CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER TWO
THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS
JESUS’ APPEAL TO THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES
The Christian church started its existence with a book, but it was not to the book that it owed its existence. It shared the book with the Jewish people; indeed, the first members of the church were without exception Jews. The church owed its distinctive existence to a person—to Jesus of Nazareth, crucified, dead and buried, but ‘designated Son of God in power … by his resurrection from the dead’ (Rom. 1:4). This Jesus, it was believed, had been exalted by God to be universal Lord; he had sent his Spirit to be present with his followers, to unite them and animate them as his body on earth. The function of the book was to bear witness to him.
Jesus, according to all the strata of the gospel tradition, regularly appealed to the Hebrew scriptures to validate his mission, his words and his actions. According to Mark, he began his ministry in Galilee with the announcement: ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand’ (Mark 1:14). This was the good news which he proclaimed, inviting his hearers to believe it. Those of them who were familiar with the book of Daniel can scarcely have missed the reference in his words to the prophecy in that book concerning a coming day in which ‘the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed’ (Dan. 2:44 cf 7:l4, 18, 27). The kingdom was to be bestowed on ‘the saints of the Most High’; Daniel in vision saw how ‘the time came when the saints received the kingdom’ (Dan. 7:22). The implication of Jesus’ announcement was that this time had now arrived. So, according to another evangelist, he encouraged his disciples with the assurance: ‘it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom’ (Luke 12:32). What was actually involved in this kingdom was spelled out in his teaching (especially his parables) and in his general ministry.
Luke records how, in the synagogue of his home town Nazareth, Jesus set out the programme of his ministry by reading from Isaiah 61:1f. the declaration of the unnamed prophet that God, by placing his Spirit on him, had anointed him ‘to preach good news to the poor,… to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord’ (Luke 4:18f.). His reading of those words was followed by the announcement: ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’ (Luke 4:21). This emphasis on scripture characterized Jesus’ ministry right on to the time when (again according to Luke) he appeared in resurrection to his disciples and assured them that his suffering and rising again, together with the consequent proclamation of the gospel to all the nations, formed the subject-matter of what was ‘written’ (Luke 24:46f.).
The church’s use of those writings was based on Jesus’ use of them: as his followers searched them further, they discovered increasingly ‘in all the scriptures the things concerning himself’ (Luke 24:27). The Old Testament, as Christians in due course came to call these writings, was a book about Jesus. Here was the church’s Bible. Here was the Bible of the Jewish people also; but so differently did the two communities read the same writings that, for practical purposes, they might have been using two different Bibles instead of sharing one.
THE CANON OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Our Lord and his apostles might differ from the religious leaders of Israel about the meaning of the scriptures; there is no suggestion that they differed about the limits of the scriptures. ‘The scriptures’ on whose meaning they differed were not an amorphous collection: when they spoke of ‘the scriptures’ they knew which writings they had in mind and could distinguish them from other writings which were not included in ‘the scriptures’. When we speak of ‘the scriptures’ we mean ‘the sacred writings’ as distinct from other writings: to us ‘scripture’ and ‘writing’ are separate words with distinct meanings. But in Hebrew and Greek one and the same word does duty for both ‘writing’ and ‘scripture’: in these languages ‘the scriptures’ are simply ‘the writings’—that is to say, ‘the writings’ par excellence. As we shall see, sometimes this involves a measure of ambiguity: does the word in this or that context mean ‘scripture’ in particular or ‘writing’ in general? But when ‘the scriptures’ or ‘the writings’ are mentioned, there is usually no ambiguity. Similarly in English ‘the book’ can be used in a special sense (indicated perhaps by the tone of voice or by the use of a capital initial) to denote the Bible—the Book as distinct from all other books.
