The Hebrew Canon was "closed around 349 bce. and not other books were added."

[Moses613]

Marco, you’re still not being entirely clear. Are you assuming that the postulated, fictional Council of Jamnia was specifically convened to reject the New Testament? Traditional Jewish literature, including the Talmud, does not anywhere record to my knowledge any such formal rejection. Rather, as you so logically put it, since the canon was already closed, these books were rejected automatically.

I am glad to stumble on to this post. I was at another post but couldn’t get my questions answered. Perhaps I can find answers here.

I’ll try!

1. Did the Great Assembly closed the canon? Or did they left it open for future additions? Where is the evidence for closing the canon if any?

They formalized the addition of all the later books to the canon. It is unclear at what point the canon was ‘closed’ as this is a matter of scholarly debate and I don’t think there’s any definitive position from a traditional Jewish point of view, except that sometime before the compilation of the Mishna/Talmud it was closed by the Great Sanhedrin, who were continuing the work of the Great Assembly.

1. Is the Great Assembly authorized to determine the canon? I presume there will be Levite priests who are authorized to do it and commanded by God to do it? If there is such a commandment, why don’t we read about it? We should be able to detect such an important commandment from the time of Great Assembly to Malachi , but I haven’t chance upon it yet.

First of all, Malachi was actually a member of the Great Assembly, they did not predate him. The Great Assembly was a mixed group comprised of Priests (cohanim) and Sages/Judges, and was authorized to rule on the canon by the Biblical verse: (Deut. 17:10) …do not deviate from that which they will tell you, right or left.
Also see Numbers 11:16 for the first gathering of the Sanhedrin of 70 sages (really 71 so there could not be an even split).

1. If this canon is a done thing, why should Jews rely on the Masoretic Text today? The MT couldn’t possibly obtain a higher or credible authorization.

The canon defines which books are included as religiously authoritative. But how do we know which of the competing textual variants is authoritative? The canon tells us that the Book of Isaiah is included, but what if I find three scrolls with three variant spellings of the same word, or where a word is dropped in one of them? Therefore, great Jewish sages in the early Middle Ages did intense textual analysis and concluded that the Masoretic text of Ben Asher was the most accurate of all, and since then Jews have basically adopted that as the correct text. Of course, we are only talking about Hebrew texts. What should we use, the Septuagint or the Vulgate?!

1. If the canon was a done thing, why were the Sadducees and Pharisees squabbling over the Holy Scriptures during the time of Jesus? The Sadducees recognizing only the first 5 books as being inspired whereas Pharisees were more liberal.

I think you are confusing the Sadducees with the Samaritans, who only accepted 5 books. AFAIK the Sads accepted all the books but argued that the Pharisaic oral tradition was inaccurate. Orthodox Jews view themselves as continuing the authentic tradition of Oral Torah, and all other groups such as the Sadducees were breakaways who rejected previously binding rulings.

If the OT was never closed, critics of the NT couldn’t put forward the argument that the Christians couldn’t add on to the Word of God or that the God of Abraham is exclusively the monopoly of the Jewish people.

Not sure what your point is. We say it was closed. The God of Abraham is the God of the Universe, as Abraham himself said, God Most High, Creator of Heaven and Earth. He loves all peoples who believe in Him and worship Him and conduct moral lives, not just Jews. However, He has chosen us specifically to carry out his special laws as a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation”. The reason why Christians can’t add to the word of God has nothing to do with the canon’s closure. It’s because the words they have written are not a record of God’s word. Same reason the US Declaration of Independence is not an addition to the Word of God. Has nothing to do with the canon.

 

[MarcoPG]

Marco, you’re still not being entirely clear. Are you assuming that the postulated, fictional Council of Jamnia was specifically convened to reject the New Testament? Traditional Jewish literature, including the Talmud, does not anywhere record to my knowledge any such formal rejection. Rather, as you so logically put it, since the canon was already closed, these books were rejected automatically.

Hello,
not that it was specifically about the NT, but also. And I am not saying it was historical, but then if it is not, and the Great Assembly had already done the job, why is there such an idea? Where does that come from?

 

[Moses613]

As I already mentioned above from Wikipedia, it was proposed by Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz in 1871 to explain how the canon came to be closed. This famous historian was not “orthodox” in his writing of history and he decided that there were additions to the canon that had to be later than 500 BCE or whenever, so he postulated a council that closed the canon in the first century CE. He said it was at Jamnia, which we know from Talmudic sources was the seat of the Sanhedrin right after the destruction of the Second Temple.

 

[ericc]

They formalized the addition of all the later books to the canon. It is unclear at what point the canon was ‘closed’ as this is a matter of scholarly debate and I don’t think there’s any definitive position from a traditional Jewish point of view, except that sometime before the compilation of the Mishna/Talmud it was closed by the Great Sanhedrin, who were continuing the work of the Great Assembly.

