Canons

B. Canons

A final authoritative collection of books is called a canon. This implies that other books were available but were not chosen. The biblical canon institutionalizes the choices that were made. There were, in fact, many more Jewish writings, written in both Hebrew and Greek, circulating within the Jewish community before the common era. But the Jewish community came to accept only a certain number of books as the ones through which they believed God spoke. These they treated as divinely inspired books.
    But not all Jews accepted the limits of this particular collection called the Hebrew Bible. There were many Jews living outside the territory of Palestine in what were largely Greek-speaking areas, called the Dispersion or the Diaspora. The Jewish communities of the Diaspora, especially the one in Alexandria, Egypt, were literarily productive, and had their own ideas of what should be included in the canon. They had come to revere other books in addition to those included in the canon recognized in Palestine.
    The additional materials, some complete books, others just appendixes, are known as the Apocrypha. They are accepted as part of Scripture by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. The Greek canon, which includes the Apocrypha, is called the Septuagint (often abbreviated by Roman numerals LXX, referring to the seventy-some Israelite elders who translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek). Protestant churches, along with the Jewish community, deny the authority of the apochryphal books and instead accept the more restricted Hebrew Bible of Palestinian Judaism.
    
Table 1 lists the differing canons of the major faith traditions.
   
    Traditionally Jews and Christians have traced the origin of the Bible to God. The doctrine of biblical inspiration affirms that the very words of the biblical text in some significant way came directly from God. Using human agents, God "inscripturated" his word for humankind. Whatever one's view of the inspiration of the biblical text, all students of the text would agree that the text was also delivered through human agency.
    Many groups and individuals were responsible for handing down the material contained in the Old Testament and for giving the individual books their final shape. Most remain nameless to this day. Even the books of identifiable prophets such as Isaiah and Amos were not entirely written by those men. The books are collections of their sayings, which anonymous editors gathered together and annotated.
    Much of the material that eventually was included in the Hebrew Bible started out as folktales, songs, and religious liturgies. The common people inherited these stories and passed them on from one generation to the next by word of mouth. Oral tradition, as it is called, was the source of many of the stories that have survived about Israel's ancestors and early history. Priests and highly trained scribes, typically employed by the king, were virtually the only ones able to read and write. They were responsible for gathering materials from oral and written sources, organizing them, and compiling them into books. Probably the earliest that any books were written down was around 950 B.C.E. during the reign of Solomon, the king of Israel at its golden age.
    The Hebrew Bible took centuries to shape. After individual books were completed, they were joined into collections of books. The earliest collection was the Torah. It was given its overall shape sometime during the Babylonian exile and was accepted as authoritative by 400 B.C.E. The Torah was followed by the Prophets, which was finalized around 200 B.C.E. After the Writings were added to these, the Tanak was completed around 100 C.E., as reflected in a conference of rabbis meeting at Jamnia. Though the process was in fact much more complicated than the above summary implies, the Hebrew Bible as we know it today became a fixed collection after a long period of growth and development.