The books of the Hebrew Bible are traditionally twenty-four in number, arranged in three divisions. The first division is the Tôrāh (‘law’ or ‘direction’), comprising the five ‘books of Moses’ (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy). The second division is the Neḇîʾîm (‘prophets’): it is further subdivided into the four Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) and the four Latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Book of the Twelve Prophets). The third division is called the Keṯûḇîm (‘writings’): it comprises eleven books. First come the Psalms, Proverbs and Job; then a group of five called the Meg̱illôṯ or ‘scrolls’ (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther); finally Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah (reckoned as one book), Chronicles. This is the arrangement regularly followed in printed editions of the Hebrew Bible.
One of the clearest and earliest statements of these three divisions and their respective contents comes in a baraitha (a tradition from the period ad 70–200) quoted in the Babylonian Talmud, in the tractate Baba Bathra. This tradition assigns inspired or authoritative authors to all twenty-four books, and discusses their order. The order of the five books in the first division is fixed, because they are set in a historical framework in which each has its chronological position; this is true also of the four Former Prophets. But the order of the books in the Latter Prophets and in the Writings was not so firmly fixed. This is inevitable when separate scrolls are kept together in a container. It is different when a number of documents can be bound together in a volume of modern shape—a codex, to use the technical term. Here the first must precede the second and the second must precede the third, whether there is any logical or chronological basis for that sequence or not. The codex began to come into use early in the Christian era, but even after its introduction religious conservatism ensured that the Jewish scriptures continued for long to be written on scrolls. If the eleven books making up the Writings—or, to take one subdivision of them, the five Meg̱illôṯ—were kept in one box, there was no particular reason why they should be mentioned in one order rather than another.
But it cannot be by accident that, in the traditional arrangement of the books. Chronicles follows Ezra-Nehemiah. This is a quite unnatural sequence, which could not have been adopted without some substantial reason. Ezra-Nehemiah takes up the history of Israel where Chronicles leaves off, whether or not Ezra-Nehemiah was originally part of the same work as Chronicles—‘the work of the Chronicler’, as it is often called. Practically every edition of the Old Testament, therefore, apart from the Hebrew Bible (and versions which follow its order), makes Ezra-Nehemiah come immediately after Chronicles (which is the logical and chronological sequence). Why then should the Hebrew Bible place Chronicles after Ezra-Nehemiah, which is properly the sequel to Chronicles? One answer to this question is that, when the canon of Old Testament scripture was in course of formation, Chronicles was ‘canonized’ (included in the canon) after Ezra-Nehemiah. There is no firm evidence that this is how it happened, but it is difficult to think of a more probable answer.
There is evidence that Chronicles was the last book in the Hebrew Bible as Jesus knew it. When he said that the generation he addressed would be answerable for ‘the blood of all the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world’, he added, ‘from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary’ (Luke 11:50f.). Abel is the first martyr in the Bible (Gen. 4:8); Zechariah is most probably the son of Jehoiada, who was stoned to death ‘in the court of Yahweh’s house’ because, speaking by the Spirit of God, he rebuked the king and people of Judah for transgressing the divine commandments (2 Chron. 24:20–22). Zechariah (c 800 bc) was not chronologically the last faithful prophet to die as a martyr; some two centuries later a prophet named Uriah was put to death in Jerusalem because his witness was unacceptable to King Jehoiakim (Jer. 26:20–23). But Zechariah is canonically the last faithful prophet to die as a martyr, because his death is recorded in Chronicles, the last book in the Hebrew Bible.
How old is the threefold division? It is widely believed, and perhaps rightly, that it is referred to for the first time by the grandson of Jeshua Ben Sira when, shortly after emigrating from Palestine to Alexandria in Egypt in 132 bc, he translated his grandfather’s book of wisdom (commonly called Ecclesiasticus or Sirach) from Hebrew into Greek. Repeatedly in the prologue to his translation he speaks of his grandfather as a student of ‘the law and the prophets and the other books of our fathers’, ‘the law itself, the prophecies and the rest of the books’. Here we may indeed have a reference to the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. But it is just possible to understand that Ben Sira is being described as a student of the holy scriptures (the law and the prophets) and of other Jewish writings not included among the scriptures.
