The Canon of the Old Testament
THE CANON OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
R. T. Beckwith
The term “canon” is borrowed from Greek, in which kanon means a rule—a standard for measurement. With respect to the Bible, it speaks of those books that met the standard and therefore were worthy of inclusion. Since the fourth century kanon has been used by Christians to denote an authoritative list of the books belonging to the Old Testament or New Testament.
There has long been some difference of opinion about the books which should be included in the Old Testament. Indeed, even in pre-Christian times, the Samaritans rejected all its books except the Pentateuch; while, from about the second century B.C. onwards, pseudonymous works, usually of an apocalyptic character, claimed for themselves the status of inspired writings and found credence in certain circles. In the rabbinical literature it is related that in the first few centuries of the Christian era certain sages disputed, on internal evidence, the canonicity of five Old Testament books (Ezekiel, Proverbs, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Esther). In the patristic period there was uncertainty among Christians whether the Apocrypha of the Greek and Latin Bible were to be regarded as inspired or not. Difference on the last point came to a head at the Reformation, when the church of Rome insisted that the Apocrypha were part of the Old Testament, on an equal footing with the rest, while the Protestant churches denied this. Though some of the Protestant churches regarded the Apocrypha as edifying reading (the Church of England, for example, continued to include them in its lectionary “for example of life but not to establish any doctrine”), they were all agreed that, properly speaking, the Old Testament canon consists of the books of the Hebrew Bible—the books acknowledged by the Jews and endorsed in the teaching of the New Testament. The Eastern Orthodox Church was for a time divided on this issue, but has recently tended more and more to come down on the Protestant side.
What qualifies a book for a place in the canon of the Old Testament or New Testament is not just that it is ancient, informative and helpful, and has long been read and valued by God’s people, but that it has God’s authority for what it says. God spoke through its human author to teach his people what to believe and how to behave. It is not just a record of revelation, but the permanent written form of revelation. This is what we mean when we say that the Bible is “inspired,” and it makes the books of the Bible in this respect different from all other books.
THE FIRST EMERGENCE OF THE CANON
The doctrine of biblical inspiration is fully developed only in the pages of the New Testament. But far back in Israel’s history we already find certain writings being recognized as having divine authority, and serving as a written rule of faith and practice for God’s people. This is seen in the people’s response when Moses reads to them the book of the covenant (Exod. 24:7), or when the Book of the Law found by Hilkiah is read, first to the king and then to the congregation (2 Kings 22–23; 2 Chron. 34), or when the Book of the Law is read to the people by Ezra (Neh. 8:9, 14-17; 10:28-39; 13:1-3). The writings in question are a part or the whole of the Pentateuch—in the first case quite a small part of Exodus, probably chapters 20-23. The Pentateuch is treated with the same reverence in Joshua 1:7ff.; 8:31; 23:6-8; 1 Kings 2:3; 2 Kings 14:6; 17:37; Hosea 8:12; Daniel 9:11, 13; Ezra 3:2, 4; 1 Chronicles 16:40; 2 Chronicles 17:9; 23:18; 30:5, 18; 31:3; 35:26.
The Pentateuch presents itself to us as basically the work of Moses, one of the earliest and certainly the greatest of the Old Testament prophets (Num. 12:6-8; Deut. 34:10-12). God often spoke through Moses orally, as he did through later prophets too, but Moses’ activity as a writer is also frequently mentioned (Exod. 17:14; 24:4, 7; 34:27; Num. 33:2; Deut. 28:58, 61; 29:20-27; 30:10; 31:9-13, 19, 22, 24-26). There were other prophets in Moses’ lifetime and more were expected to follow (Exod. 15:20; Num. 12:6; Deut. 18:15-22; 34:10), as they did (Judg. 4:4; 6:8), though the great outburst of prophetic activity began with Samuel. The literary work of these prophets started, as far as we know, with Samuel (1 Sam. 10:25; 1 Chron. 29:29), and the earliest kind of writing in which they seem to have engaged extensively was history, which afterwards became the basis of the books of Chronicles (1 Chron. 29:29; 2 Chron. 9:29; 12:15; 13:22; 20:34; 26:22; 32:32; 33:18ff.) and probably of Samuel and Kings too, which have so much material in common with Chronicles. Whether Joshua and Judges likewise were based on prophetic histories of this kind we do not know, but it is quite possible. That the prophets on occasion wrote down oracles also is clear from Isaiah 30:8; Jeremiah 25:13; 29:1; 30:2; 36:1-32; 51:60-64; Ezekiel 43:11; Habakkuk 2:2; Daniel 7:1; 2 Chronicles 21:12.
