall in line. And so today we might speak of the canon of Shakespeare, which which would be the plays and sonnets that he actually wrote, or the canon of Canadian literature, the books widely recognized as great literature of the country, or the canon of the Hebrew Bible. [00:01:32] For many years, the more or less standard, widely accepted view about the formation of the Tanakh was that it happened in stages. The Torah in this view was finally accepted throughout Judaism as a canonical book which or five books in one collection by the year 400 BCE the Nevi', IM, both former and latter prophets were established in their final form by 200 BCE and the ketuvim were finalized as a collection in 90 CE at the Council of Jamnia, about which I will say a few words following. [00:02:06] According to this view, that was the same time and place that the Hebrew Bible was closed, that is that the canon was completely set and no books from then on could be added in or taken out. [00:02:20] Almost no one holds to this exact view today. But there are some things basically right about is true that the canon did not come to be accepted all at once in one fell swoop, but gradually over time, as different sections of Hebrew Scripture came widely to be seen as fully authoritative and at different periods in the history of ancient Israel. [00:02:43] And the sequence is right. The first sub collection to be formed and accepted was the Torah, then much later the prophets, and then later still, and certainly last, the writings. But the process was a bit messier than the older standard view allowed. And there is little evidence that the Council of Jamnia was where the final collection was ultimately authorized and made official part of the Jewish religion. Before laying out the more commonly accepted view today, I should say a few words about the Council of Jamnia. [00:03:15] I have mentioned several times on the blog that the Roman armies suppressed the Jewish uprising of 66 CE, so some 35 years after Jesus death, by laying siege to Jerusalem and eventually destroying it and its temple in 70 CE. [00:03:32] Obviously these horrible events had a cataclysmic effect on Judaism, which no longer had its religious center, a place for sacrifice, or a group of leaders to look after its welfare to help reconstruct Judaism and to move forward. [00:03:48] There was a kind of council called in the Galilean city of Jamnia, where the leading Jewish teachers of the day, rabbis, who were in the main related to the party of the Pharisees, came together to try to outline how the religion was to move ahead now that there was no active priesthood, no sacrificial system, no temple. [00:04:09] Eventually, Judaism was to shift away of necessity from an emphasis on the temple cult and sacrifice to being very much a religion of the book. [00:04:18] The sacred traditions of Israel, especially as embodied in Scripture, were to become the focus of the religion as it emerged from the disaster of 70 CE. [00:04:28] That much is relatively certain. [00:04:31] The older generation of scholars went further and argued that it was at this council that the canon was once and for all set. That, however, goes beyond the evidence. [00:04:40] It now does not appear that the Council of Jewish leaders at Chamnia established, fixed and closed the canon of Scripture.