There is one place in the New Testament which may reflect the threefold division. In Luke’s account of the appearance of the risen Lord to his disciples in Jerusalem, they are reminded how he had told them ‘that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled’ (Luke 24:44). Here ‘the psalms’ might denote not only the contents of the Psalter but also the whole of the third division—the Writings—of which the Psalter was the first book. We cannot be sure of this; in any case, the Hebrew scriptures are more often referred to in the New Testament as ‘the law and the prophets’. Jesus said that the golden rule sums up ‘the law and the prophets’ (Matt. 7:12); Paul claims that God’s way of righteousness set forth in the gospel which he preaches is attested by ‘the law and the prophets’ (Rom. 3:21). No problem was felt about including books of the third division among the ‘prophets’: David is called a prophet in Acts 2:30, Daniel in Matthew 24:15, and even Job, by implication, in James 5:10f.
Sometimes the whole Hebrew Bible, or any part of it, is referred to as ‘the law’: in John 10:34 Jewish disputants are told that part of Psalm 82 is ‘written in your law’; in 1 Corinthians 14:21 a quotation from Isaiah 28:11f. is similarly said to be written ‘in the law’, while in Romans 3:10–19 a chain of quotations from the Psalms and Isaiah is included in ‘whatever the law says’. Less often the whole collection is described as ‘the prophets’: when Jesus on the Emmaus road spoke of the two disciples’ being so ‘slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken’ (Luke 24:25), it is plain from the context that Moses is included among ‘the prophets’ (he was, in fact, the greatest of them).
THE EVIDENCE OF JOSEPHUS
A rather different threefold division of the same books is mentioned by Josephus, the Jewish historian, in the first volume of his treatise Against Apion, written in the nineties of the first century ad. Josephus contrasts the reliable sources for early Jewish history with the many conflicting accounts of origins given by Greek historians:
We have not myriads of books, disagreeing and conflicting with one another, but only twenty-two, containing the record of all time, and justly accredited.
Of these, five are the books of Moses, containing the laws and the history handed down from the creation of the human race right to his own death. This period falls a little short of three thousand years. From the death of Moses to the time of Artaxerxes, who was king of Persia after Xerxes, the prophets who followed Moses have written down in thirteen books the things that were done in their days. The remaining four books contain hymns to God and principles of life for human beings.
From Artaxerxes to our own time a detailed record has been made, but this has not been thought worthy of equal credit with the earlier records because there has not been since then the exact succession of prophets.
When he says that since Artaxerxes’ time there has been no exact succession of prophets, Josephus does not mean that the gift of prophecy itself died out. He mentions its exercise among the Essenes, he says that the Jewish ruler John Hyrcanus I (134–104bc) was divinely enabled ‘to foresee and foretell the future’, and he claims to have had the gift himself. But in the period between Moses and Artaxerxes (465–423 bc) he appears to envisage an unbroken succession of prophets, guaranteeing the continuity and trustworthiness of the records which they were believed to have produced.
When Josephus speaks of twenty-two books, he probably refers to exactly the same documents as the twenty-four of the traditional Jewish reckoning, Ruth being counted as an appendix to Judges and Lamentations to Jeremiah. His three divisions might be called the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. His first division comprises the same five books as the first division in the traditional arrangement. But his second division has thirteen books, not eight, the additional five being perhaps Job, Esther, Daniel, Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah. The four books of the third division would then be Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs. It is impossible to be sure, because he does not specify the books of the three divisions one by one.
It is unlikely that Josephus’s classification of the books was his own; he probably reproduces a tradition with which he had been familiar for a long time, having learned it either in the priestly circle into which he was born or among the Pharisees with whose party he associated himself as a young man.