Thank you for your informative post. However, I have difficulty in locating the evidence that the canon was “closed”. Can you point me to which prophet actually said that? I couldn’t find it in Ezra or Nehemiah. For such an important event, surely there must be some definitive instruction from God. Recorded somewhere?

I think you are confusing the Sadducees with the Samaritans, who only accepted 5 books. AFAIK the Sads accepted all the books but argued that the Pharisaic oral tradition was inaccurate. Orthodox Jews view themselves as continuing the authentic tradition of Oral Torah, and all other groups such as the Sadducees were breakaways who rejected previously binding rulings.

My reading from various articles from the net says that the Sadducees only recognized
the 5 Books of Moses as divinely inspired. They did not recognized the Prophets. Perhaps the articles I read were not factual? If so, could you point me to an authoritative source as to what the actual position of the Sadducees were. Did the Sadducees reach common agreement with the Pharisees on what books are divinely inspired in the Great Assembly? Yes it is tough to distinguish fact from fiction from the net

Not sure what your point is. We say it was closed.

That was exactly my point. Who has the authority if not commanded by God to close the canon? Which prophet or priest or holy man of the Great Assembly did God reveal that commandment to? If the Jews were expecting a future messiah/messenger to come, why would the Great Assembly close the canon? Who would have the audacity to do that? It is a good thing to collect all your existing books but another to say the canon is closed in the absence of explicit commandment from God.

The Septuagint has more books than the MT canon. The Septuagint was in common usage for hundreds of years. So did the Greek speaking Jews erred in using the Septuagint? Did the temple authorities prohibited the Septuagint as being unauthorized? If prohibited, why don’t we hear about that? Would love to have resources to illuminate what is true history.

 

[Moses613]

I was under the impression that the Sadducees accepted all 24 books because I never saw anywhere in the Talmud that mentions differently and in fact one source that seemed to indicate they accepted the other books. But I now realize that source is not a proof. Additionally, I found a website that quotes both Origen and Hippolytus of Rome, who lived pretty close to if not contemporaneously with them, and they said the Sadducees only accepted the 5 books of Moses, so I guess it would make sense to assume that that is true. As far as your other comments on the authority under which the canon was closed, that can only be answered with a longer essay on religious authority in Torah law which I don’t have the time to research and write. Also, your question about the Messiah indicates that you believe the Jewish concept of Messiah is the same as the Christian one, just we don’t believe Jesus was “it”. This is fundamentally flawed. As another Jewish poster said elsewhere on these forums, Judaism is not Christianity minus Jesus and Christianity is not Judaism plus Jesus. We don’t believe in a Messiah who will give a new law. He will only uphold the existing law. This is a much longer discussion than I have time for. Maybe some other regulars want to jump in!

 

[SteveVH]

As I already mentioned above from Wikipedia, it was proposed by Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz in 1871 to explain how the canon came to be closed. This famous historian was not “orthodox” in his writing of history and he decided that there were additions to the canon that had to be later than 500 BCE or whenever, so he postulated a council that closed the canon in the first century CE. He said it was at Jamnia, which we know from Talmudic sources was the seat of the Sanhedrin right after the destruction of the Second Temple.

I was under the impression that Jamnia was a school, not a council, and had no authority to canonize anything.

 

[ericc]

Also, your question about the Messiah indicates that you believe the Jewish concept of Messiah is the same as the Christian one, just we don’t believe Jesus was “it”. This is fundamentally flawed. As another Jewish poster said elsewhere on these forums, Judaism is not Christianity minus Jesus and Christianity is not Judaism plus Jesus. We don’t believe in a Messiah who will give a new law. He will only uphold the existing law. This is a much longer discussion than I have time for. Maybe some other regulars want to jump in!

Actually, I didn’t assume the messiah/messenger alluded in Malachi as being the Christian Messiah because that would be rejected by non-Christians such as yourself. My point is since the Jews are expecting a future messiah to come, who would have the audacity to close the canon? Don’t they want hear what this messiah/messenger has to say? Malachi being supposedly the last prophet, stated that they are awaiting the arrival of the messenger and that the priesthood had been corrupted . Which would lead to the supposition that pronouncements from the priesthood can NOT be relied on from there on. Henceforth, how can anyone accept that after the Great Assembly, future Sanhedrin pronouncements will be credible? The closure of the canon being one.

