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CANON OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

A Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held as sacred by Judaism and Christianity. The name “Old Testament” reflects the Christian movement’s self-understanding as the fulfillment of Jeremiah’s prophecy (Jer. 31:31) of a new covenant (Lat. testamentum) between God and Israel. Judaism uses a variety of designations for its sacred writings, including: (1) “scripture,” from Heb. miqrāʾ, “that which is read aloud;” (2) “Tanak,” an acronym created from the names of the three traditional divisions of the Hebrew Scriptures, Torah (Law), Nebiʾim (Prophets), and Kethubim (Writings); and (3) “Torah,” after the section of the Scriptures that is most important for Jewish practice.

The development of the OT canon is a result of the interaction between two distinct but inseparable meanings of the term “canon.” “Canon” is derived from Semitic qāneh, “reed,” and takes its meaning metaphorically from the use of such objects as measuring devices. When applied to a literary collection, canon in its strictest sense refers to a fixed list of texts possessing an exclusive status relative to other writings. On the basis of such a definition, one might assume that the OT canon possessed a uniform shape and a precise date of origin. However, evidence for its history provides neither a clearly identifiable date of origin nor a single, universally accepted description of its contents. Under these circumstances, a broader definition is required. Canon in its broader sense is the normative functioning of given texts within social groups, without regard to the fixed content or exclusive status of the texts in use. By this definition, the texts of the OT were employed as a fluid, functional “canon-in-the-making” for many years prior to their ultimate definition as a fixed and exclusive collection.

Evidence for a Fixed Canon

Hebrew manuscripts and rabbinic listings of the definitive books of the Jewish Scriptures include 24 books arranged in a tripartite division of Torah, Prophets, and Writings. The numbering of the books reflects the number of individual scrolls used to record each book in antiquity.

The earliest reference to a fixed collection of Jewish Scriptures is found in the writings of the historian Josephus (Ag. Ap. 1.8, ca. 90 b.c.e.). According to Josephus, the 22 sacred books of the Jewish Scriptures were written during Israel’s classical period of prophetic inspiration, from the time of Moses to the period of Judean restoration in the mid-5th century. Although the contents of the Scriptures are described in three sections, these sections are not identical to the tripartite rabbinic division. Josephus’ canon consisted of: (1) the five books of Moses; (2) 13 prophetic books, including not only the eight books of the rabbinic “Prophets” section, but also Job, Daniel, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Esther; and (3) the four books of Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs. The difference between the 22 books in Josephus’ list and the 24 in the rabbinic lists is usually explained by counting Ruth with Judges and Lamentations with Jeremiah. The number 22 is identical to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, symbolizing the completeness of the collection. The tradition of counting the books as 24 is attested in 4 Ezra 14:45, a passage roughly contemporaneous with Josephus.

Attempts to trace the history of a fixed collection of Scriptures to a time earlier than Josephus are frustrated by a complex set of findings. The LXX, the ancient translation of the Jewish Scriptures from Hebrew into Greek, provides earlier chronological evidence for the history of the OT canon, but not without complicating that history a great deal. Except for the Torah, the LXX preserves the books in a different order, based loosely on chronology and literary typology, and with a variety of textual divergences from existing Hebrew manuscripts. The most significant difference is that the Greek translation included several writings not included in the Hebrew canon. Additional texts found in the LXX but not in Hebrew manuscripts and lists include 1-2 Esdras, Judith, Tobit, 1-2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and Baruch, as well as numerous additions to individual books.

The Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures owes its preservation to the Christian movement. The Greek Bible was the Scripture of the early Church, a fact reflected not only in the numerous citations of the LXX found in the NT, but also in the acceptance of most of the books of the Greek Bible into the canon of the early Church, books that have been retained until the present time in the canon of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian Churches. Although Protestant Christianity accepts as canonical only those books of the Jewish Scriptures preserved in Hebrew, the Protestant OT still follows the order of the LXX and not the Hebrew Bible. Until the 19th century, even printed editions of the Protestant Bible included the deuterocanonical books of the Catholic and Orthodox OT, which are designated as “Apocrypha” by Protestant Christianity.

The best explanation of the difference between the number and order of books in the rabbinic Jewish canon and that of the LXX manuscripts and the early Church is that, apart from the five books of the Torah, the limits and divisions of the Jewish Scriptures were not fully defined at the time of the translation into Greek, between the 3rd and the 1st centuries b.c.e. The manuscript discoveries from the Dead Sea region, especially Qumran, support this conclusion. The Jewish sect living at Qumran preserved and esteemed religious writings beyond those of the subsequent Hebrew canon, such as the pseudonymous books of Jubilees and Enoch, as well as texts unique to the Qumran community. The overall picture that the LXX and Qumran manuscripts yield is that prior to the 1st century c.e. the 24 books of the Hebrew canon were preserved, translated, employed, and esteemed as Scripture, but, apart from the Torah, they did not possess an exclusive status nor a uniform shape. Based upon the available evidence, prior to the last half of the 1st century c.e., the Jewish Scriptures consisted of the Torah, a loosely defined group of writings referred to as “the Prophets,” and an undefined group of miscellaneous writings.