DISCUSSIONS AT JAMNIA
About the same time as Josephus wrote his work Against Apion, the Hebrew scriptures were among various subjects debated by the rabbis who set up their headquarters at Jabneh or Jamnia in western Judaea, under the leadership of Yohanan ben Zakkai, to discuss the reconstruction of Jewish religious life after the collapse of the Jewish commonwealth in ad 70. Jewish life had to be adapted to a new situation in which the temple and its services were no more. So far as the scriptures are concerned, the rabbis at Jamnia introduced no innovations; they reviewed the tradition they had received and left it more or less as it was. It is probably unwise to talk as if there was a Council or Synod of Jamnia which laid down the limits of the Old Testament canon.
They discussed which books ‘defiled the hands’—a technical expression denoting those books which were the product of prophetic inspiration. One had to wash one’s hands after handling them, just as one did after ‘defiling’ the hands (whether materially or ritually). One might explain this practice in terms of Mary Douglas’s ‘purity and danger’; but by the time we are dealing with the idea may simply have been that if people had to wash their hands every time they touched a sacred book they would be deterred from handling it casually.
At any rate, the rabbis at Jamnia discussed whether certain books did or did not ‘defile the hands’ in this sense. Did Jeshua ben Sira’s wisdom book (Ecclesiasticus) defile them or not? It was a work which inculcated true religion; objectively it was not easy to distinguish it in point of sacredness from Proverbs or Ecclesiastes. The conclusion, however was that it did not defile the hands. But what of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes? Proverbs seems to contradict itself in two adjacent verses: ‘Answer not a fool according to his folly,… Answer a fool according to his folly …’ (Prov. 26:4f.). (It was easily explained that in some circumstances the one precept, and in some circumstances the other precept, should be followed.) Ecclesiastes, on the face of it, was a much less orthodox book than Ben Sira’s work: is it really fitting to believe that ‘there is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and find enjoyment in his toil’ (Eccles. 2:24)? (It was pointed out that this could be read as a question expecting the answer ‘No’—‘Is there nothing better for a man…?’)
Neither Esther nor the Song of Songs contains the name of God—unless indeed his name be concealed in Cant 8:6, where ‘a most vehement flame’ might be literally ‘a flame of Yah’. Both works might appear to be non-religious in character, but Esther provided the libretto for the popular festival of Purim, and if the Song could he allegorized so as to become a celebration of Yahweh’s love for Israel, it could continue to be recognized as an inspired scripture. As for Ezekiel, the prescriptions in its closing chapters for the new temple and its services could with difficulty be made to agree with those in the Pentateuch, and the chariot vision of chapter 1 gave rise to mystical speculations and exercises which some rabbis believed to be spiritually dangerous. The opinion was expressed that Ezekiel ought to be ‘withdrawn’ (withdrawn, probably, from the synagogue calendar of public readings). Other pious souls were content to wait until Elijah came at the end of the age: the problems of Ezekiel would be among those winch he was expected to solve. Happily, it was not necessary to wait so long: one Hananiah the son of Hezekiah sat up night after night burning the midnight oil to the tune of 300 measures until he had worked out a reconciliation between Ezekiel and Moses. But this simply means that the rabbis of Jamnia, like religious disputants of other ages, enjoyed a really tough subject for theological debate; it does not mean that at this late date the status of Ezekiel was in serious jeopardy.
From the same period as Josephus and the Jamnia debates comes an independent reference to twenty-four as the number of books of holy scripture. The Apocalypse of Ezra (otherwise called 4 Ezra and 2 Esdras) was written after the destruction of the temple in ad 70, but purports to record revelations made to Ezra after the destruction of Solomon’s temple centuries before. Ezra tells how, by divine illumination, he was enabled to dictate to five men over a period of forty days the contents of ninety-four books. ‘And when the forty days were ended, the Most High spoke to me, saying, “Make public the twenty-four books that you wrote first and let the worthy and the unworthy read them; but keep the seventy that were written last, in order to give them to the wise among your people” ’ (4 Ezra 14:45f). The twenty-four books accessible to the public appear to be the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible; the other seventy were esoteric or apocalyptic works which yielded their secret meaning to an inner circle (such as, for example, the Qumran community).
A THREE-STAGE CANON?