The reason why Moses and the prophets wrote down God’s message and did not content themselves with delivering it orally was sometimes to send it to another place (Jer. 29:1; 36:1-8; 51:60ff.; 2 Chron. 21:12), but quite as often to preserve it for the future as a memorial (Exod. 17:14) or a witness (Deut. 31:24-26), that it might be there for the time to come (Isa. 30:8). The unreliability of oral tradition was well known to the Old Testament writers. An object-lesson here was the loss of the Book of the Law during the wicked reigns of Manasseh and Amon. When it was rediscovered by Hilkiah, its teaching came as a great shock, for it had been forgotten (2 Kings 22–23; 2 Chron. 34). The permanent and abiding form of God’s message was therefore not its spoken but its written form, and this explains the rise of the Old Testament canon.
How long the Pentateuch took to reach its final shape we cannot be sure. However, we saw in the case of the book of the covenant, referred to in Exodus 24, that it was possible for a short document like Exodus 20-23 to become canonical before it had grown to anything like the length of the book which now embodies it. The book of Genesis also embodies earlier documents (Gen. 5:1), Numbers includes an item from an ancient collection of poems (Num. 21:14ff.), and the book of Deuteronomy was considered canonical even within Moses’ lifetime (Deut. 31:24-26), for this writing was placed beside the ark. The ending of Deuteronomy, however, was written after Moses’ death.
While there was a succession of prophets, it was of course possible for earlier sacred writings to be added to and edited in the manner indicated above, without committing the sacrilege about which warnings are given in Deuteronomy 4:2; 12:32; Proverbs 30:6. The same applies to other parts of the Old Testament. The book of Joshua embodies the covenant of its last chapter, 24:1-25, originally written by Joshua himself (24:26). Samuel embodies the document on the manner of the kingdom (1 Sam. 8:11-18), originally written by Samuel (1 Sam. 10:25). Both these documents were canonical from the outset, the former having been written in the very Book of the Law at the sanctuary of Shechem, and the latter having been laid up before the Lord at Mizpeh. There are signs of the growth of the books of Psalms and Proverbs in Psalms 72:20 and Proverbs 25:1. Items from an ancient collection of poems are included in Joshua (10:12ff.), Samuel (2 Sam. 1:17-27) and Kings (1 Kings 8:53, LXX). Kings names as its sources the Book of the Acts of Solomon, the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel and the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah (1 Kings 11:41; 14:29ff.; 2 Kings 1:18; 8:23). The latter two works, combined together, are probably the same as the Book of the Kings of Israel and Judah, often named as a source by the canonical books of Chronicles (2 Chron. 16:11; 25:26; 27:7; 28:26; 35:27; 36:8; and, in abbreviated form, 1 Chron. 9:1; 2 Chron. 24:27). This source book seems to have incorporated many of the prophetic histories which are also named as sources in Chronicles (2 Chron. 20:34; 32:32).
Not all the writers of the Old Testament books were prophets, in the narrow sense of the word; some of them were kings and wise men. But their experience of inspiration led to their writings also finding a place in the canon. The inspiration of psalmists is spoken of in 2 Samuel 23:1-3; 1 Chronicles 25:1, and of wise men in Ecclesiastes 12:11ff. Note also the revelations made by God in Job (38:1; 40:6), and the implication of Proverbs 8:1–9:6 that the book of Proverbs is the work of the divine Wisdom.