Process of Canonization

Although identifying the mid-to-late 1st century c.e. as the date of the earliest explicitly limited collection of Jewish Scriptures satisfies the strict definition of canon as a fixed collection of exclusive status, such a description excludes extensive evidence for the authoritative usage of most of the OT at times much earlier than this minimal date of origin. Some argue that the present form of portions of biblical material may be traced back directly to the historical figure of Moses. Most would agree that, at the very least, material preserved in Deut. 12–26 is directly related to the scroll of law promulgated by King Josiah of Judah in the 7th century (2 Kgs. 22:8–23:25). A great portion of the Jewish Scriptures took their present shape in the 6th century during the Babylonian Exile, so that by the time Ezra the scribe came to Jerusalem from Babylon in the mid-5th century “with the Law of his God in his hand” (Ezra 7:14), much of the subsequent OT canon was circulating in roughly its present form.

The difference between the relatively late emergence of the exclusive status of the OT canon and the great antiquity of the normative usage of the OT writings demonstrates the necessity of expanding the definition of canon to include the more general concept of a text’s function as a normative standard of evaluation. In the functional stage of canon formation, the status of a canonical work is implicitly assumed in its usage. Further, the canonical function of a work is contingent upon the situation in which it is used and is therefore subject to change given the exigencies of the moment. The fixed, definitive OT canon is the final, reflective stage of a lengthy and complex process during which the biblical texts continued to function normatively over an extended series of circumstances. Due to the implicit and somewhat random nature of the continuous normative use of the canonical books, the process of the canon’s development is best described in a theoretical, rather than objective, manner.

The initial stage in the formation of the OT canon was the written preservation of its contents. For much of the OT material, however, this stage of the process is shrouded in mystery. The current written form of most OT books is the result of a process of collection or compilation of material existing in a previous form, whether oral or written, that cannot be recreated with great certainty.

In order to continue the process that leads to canonization, the written material required some form of publication or official sanction within a community. The account given in 2 Kgs. 23 of Josiah’s promulgation of the Deuteronomic law code provides a rare glimpse of the kind of official publication that was necessary for the survival of biblical literature, despite the silence of the biblical record regarding such official sanctions.

The fact that ancient Near Eastern texts outside the Bible have survived only as archaeological discoveries shows that official publication and sanction alone do not guarantee continuous canonical status. Published texts must be reproduced textually, an effort not to be underestimated in a predominantly oral culture. Economic factors related to training scribes, procuring and preparing writing materials, reproducing lengthy texts by hand, storing the texts and the copies, and repeating the copying process required a highly motivated interest group. The preserved texts must have met some pressing need of the preserving community, whether for self-understanding or community governance, in order to justify such expense in terms of labor and materials. Israel’s understanding of its traditions as divine revelation, whether as priestly instruction (tôrâ) or as prophetic word (dāḇār), reflects the explicit religious value of the preserved traditions. References to ancient books no longer extant, such as the Book of the Wars of the Lord (Num. 21:14) and the Book of Jashar (Josh. 10:13; 2 Sam. 1:18), suggest that only a fraction of Israelite literature was esteemed valuable enough by succeeding generations to receive continuous reproduction.

Beyond physical reproduction, textual transmission by succeeding generations required various degrees of actualizing interpretation in order to appropriate older texts to new situations. Often such interpretation took the form of editorial alteration of the text itself, a process that is demonstrable for the OT by comparing the texts of various ancient manuscripts. Other contemporizing interpretations circulated independently of the biblical text in the form of oral tradition. The description in Neh. 8 of Ezra reading the Torah of Moses while the Levites “interpret and give the sense” provides a clear example of the role of interpretation in the transmission of valued texts.

If a text survives long enough due to continued actualization and also the continued survival of the interpreting community, then it achieves added significance not only for its content but also for its “timeless” character. The text is afforded a “classical” status relative to other literature because of its antiquity and durability. Such a phenomenon would explain the proliferation of pseudonymous writings during the 3rd and 2nd centuries. Eventually, a level of “critical” study emerges in order to distinguish classical literature from other imitative, archaizing works. The emerging boundaries between a classic text and a secondary text are illustrated by comparing the book of Daniel, which is included in the canon perhaps because of its exilic narrative setting, and the book of Sirach, which, although highly esteemed by both Judaism and Christianity, nevertheless is excluded from the Jewish canon because of its self-conscious and explicit origin in the 2nd century b.c.e. By the time of Josephus, the canon was defined to exclude not only texts written later than the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, but also those texts claiming to have been written earlier than Moses.

Study and reflection upon classical texts increases the status of those texts and provides the intellectual context for a defined canon. After the number of canonical works is determined, the text, arrangement, and classification of the contents develop a degree of standardization. It is theoretically possible that a text might be removed or added to the canon at this late stage, but such changes are extremely unlikely. The latter, reflective stages of the canonical process possess a self-perpetuating tendency.

Canon and Interpretation

The concept of the OT canon as a distinct stage in the history of the biblical text has received increased attention in recent scholarship. In addition to the various other stages of development of biblical texts, the final, “canonical” form of the text has become a topic of renewed investigation. Study of texts in their canonical form presumes that the text has undergone a genre transformation from a prior literary category to the distinct category of normative Scripture and may be productively interpreted as such.

Bibliography. J. Barr, Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism (Philadelphia, 1983); J. Barton, Oracles of God (London, 1986); B. S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia, 1979); D. N. Freedman, The Unity of the Hebrew Bible (Ann Arbor, 1991); J. A. Sanders, From Sacred Story to Sacred Text (Philadelphia, 1987); B. H. Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1988).

Barry A. Jones

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

CANON OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)