A common, and not unreasonable, account of the formation of the Old Testament canon is that it took shape in three stages, corresponding to the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible. The Law was first canonized (early in the period after the return from the Babylonian exile), the Prophets next (late in the third century bc). When these two collections were closed, everything else that was recognized as holy scripture had to go into the third division, the Writings, which remained open until the end of the first century ad, when it was ‘closed’ at Jamnia. But it must be pointed out that, for all its attractiveness, this account is completely hypothetical: there is no evidence for it, either in the Old Testament itself or elsewhere.
We have evidence in the Old Testament of the public recognition of scripture as conveying the word of God, but that is not the same thing as canonization.
When, on the occasion already referred to, Moses read ‘the book of the covenant’ to the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai, they responded with an undertaking to keep the divine commandments: to them what Moses read was the word of God (Exod. 24:3–7). When, at a later date, the law-code of Deuteronomy was put ‘beside the ark of the covenant of Yahweh’ (Deut. 31:26), this was to be a token of its sanctity and a reminder to the people of the solemnity of their obligation to continue in the way which God had commanded them. When the same law-code, probably (‘the book of the law’), was found in the temple in the reign of Josiah, it was read by the king’s decree to a great concourse of the people of Judah and Jerusalem; the king entered into a solemn undertaking ‘to perform the words of the covenant that were written in this book; and all the people joined in the covenant’ (2 Kings 23:1–3). Again, after the return from the Babylonian exile, Ezra and his associates read publicly from ‘the book of the law of Moses’ which he had brought from Babylon to Jerusalem, and the national leaders made a firm covenant to order their lives from then on in accordance with the commandments which it contained (Neh. 8:1–9:38).
On all these occasions the authority of the word of God was acknowledged in what was read; but there is no mention as yet of anything in the nature of a collection to which such a document might be added, or in which others might be added after it. Even in the ban on adding anything to the law-code of Deuteronomy or taking anything from it (Deut. 4:2) the law-code is envisaged as quite self-contained; there is no word of adding it to other codes, as has actually been done in the final arrangement of the Pentateuch. (‘Pentateuch’ is a term of Greek origin denoting the five books of the Law.)
Later prophets recognize the divine authority underlying the ministry of earlier prophets (cf Jer. 7:25; Ezek. 38:17), but the idea of collecting the oracles of a succession of prophets did not occur at once. Zechariah the prophet refers to ‘the former prophets’ (Zech. 1:4; 7:7), meaning those who prophesied before the exile, but he does not imply that their words have been published as a collection. Such a collection did come into being in the following centuries, but by what agency must be a matter of speculation. The earliest reference to such a collection is probably in Daniel 9:2, where Daniel found Jeremiah’s prophecy of the duration of Jerusalem’s desolations (Jer. 23:11f.) among ‘the books’.
In the persecution under Antiochus Epiphanes many copies of the scriptures were seized and destroyed; possession of a copy of ‘the book of the covenant’ was punished with death (1 Macc. 1:56f.). It was necessary therefore to replace the lost copies when religious liberty was regained. In a letter purporting to be addressed by the Jews of Jerusalem and Judaea to the Jews of Egypt it is recalled that Nehemiah in his day ‘founded a library and collected the books about the kings and prophets, and the writings of David, and letters of kings about votive offerings’. Following his precedent, the letter goes on, Judas Maccabaeus also (between 164 and 160 bc) ‘collected all the books that had been lost on account of the war which had come upon us, and they are in our possession’ (2 Macc. 2:13f.).