THE CLOSING OF THE FIRST SECTION OF THE CANON—THE LAW
The references to the Pentateuch (in whole or part) as canonical, which we saw in the other books of the Old Testament, and which continue in the intertestamental literature, are remarkably numerous. This is doubtless due in part to its fundamental importance. References to other books as inspired or canonical are, within the Old Testament, largely confined to their authors: the chief exceptions are probably Isaiah 34:16; Psalms 149:9; Daniel 9:2. Another reason for this frequency of reference to the Pentateuch may, however, be that it was the first section of the Old Testament to be written and recognized as canonical. The likelihood that this was so arises from the fact that it was basically the work of a single prophet of very early date, which was edited after his death but was not open to continual addition, whereas the other sections of the Old Testament were produced by authors of later date, whose number was not complete until after the return from the Babylonian exile. No one doubts that the Pentateuch was both complete and canonical by the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, in the fifth century B.C., and it may have been so considerably earlier. In the third century B.C. it was translated into Greek, thus becoming the first part of the Septuagint. In the mid-second century B.C. we have evidence of all five books, including Genesis, being attributed to Moses (see Aristobulus, as cited by Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel 13.12). Later in the same century the breach between Jews and Samaritans seems to have become complete, and the preservation of the Hebrew Pentateuch by both parties proves that it was already their common property. All this is evidence that the first section of the canon was now closed, consisting of the five familiar books, neither more nor less, with only minor textual variations persisting.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SECOND AND THIRD SECTIONS OF THE CANON—THE PROPHETS AND HAGIOGRAPHA
The rest of the Hebrew Bible has a different structure from the English Bible. It is divided into two sections: the Prophets and the Hagiographa (sacred writings). The Prophets comprise eight books: the historical books Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, and the oracular books Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and the Twelve (the Minor Prophets). The Hagiographa comprise eleven books: the lyrical and wisdom books Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and Lamentations, and the historical books Daniel (see below), Esther, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles. This is the traditional order, according to which the remaining book of the Hagiographa, Ruth, is prefaced to Psalms, as ending with the genealogy of the psalmist David, though in the Middle Ages it was moved to a later position, alongside the other four books of similar brevity (Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations and Esther). It is noteworthy that in Jewish tradition Samuel, Kings, the Minor Prophets, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles are each reckoned as a single book. This may indicate the capacity of an average Hebrew leather scroll at the period when the canonical books were first listed and counted.
Doubt has sometimes been cast, for inadequate reasons, on the antiquity of this way of grouping the Old Testament books. More commonly, but with equally little real reason, it has been assumed that it reflects the gradual development of the Old Testament canon, the grouping having been a historical accident and the canon of the Prophets having been closed about the third century B.C., before a history like Chronicles and a prophecy like Daniel (which, it is alleged, naturally belong there) had been recognized as inspired or perhaps even written. The canon of the Hagiographa, according to this popular hypothesis, was not closed until the Jewish synod of Jamnia or Jabneh about A.D. 90, after an open Old Testament canon had already been taken over by the Christian church. Moreover, a broader canon, containing much of the Apocrypha, had been accepted by the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria, and was embodied in the Septuagint; and the Septuagint was the Old Testament of the early Christian church. These two facts, perhaps together with the Essene fondness for the pseudonymous apocalypses, are responsible for the fluidity of the Old Testament canon in patristic Christianity. Such is the theory.
The reality is rather different. The grouping of the books is not arbitrary, but according to literary character. Daniel is half narrative, and in the Hagiographa (according to the traditional order), it seems to be placed with the histories. There are histories in the Law (covering the period from the creation to Moses) and in the Prophets (covering the period from Joshua to the end of the monarchy), so why should there not be histories in the Hagiographa also, dealing with the third period, that of the Babylonian exile and return? Chronicles is put last among the histories, as a summary of the whole biblical narrative, from Adam to the return. It is clear that the canon of the Prophets was not completely closed when Chronicles was written, for the sources it quotes are not Samuel and Kings but the fuller prophetic histories which seem to have served as sources for Samuel and Kings as well. The earliest elements in the Prophets, incorporated in books such as Joshua and Samuel, are certainly very old, but so are the earliest elements in the Hagiographa, incorporated in books such as Psalms, Proverbs, and Chronicles. These elements may have been recognized as canonical before the final completion of even the first section of the canon. The latest elements in the Hagiographa, such as Daniel, Esther, and Ezra-Nehemiah, belong to the end of Old Testament history. But the same is true of the latest elements in the Prophets, such as Ezekiel, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Even though the books of the Hagiographa do tend to be later than the Prophets, it is only a tendency, and the overlap is considerable. Indeed, the very assumption that the Hagiographa are a late collection may have led to their individual books being dated later than they otherwise would have been.
