Hebrew Canon
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The Hebrew Canon
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[edit] Definition
The Hebrew Canon consists of the books of the Bible considered canonical by Jewish scholars; it is identical with the Canon of the Old Testament according to Protestants.
[edit] History
The selection of the Hebrew Canon is said to have been made in the first century AD by the so-called "Council of Jamnia", but this is a claim much disputed by certain scholars who put the origin of the Hebrew Canon centuries earlier.
The issue is doubtful, and we do not feel competent to settle this dispute. We may note that as with other supposedly factual debates over this or that point of Bible history, it has a distinct theological undertone: for it is disquieting for the type of Christian who considers the Bible to be the perfect word of God to also contemplate the possibility that God used as his instruments in defining the very canon itself, people who had (from a Christian perspective) rejected their Messiah and God's son.
The earliest surviving examples of an entire Hebrew Canon in Hebrew date from the ninth century AD, in the recension known as the Masoretic Text.
[edit] Discussion
The criterion used to define the Hebrew Canon was to admit only books written in Hebrew and no later than the Book of Ezra. It is now known that some of the books included post-dated Ezra, which raises the question of whether we've been reading the wrong Bible all these years, or whether the scholars who drew up the Hebrew canon managed to hit on the right result by applying an incorrect criterion incorrectly.
The books excluded from the Hebrew Canon are known as the Apocrypha.