Where these collected scriptures were housed is not stated, but if may well have been in the temple. The holy place was a fitting repository for the holy books. Josephus tells how a copy of the law formed part of the temple spoils carried in Vespasian’s triumphal procession in ad 71; it was subsequently kept in the imperial palace. It may have been from the temple, too, that the ‘sacred books’ came which Josephus received as a gift from Titus after the capture and destruction of the holy place.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE QUMRAN TEXTS
The discoveries made at Qumran, north-west of the Dead Sea, in the years following 1947 have greatly increased our knowledge of the history of the Hebrew scriptures during the two centuries or more preceding ad 70. The texts discovered and studied appear to represent about five hundred separate documents, about one hundred of them being copies of books of the Hebrew Bible (some books in particular being represented by several copies). A few of these copies are substantially complete, but most are very fragmentary. All the books of the Hebrew Bible are represented among them, with the exception of Esther. This exception may be accidental (it is conceivable that a copy of Esther once included in the Qumran library has perished completely), or it may be significant: there is evidence of some doubt among Jews, as later among Christians, about the status of Esther. Esther may have been felt to have too close an affinity to the ideals of Judas Maccabaeus and his kinsfolk in the Hasmonaean family, of whom the Qumran community utterly disapproved.
But the men of Qumran have left no statement indicating precisely which of the books represented in their library ranked as holy scripture in their estimation, and which did not. A book setting forth the community’s rule of life or liturgical practice was no doubt regarded as authoritative, just as the Book of Common Prayer is (or was) in the Church of England, but that did not give it scriptural status.
Among their books are several commentaries on books of the Hebrew Bible, explaining them according to the community’s distinctive principles of interpretation. The books thus commented on were certainly acknowledged as holy scripture: their words were the words of God spoken through his prophets or spokesmen, foretelling events of the commentators’ own days, when the end of the current age was believed to be impending. We may confidently say, therefore, that the ‘canon’ of the Qumran community included the Pentateuch, the Prophets, the Psalms (possibly with a few supplementary psalms). It also included the book of Daniel, who is called ‘Daniel the prophet’ (as in Matt. 24:15), and probably Job (an Aramaic targum or paraphrase of Job was found in Cave 11 at Qumran).
But what of Tobit, Jubilees and Enoch, fragments of which were also found at Qumran? These were in due course to be reckoned canonical by certain religious groups; were they reckoned canonical by the Qumran community? There is no evidence which would justify the answer ‘Yes’; on the other hand, we do not know enough to return the answer ‘No’. One of the community documents—the Zadokite Work (or the Book of the Covenant of Damascus)—attaches some degree of authority to Jubilees: ‘As for the exact statement of all their epochs to which Israel turns a blind eye, it can be learned from the Book of the Divisions of the Times into their Jubilees and Weeks.’ The ‘Temple Scroll’ from Cave 11 (which should perhaps be more accurately called the ‘Torah Scroll’) is a repromulgation of the law or Moses, set in a deuteronomic framework, which was to be put into effect when national life was restored in accordance with Qumran ideals. The first editor of this document, the late Yigael Yadin, argued that it had canonical status in the community; he thought that it too was referred to in the Zadokite Work as ‘the sealed book of the law’ (but this is more probably a reference to the book found in the temple in the reign of Josiah).
From time to time the community documents indicate more explicitly which books were reckoned ‘canonical’ by quoting from them with introductory formulae which indicate their quality as divine revelation. When the Zadokite Work bases a ban on bigamy from the juxtaposition of the texts ‘male and female he created them’ (Gen. 1:27), ‘they went into the ark two and two’ (Gen. 7:9, 15), and ‘he shall not multiply wives for himself’ (Deut. 17:17), it is evident that the documents from which the three texts are quoted are authoritative scripture.
It is probable, indeed, that by the beginning of the Christian era the Essenes (including the Qumran community) were in substantial agreement with the Pharisees and the Sadducees about the limits of Hebrew scripture. There may have been some differences of opinion and practice with regard to one or two of the ‘Writings’, but the inter-party disagreements remembered in Jewish tradition have very little to do with the limits of the canon. The idea that the Sadducees (like the Samaritans) acknowledged the Pentateuch only as holy scripture is based on a misunderstanding: when Josephus, for example, says that the Sadducees ‘admit no observance at all apart from the laws’, he means not the Pentateuch to the exclusion of the Prophets and the Writings but the written law (of the Pentateuch) to the exclusion of the oral law (the Pharisaic interpretation and application of the written law, which, like the written law itself, was held in theory to have been received and handed down by Moses). It would be understandable if the Sadducees did not accept Daniel which contains the most explicit statement of the resurrection hope in the whole of the Old Testament.