Since the books in both these sections are by a variety of authors and are usually independent of one another, it may well be that they were recognized as canonical individually, at different dates, and at first formed a single miscellaneous collection. Then, when the prophetic gift had been for some while withdrawn, and their number was seen to be complete, they were more carefully classified, and were divided into two distinct sections. “The books,” spoken of in Daniel 9:2 (NRSV), may have been one growing body of literature, loosely organized and containing not only works by prophets like Jeremiah but also works by psalmists like David. The tradition in 2 Maccabees 2:13 about Nehemiah’s library reflects such a mixed collection: “He, founding a library, gathered together the books about the kings and prophets, and the books of David, and letters of kings about sacred gifts.” The antiquity of this tradition is shown not only by the likelihood that some such action would be necessary after the calamity of the exile, but also by the fact that the “letters of kings about sacred gifts” are simply being preserved because of their importance and have not yet been embodied in the book of Ezra (6:3-12; 7:12-26). Time had to be given after this for books like Ezra to be completed, for the recognition of the latest books as canonical, and for the realization that the prophetic gift had ceased, and only when these things had happened could the firm division between Prophets and Hagiographa and the careful arrangement of their contents be made. The division had already been made towards the end of the second century B.C., when the prologue to the Greek translation of Ecclesiasticus was composed, for this prologue repeatedly refers to the three sections of the canon. But it seems likely that the division had not long been made, for the third section of the canon had not yet been given a name: the writer calls the first section “the Law,” and the second section (because of its contents) “the Prophets” or “the Prophecies,” but the third section he simply describes. It is “the others that have followed in their steps,” “the other ancestral books,” “the rest of the books.” This language implies a fixed and complete group of books, but one less old and well-established than the books it contains. The three sections are also referred to in the first century A.D. by Philo (De Vita Contemplativa 25) and by Christ (Luke 24:44), both of whom give the third section its earliest name of “the Psalms.”
THE CLOSING OF THE SECOND AND THIRD SECTIONS OF THE CANON
The date when the Prophets and Hagiographa were organized in their separate sections was probably about 165 B.C. The 2 Maccabees tradition just quoted speaks of the second great crisis in the history of the canon: “And in the same way Judas [Maccabaeus] collected all the books that had been lost on account of the war which had come upon us, and they are still in our possession” (2 Macc. 2:14). The “war” mentioned here is the Maccabaean war of liberation from the Syrian persecutor Antiochus Epiphanes. The hostility of Antiochus against the Scripture is on record (1 Macc. 1:56ff.), and it is indeed probable that Judas would have needed to gather copies of them together when the persecution was over. Judas knew that the prophetic gift had ceased a long time before (1 Macc. 9:27), so it seems likely that when he gathered together the scattered Scriptures he arranged and listed the complete collection in the traditional order. Since the books were as yet in separate scrolls, which had to be “collected,” what he would have produced would not have been a volume but a collection, and a list of the books in the collection, divided into three.
In drawing up his list, Judas probably established not only the firm division into Prophets and Hagiographa but also the traditional order and number of the books within them. A list of books has to have an order and number, and the traditional order has Chronicles as the last of the Hagiographa. This position for Chronicles can be traced back to the first century A.D., since it is reflected in a saying of Christ’s in Matthew 23:35 and Luke 11:51, where the phrase “from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah” probably means all the martyred prophets from one end of the canon to the other, from Genesis 4:3-15 to 2 Chronicles 24:19-22. The traditional number of the canonical books is twenty-four (the five books of the Law, together with eight books of the Prophets and the eleven books of the Hagiographa listed above), or twenty-two (Ruth being in that case appended to Judges, and Lamentations to Jeremiah, in order to conform the count to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet). The number twenty-four is first recorded in 2 Esdras 14:44-48, about A.D. 100. The number twenty-two is first recorded in Josephus (Contra Apion 1.8), just before A.D. 100, but also, probably, in the fragments of the Greek translation of the book of Jubilees (first century B.C.?). If the number twenty-two goes back to the first century B.C., so does the number twenty-four, for the former is an adaptation of the latter to the number of letters in the alphabet. And since the number twenty-four, which combines some of the smaller books into single units but not others, seems to have been influenced in this by the traditional order, the order too must be equally old. There is no doubt about the identity of the twenty-four or twenty-two books—they are the books of the Hebrew Bible. Josephus says that they have all been accepted as canonical from time immemorial. Individual attestation can be provided for the canonicity of nearly all of them from writings of the first century A.D. or earlier. This is true even of four out of five disputed by certain of the rabbis: only the Song of Songs, perhaps because of its shortness, remains without individual attestation.
