Well, I tried to sneak it past him, but Adam Gonnerman called my hand. I read an excellent article that he posted on his web site and that article got me to thinking about the canon. I’d been wanting to discuss that a bit, and now seems like a good time. His presentation is better written and much more scholarly, so I hope you’ll take a few minutes to look over it.
But let’s talk canon. For a long time, God’s people didn’t spend a lot of time identifying which books were inspired and which were not. The Jews honored the Torah (Genesis-Deuteronomy) above all other writings, including those that we typically accept as being of equal weight. They would not place Job, for example, alongside Leviticus. Both were seen as helpful, but one was The Law.
The concern with identifying the canon arose after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Much of what the Jews considered to be their identity was lost, and they struggled to define themselves in the light of what had occurred. Part of that struggle was to identify the writings that were truly “God breathed.”
It was a given that they would reject the Christian writings. They also rejected the “Second Canon,” the Deuterocanonical books like the books of Maccabees. There were two stated reasons for rejecting these books:
- The Pharisees taught that divine revelation ceased with Ezra; the Talmud identifies Malachi as the last prophet. Either of these dates (which basically coincide) would exclude the books known as the Apocrypha.
- It was also determined that the holy language of Scripture was Hebrew. Books that were not written principally in Hebrew were not accepted. (Daniel, Ezra and Jeremiah have sections in Aramaic, but were considered “Hebrew enough”).
There was another important reason, which tended to go unstated: these books were seen as teaching certain ideas which were used by Christians, like teachings about life after death.
Some scholars believe that there was a council of Jamnia at the end of the first century which established the Jewish canon. However, no concrete historical evidence has been found for the existence of such a council.
It’s worth noting that there was no uniformity among the Jews on the subject of the canon until well after the time of Christ. With Jews scattered across the known world, different groups would accept different books as being canonical.
I know some of you have studied this more than I. What other light would you shed on the formation of the Old Testament canon?