As for the Samaritans, their Bible was restricted to the Pentateuch. They had their own edition of the book of Joshua and a number of other traditions, but these were not recognized as holy scripture. The Samaritan Bible was basically a popular Palestinian recension of the Hebrew Pentateuch, which was subjected to an editorial process to bring it into line with certain aspects of Samaritan tradition which conflicted with Jewish tradition. The Samaritan Bible has customarily been treated as evidence for the view that the final Samaritan schism took place at a time when the Pentateuch but not the Prophets or Writings had been ‘canonized’, but this is not necessarily so.
When we think of Jesus and his Palestinian apostles, then, we may be confident that they agreed with contemporary leaders in Israel about the contents of the canon. We cannot say confidently that they accepted Esther, Ecclesiastes or the Song of Songs as scripture, because evidence is not available. We can argue only from probability, and arguments from probability are weighed differently by different judges. But when in debate with Jewish theologians Jesus and the apostles appealed to ‘the scriptures’, they appealed to an authority which was equally acknowledged by their opponents. This near-unanimity might suggest that some widely acknowledged authority had promulgated a decision on the matter. It is not easy, however, to identify an authority in the relevant period which would have commanded the assent of such diverse groups. But, as later with the New Testament, so with the Old Testament it is probable that, when the canon was ‘closed’ in due course by competent authority, this simply meant that official recognition was given to the situation already obtaining in the practice of the worshipping community.
See 63–67.
Compare the ambiguity at the beginning of 2 Tim. 3:16. Does graphē here mean ‘scripture’ (in the special sense) or ‘writing’ (in the general sense)? If the former (which is more probable), the translation is ‘Every scripture is divinely inspired (God-breathed) and profitable …’; if the latter, the translation is ‘Every divinely inspired writing is also profitable …’.
The twelve prophets are those commonly called the Minor Prophets—not because they are less important, but because the books bearing their names are so much shorter than those of the ‘Major Prophets’ (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel).
These twenty-four books are identical with the thirty-nine of the Protestant Old Testament; the difference in reckoning arises from counting the twelve (‘minor’) prophets separately and dividing Samuel, Kings, Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah into two each.
Baba Bathra 14b–15a.
For arguments against the customary view that Ezra-Nehemiah was an integral part of the work of the Chronicler see H. G. M. Williamson, Israel in the Books of Chronicles (Cambridge, 1977); see also the balanced discussion in D. J. A. Clines, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, NCB (London/Grand Rapids, 1984), pp. 1–24.
If the quotation from ‘the Wisdom of God’ (Luke 11:49) goes on to ‘… between the altar and the sanctuary’ in verse 51, the chronological evidence for the position of Chronicles as the last book in the Bible is unaffected. But probably rsv is right in ‘this generation’ is characteristic of Jesus, own style. Matthew’s reference to ‘Zechariah the son of Barachiah’ in his parallel passage (Matt. 24:35) is a problem on its own, but the Zechariah of 2 Chronicles 24:20–22 is most probably meant.
Sirach is a Greek spelling of Sira, the (Hebrew) name of the author’s father.
See J. Barton, Oracles of God (London, 1986), p. 47.
The Psalter was a specially rich source of gospel ‘testimonies’ (OT texts fulfilled in the gospel story), not least because the portrayal of the righteous sufferer (e.g. Pss. 22:1; 69:4, 9, 21) was believed to anticipate the experiences of Jesus.
Josephus, Against Apion 1.38–41.
Josephus, Antiquities 13.311; 15.373–379.
Josephus, Antiquities 13.300.
Josephus, Jewish War 3.351–354.
The total of 22 may have been arranged so as to correspond with the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet; see p. 73, 78, 90.
Job is perhaps reckoned among ‘the prophets’ in Sirach 49:9 (Hebrew) and James 5:10f.