Hence in summary,

1. Yes, the Men of the Great Assembly did assemble a number of books
2. No, there is no evidence of divine proclamation that the canon was closed by any identified persons of the Great Assembly (120 persons consisting of prophets, priests, holy men, educators?)
   3)Yes, there is expectation of a future messenger/messiah which would not support premature closure of the canon.
3. Disagreement among Jews what constitute inspired books mean there was no common acceptance of the proposed canon. This disagreement carried on for centuries.
   5)The Septuagint can not be written off as being unauthorized. It has been in usage by Greek speaking Jews for centuries with no evidence that it is unauthorized by temple authorities. In my view it remains historically a superior translation of paleo-Hebrew with no political overtones compared to the MT which was done up late in the 10th century and admittedly came from not error free sources.

The evidence of closure of the Jewish canon remains elusive.

 

[Moses613]

Two points.

1. The Messiah will not need to add on to Scripture, therefore it does not matter if the canon is closed or not. Even if he has prophecy, that prophecy does not have to become scripture. Additionally, the Messiah might be able to reconvene a new Great Assembly which can overrule the closure of the canon. But this is pure speculation. Nothing about the Messiah contradicts the present closure of the canon. And as I pointed out before, our rejection of the NT is not due to the canon’s closure, rather other reasons.
2. The MT is not a “translation of paleo-Hebrew”. It is a record of the original Hebrew text with possible variants. The Dead Sea Scrolls, dating from around 200 BCE, prove this. Here’s a quote from biblicalarchaeology.org: “Indeed, one of the most important contributions of the scrolls is that they have demonstrated the relative stability of the Masoretic text.” The same article I’m quoting does say, however, that there are some important textual variants between MT and DSS, but the main impressive thing about them is their incredible similarity.
   If you want to argue the following, I’ll diagree with you, but you may say: “The original Hebrew text on which the Septuagint is based is more accurate than the text of the MT.”

Also, from Wikipedia (emphasis added):
“The most widely accepted view today is that the original Septuagint (LXX) provided a reasonably accurate record of an early Hebrew textual variant that differed from the ancestor of the Masoretic text as well as those of the Latin Vulgate, where both of the latter seem to have a more similar textual heritage… These issues notwithstanding, the text of the LXX is generally close to that of the Masoretes and Vulgate. For example…”

 

[ericc]

Two points.

1. The Messiah will not need to add on to Scripture, therefore it does not matter if the canon is closed or not. Even if he has prophecy, that prophecy does not have to become scripture. Additionally, the Messiah might be able to reconvene a new Great Assembly which can overrule the closure of the canon. But this is pure speculation. Nothing about the Messiah contradicts the present closure of the canon. And as I pointed out before, our rejection of the NT is not due to the canon’s closure, rather other reasons.
2. The MT is not a “translation of paleo-Hebrew”. It is a record of the original Hebrew text with possible variants. The Dead Sea Scrolls, dating from around 200 BCE, prove this. Here’s a quote from biblicalarchaeology.org: “Indeed, one of the most important contributions of the scrolls is that they have demonstrated the relative stability of the Masoretic text.” The same article I’m quoting does say, however, that there are some important textual variants between MT and DSS, but the main impressive thing about them is their incredible similarity.
   If you want to argue the following, I’ll diagree with you, but you may say: “The original Hebrew text on which the Septuagint is based is more accurate than the text of the MT.”

Also, from Wikipedia (emphasis added):
“The most widely accepted view today is that the original Septuagint (LXX) provided a reasonably accurate record of an early Hebrew textual variant that differed from the ancestor of the Masoretic text as well as those of the Latin Vulgate, where both of the latter seem to have a more similar textual heritage… These issues notwithstanding, the text of the LXX is generally close to that of the Masoretes and Vulgate. For example…”

Unfortunately both your points do not bring us closer identifying the"who" and “when” the canon was closed , if indeed it was closed. My remarks about the circumstances not supporting the closure still remains valid. I tried not to bring the NT into the picture as I know it will not help in the discussion.

BTW, the source documents for the MT translation, do they still exist? How do we know the one chosen among the variants available, the correct one?

At the end, perhaps the key question to answer is this: Is the longer canon Septuagint considered credible during 1 AD and the 2 or 3 centuries before it? What does history say? Did the Greek speaking Jews during those times erred in their religion? If it is good enough for them, why change?

 

[Moses613]

I guess it depends to whom your question is directed. If you’re asking a contemporary halachically observant (“orthodox”) Jew why he accepts that the canon is closed, he will inform you that the Talmud rules that way and we accept the authority of the Talmud as the final arbiter of Jewish Law. If you would ask me if the Greek or Alexandrian Jews were erring in their religion, I would respond that I don’t know that there’s any positive evidence to conclude that they were (for example, can you prove that they accepted the apocrypha included in the Septuagint?), but if they were not making use of the canon as defined by the Talmud’s record, then perhaps they erred in that respect.