20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Sacred Text and Canon

Sacred Text and Canon David Stern T he Jewish concept of a sacred text derives directly from the Bible's description of the origins of its own laws. In the famous passages in Exodus 19 and 24 narrating the Sinaitic revelation, the sacrality of the laws revealed there is set forth as a function of both their divine origins and their authority for all time. Repeated in the book of Deuteronomy (cf. 31:9-13), these functions were eventually extended to every book in the Hebrew Bible in its three parts, the Pentateuch (Torah), the Prophets (Neviim), and the Writings (Ketuvim), all of which were believed to be divinely inspired and hence authoritative as guides for religious practice and belief. These canonical texts were treated as definitively fixed (Eccles. 3:14; cf. Deut. 4:2; 13:1) and as objects of special study (cf. Deut. 31:10-13); one can assume that from an early period, the notion of a canonical text carried with it the idea that such a text required interpretation, both for its intrinsic importance and because it had to be constantly reinterpreted in order to maintain its relevance. Modern scholars have been wary of accepting the biblical account of its origins at face value. While many passages in the later books of the Bible 842 SACRED TEXT AND CANON echo earlier traditions, there are few unequivocal testimonies that would prove the canonization of specific texts as literary documents of sacred status ; even in the passages in Exodus and Deuteronomy cited above, it is not clear precisely what revelation is being described. Most scholars today believe that the canonization of the Bible and its formation into the present text we possess took place at a date much later than the Bible claims; according to current scholarly consensus, the first book in the Bible to reach canonical status was Deuteronomy, during the time of the josianic reform in 622 B.C.E. (cL II Kings 22:8; 23: 1-3). The remainder of the Pentateuch, in its several sacred traditions, was joined to Deuteronomy in the late fifth and early fourth centuries B.C.E., following the return from the Babylonian Exile under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah (cL Neh. 8:2-3). The Prophets, as a collection, was closed in the third century B.C.E., following the period of Persian hegemony in Palestine, while the Writings, the final section of the Bible, was not completed until perhaps the late first or early second centuries C.E., following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., at a rabbinic synod supposedly held at jabneh. In the case of both the Prophets and the Writings, however, it is clear that individual books in the collections were considered sacred and had been canonized long before the collections in their entirety. Precisely how these final canonical decisions were made is not known. The Bible itself does not describe the process of canonization (except, perhaps , in the passages in II Kings and Nehemiah), and the extrabiblical evidence is at best equivocal. The library at Qumran suggests that the sectarians who lived there possessed a biblical canon slightly larger than that of the rabbis and subsequent judaism, and by examining books like Ben Sira and jubilees that were not included in the rabbinic canon, modern scholars have speculated, not very successfully, upon the criteria the rabbis may have used in fixing their final canon. In a recent study, however, S. Z. Leiman has reviewed all the supposed evidence in rabbinic literature and concluded that there is no proof that the rabbis ever decided the canon. The synod at jabneh was not about canonization of Scripture, and the meaning of the terms that the rabbis use to describe supposedly canonical books-terms like "books that defile the hands" (M. Kelim 15:6; M. Yad. 3:5)-is unclear. As Leiman points out, the rabbis never propose as a candidate for Scripture any book that was known to them to have been authored after the third century B.C.E., the time at which they believed classical prophecy ceased, or any book that was published after the second century B.C.E. Accordingly, Leiman concludes that the rabbis, in fact, inherited a canon of Scripture that had been fixed no later than the second century B.e.E.; at most, they SACRED TEXT AND CANON 843 made some minor...