There are many references in the Mishnah and later rabbinical compilations to the discussions of the sages (including pre-eminently Yohanan ben Zakkai) in the ‘vineyard of Jabneh’ in the generation following ad 70. See J. P. Lewis, ‘What do we mean by Jabneh?’ JBR 32 (1964), pp. 125–132.
Their ‘discussions have not so much dealt with acceptance of certain writings into the Canon, but rather with their right to remain there’ (A. Bentzen, Introduction to the Old Testament, I [Copenhagen, 1948], p. 31).
See the Mishnah tractate Yadayim (‘Hands’), 3.2–5.
M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Harmondsworth, 1970).
See R. T. Beckwith, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church (London, 1985), pp. 278–281.
Hebrew šalheḇeṯyāh may be divided into the two words šalheḇeṯ Yāh. Yāh (av/kjv ‘Jah’) is a short form of Yahweh (av/kjv ‘Jehovah’).
tb Shabhāt 13b; Ḥagîgāh 13a; Menāhôt 45a.
See p. 47, n. 11, 85, n. 11.
This account has largely held the field since it was popularized by H. E. Ryle, The Canon of the Old Testament (London, 1892, 21909).
It has been held, however, that Deuteronomy served as the introduction to the ‘deuteronomic history’ (comprising Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings), and that this combined work was the first instalment of the Old Testament canon; see R. E. Clements, Prophecy and Tradition (Oxford, 1975), pp. 47–57.
The ‘letters of kings about votive offerings’ may be those reproduced in Ezra 6:3–7:26.
Jewish War, 7.150, 162. This may be ‘the Scroll of the Temple Court’ mentioned in the Mishnah, Moʾed Qaṭan, 3.4; Kelim 15.6.
Life, 418.
See F. M. Cross, The Ancient Library of Qumran and Modern Biblical Studies (Grand Rapids, 31980).
See pp. 71, 79, 80.
See the discussion in R. T. Beckwith, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church, pp. 283, 288–297; he points out that Esther conflicts with the Essenes’ calender, which they believed to be divinely ordained.
See p. 58 with n. 5.
4Q florilegium 2.3.
The discovery of this work (edited by J. P. M. van der Ploeg, A. S. van der Woude and B. Jongeling, Le Targum de Job [Leiden, 1971]) reminds one of the notes appended to the Septuagint version of Job, said to have been ‘translated out of the Syriac book’, and of the Job Targum which Gamaliel ordered to be built into the temple walls (tb Shabbāt 115a).
See pp. 84–86, 182.
CD 16.4
Y. Yadin, The Temple Scroll (Jerusalem, 1983), I, pp. 390–395.
CD 5.2.
CD 4.21–5.2.
Josephus, Antiquities, 18.16; his meaning is made plain in Antiquities, 13.297, where the Sadducees are said to ‘hold that only the written laws should be reckoned valid, but that those handed down by tradition from the fathers need not be observed’. It was probably misinterpretation of Josephus, directly or indirectly, that led Origen (Against Celsus, 1.49) and Jerome (Commentary on Matthew, on 22:31f.) to say that the Sadducees accept the books of Moses alone as scripture.
This oral law is the ‘tradition of the elders’ mentioned in Mark 7:5.
Daniel 12:2. When Jesus appealed to scripture in refutation of the Sadducees’ denial of resurrection, he cited Exod. 3:6, basing his argument on the character of God (Mark 12:26f.).
See P. Kahle, The Cairo Geniza (London, 1947), pp. 147f.; F. M. Cross, The Ancient Library of Qumran and Modern Biblical Studies, pp. 172f., 192f.
A. C. Sundberg argues that the Samaritan restriction of the canon to the Pentateuch involved ‘a conscious rejection of the collection of Prophets, since the Prophets were then regarded as canonical in Jerusalem’ (The Old Testament of the Early Church [Cambridge, Mass., 1964], p. 111); cf J. Barton, Oracles of God, pp. 282f.
See p. 262