Such evidence implies that by the beginning of the Christian era the identity of all the canonical books was well known and generally accepted. How, then, has it come to be thought that the third section of the canon was not closed until the synod of Jamnia, some decades after the birth of the Christian church? The main reasons are that the rabbinical literature records disputes about five of the books, some of which were settled at the Jamnia discussion; that many of the Septuagint manuscripts mix apocryphal books among the canonical, thus prompting the theory of a wider Alexandrian canon; and that the Qumran discoveries show the apocalyptic pseudepigrapha to have been cherished, and perhaps reckoned canonical, by the Essenes. But the rabbinical literature records similar, though more readily answered, academic objections to many other canonical books, so it must have been a question of removing books from the list (had this been possible), not adding them. Moreover, one of the five disputed books (Ezekiel) belongs to the second section of the canon, which is admitted to have been closed long before the Christian era. As to the Alexandrian canon, Philo of Alexandria’s writings show it to have been the same as the Palestinian. He refers to the three familiar sections, and he ascribes inspiration to many books in all three, but never to any of the Apocrypha. In the Septuagint manuscripts, the Prophets and Hagiographa have been rearranged by Christian hands in a non-Jewish manner, and the intermingling of Apocrypha there is a Christian phenomenon, not a Jewish one. At Qumran the pseudonymous apocalypses were more likely viewed as an Essene appendix to the standard Jewish canon than as an integral part of it. There are allusions to this appendix in Philo’s account of the Therapeutae (De Vita Contemplativa 25) and in 2 Esdras 14:44-48. An equally significant fact discovered at Qumran is that the Essenes, though at rivalry with mainstream Judaism since the second century B.C., reckoned as canonical some of the Hagiographa and had presumably done so since before the rivalry began.
FROM JEWISH CANON TO CHRISTIAN
The Septuagint manuscripts are paralleled by the writings of the early Christian Fathers, who (at any rate outside Palestine and Syria) normally used the Septuagint or the derived Old Latin version. In their writings, there is both a wide and a narrow canon. The former comprises those books from before the time of Christ which were generally read and esteemed in the church (including the Apocrypha), but the latter is confined to the books of the Jewish Bible, which scholars like Melito, Origen, Epiphanius, and Jerome take the trouble to distinguish from the rest as alone inspired. The Apocrypha were known in the church from the start, but the further back one goes, the more rarely are they treated as inspired. In the New Testament itself, one finds Christ acknowledging the Jewish Scriptures, by various of their current titles, and accepting the three sections of the Jewish canon and the traditional order of its books; one finds most of the books being referred to individually as having divine authority—but not so for any of the Apocrypha. The only apparent exceptions are found in Jude: Jude 9 (citing the apocryphal work, The Assumption of Moses) and Jude 14, citing Enoch. Jude’s citation of these works does not mean he believed they were divinely inspired, just as Paul’s citation of various Greek poets (see Acts 17:28; 1 Cor. 15:33; Tit. 1:12) does not attribute divine inspiration to their poetry.
What evidently happened in the early centuries of Christianity was this: Christ passed on to his followers, as Holy Scriptures, the Bible which he had received, containing the same books as the Hebrew Bible today. The first Christians shared with their Jewish contemporaries a full knowledge of the identity of the canonical books. However, the Bible was not yet between two covers: it was a memorized list of scrolls. The breach with Jewish oral tradition (in some matters a very necessary breach), the alienation between Jew and Christian, and the general ignorance of Semitic languages in the church outside Palestine and Syria, led to increasing doubt concerning the canon among Christians, which was accentuated by the drawing up of new lists of the biblical books, arranged on other principles, and the introduction of new lectionaries. Such doubt about the canon could only be resolved, and can only be resolved today, in the way it was resolved at the Reformation—by returning to the teaching of the New Testament and the Jewish background against which it is to be understood.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Harris, R. L. Inspiration and Canonicity of the Bible, 1957.
Kline, M. G. The Structure of Biblical Authority, 1972.
Leiman, S. Z. The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture, 1976.
Lewis, J. P. Journal of Bible and Religion 32, 1964, pp. 125-132.
Margolis, M. L. The Hebrew Scriptures in the Making, 1922.
Purvis, J. D. The Samaritan Pentateuch and the Origin of the Samaritan Sect, 1968.
Ryle, H. E. The Canon of the Old Testament, 1895.
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Zeitlin, S. A Historical Study of the Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures, 1933.