From Collection to Canon: The Emergence of the Bible/Tanakh

Recent scholarship cautions against retrojecting modern notions of the biblical canon onto antiquity. The proliferation of Jewish literature in the Second Temple period and of traditions attributed to biblical figures shows that ideas about authorship, inspiration, and authenticity were fluid. Psalms attributed to King David from this period go far beyond the 150 canonized in the Hebrew Bible (see, e.g., “David as Author and Prophet”). It took centuries for the final shape of the canon to emerge, and many texts maintained semicanonical status even after the canon became fixed. The texts here present the arc of the development of what became the Tanakh, the acronym used to refer to the texts that compose the Hebrew Bible: Torah, Prophets (nevi’im), and Writings (ketuvim).

The book of 2 Maccabees likens Judah Maccabee to Nehemiah as a collector of “books about the kings and prophets, and the writings of David, and letters of kings.” That is, prior to the expression of a canonical consciousness, 2 Maccabees presents the priestly Hasmonean leader as a restorer of “all the books that had been lost,” perhaps in a Hellenistic-style library building project and also in the mode of other ancient Near Eastern cultures, wherein temples served as repositories of holy texts and as centers of learning and textual production.

A number of texts attest to debates over which books, and how many, were considered authoritative. The first to present a specific number of divinely revealed texts come from after the destruction of the Second Temple. These texts do not enumerate which specific books they have in mind but provide only a symbolic number. The pseudonymous apocalypse of 4 Ezra (preserved as 2 Esdras) presents Ezra, the priest and scribe known from the biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah, as receiving divine instruction to write down twenty-four books of revelation, to restore texts that would otherwise be lost. Josephus wrote the polemical Against Apion late in life, toward the end of the first century CE. In it he supports his claim that the Jews have maintained a proper historical record in their prophetic books by arguing that, in contrast to the Greeks, Jews “do not have endless numbers of books” but only twenty-two. Neither Josephus nor the author of 4 Ezra enumerates which texts are included in the numbers. Scholars suggest that rather than assuming that these authors had specific “biblical” books in mind, the numbers twenty-two and twenty-four should be understood as typological, representative of ideas and not of a specific and finite list of books. There are twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and so the suggestion that the record of divine revelation is contained in twenty-two texts is best understood as a claim for perfection and completeness within those divinely inspired works. Similarly, there are twenty-four letters in the Greek alphabet, and twenty-four books each in the Homeric works, The Iliad and The Odyssey. At the same time, the divisions of scripture were also being worked out, eventually taking shape as the Torah, Prophets, and Writings as we know them.

The traditional Jewish enumeration of the Hebrew Bible is twenty-four books, as detailed in b. Bava Batra 14b, which debates the correct order of the books. The shorter books of the twelve minor prophets are grouped together as one so they do not get lost amid the larger works, and the three longer major prophets are ordered thematically. The talmudic debate over the order, alongside the fact that the order presented does not comport with the traditional Jewish ordering of the Tanakh, shows that the process of canonization was ongoing. Canonicity is also at issue in the question about whether a text “defiles the hands,” a proxy for the sanctity of the text and its inclusion in what eventually became the Tanakh.

Evidence that different versions of the Torah were circulating in antiquity also comes from the existence of the Samaritan Pentateuch, and a midrash on Deuteronomy claims that three different versions of the Torah were preserved in the Temple and compared to one another to establish the best reading for any particular text.

Because a canon is defined both by what is included and by what is excluded, the question of which texts Jews counted as scripture was the subject of discussion among Christians in the second and third centuries CE who were in the process of establishing their own canon. These secondhand reports of what Jews of the time considered scripture connect a text’s canonicity to the question of its authorship and suggest that Jews and Christians developed canonical consciousness concurrently. Whereas canonical consciousness is initially expressed through symbolic numbers, here we see it evolve into enumerated lists that, despite their boundaries, do not claim to include the entirety of revelation. There remains space for further revelation, which for the rabbis is accommodated by the Oral Torah, the accompaniment to written scripture, delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai (see The Sages and the Oral Torah).