BOOK REVIEW

BECKWITH, R., The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church and its Background in Early Judaism, Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1985. Pp. xiii + 528. Cloth, $35.00. ISBN 0-8028-3617-8. The surviving records have preserved little information about the process through which the canon of the Hebrew Bible was formed or recognized, but in modem times many scholars have concluded that three fundamental stages can nevertheless be distinguished: the Torah was canonized in the early post-exilic period, the Prophets around 200 BCE, and the Writings in ca. 90 CE at the Council of Jamnia. It is widely supposed that Hellenistic Jews accepted a larger canon which included the apocryphal books. In the last few decades, some aspects of this widely accepted hypothesis have come under heavy attack-especially the role that the Council of Jamnia is thought to have played. A thorough revision of the accepted theory was enunciated by S.Z. Leiman in his The Canonization of Hebrezv Scripture: The Talmudic and Midrashic Evidence (Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 47; Harden, CN: Archon Books, 1976). He argued that the prophetic canon was closed in approximately 500-400 BCE and that the full canon-including the Writings-was fixed already in the second century BCE. R. Beckwith has now built upon the foundations laid by Leiman and others and has written the most comprehensive study to appear in many years of all the evidence that may bear upon the development of the Old Testament canon. Through his researches he hopes to have shed light not only on an ancient process but also upon the problem of canon in the modem
church. In his Introduction he swiftly sketches prior work in the field and sets forth his own method and aims. One methodological assumption which deserves highlighting is that, as he traces the history of how and when certain books were recognized as scriptural, ... the statements of ancient authors will be taken in their obvious sense and accepted as dependable, unless there are strong grounds for thinking that they ought not to be(9). What this means in

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practice is that Beckwith uses some texts as reliable historical sources, when most would classify them quite differently (e.g. the second letter prefaced to 2 Maccabees). Moreover, he thinks that the New Testament books accurately reflect the teachings of Jesus and his apostles. Beckwith surveys the textual witnesses for his topic in the first chapter and attempts to align the various books with known parties, all of whom seem to agree about which books were authoritative. The second chapter deals with The Fact of the Canon; included here is a very useful compilation of passages in which books are designated as authoritative by tags such as scripture, it is written, etc. (pp. 69-76-only Ruth, Songs of Songs, and Esther are not adduced under one of these formulae). After treating the titles for the canon in chap. 3, he proceeds to a study of the evidence for The Structure of the Canon in chap. 4, that is, information about the threefold division, which must have been fixed in the second century BCE. He thinks that each of the three sections was closed by this time and that the canonical process took place, not in three stages, but in two: the Law first, then the other two at the same time. Chap. 5 focuses on The Order of the Canonical Books. Here he works through Jewish (the earliest order is that found in bBaba Bathra 14b) and patristic sources, among others; he also offers a detailed discussion of Mt 23.34-36 and what relevance it has for the subject (it shows that in Jesus time the Books of Chronicles already occupied last position in the canon). In the sixth chapter, the number of books in the canon comes under consideration. Beckwith maintains that 24 (with Ruth and Lamentations counted as separate books) is the slightly older number, while 22 soon was accepted. This number of biblical books, which was fixed in the second century BCE, is attested in the Book of Jubilees (or at least in the Greek translation of it). The final two chapters discuss The Identity of the Canonical Books by considering the two sides of this issue: chap. 7 treats those books which were included (here one finds Beckwiths study of the Jamnia issue and of certain problematic books such as Esther); and chap. 8 handles those works which were excluded (he writes about the apocalyptic literature and the canons of the different ancient groups). Five appendices (including ones on The Order of the Prophets and Hagiographa in the Jewish Tradition and The Canon of the Early Ethiopian Church) and three indices bring his most impressive study to an end. Everypne who is interested in the subject of the canonization of the Hebrew Bible should be grateful to Beckwith for gathering so much information and for arranging and analyzing it in such learned fashion. Though he presents his thesis on the basis of a mass of detailed evidence, his fundamental conclusions are rather simple: the canon was fixed and closed in the time of Judas Maccabeus (Judas was very instrumental in the process); at this time its order and structure were also determined, and all Jewish groups-in the land or in the diaspora-including the earliest Christians, accepted this canon. Beckwiths work should insure that scholars look more

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seriously to an earlier time than 90 CE for the canonization of virtually every

book that is now in the Hebrew Bible. There are, however, several crucial parts of his argument which can hardly be accepted. First, it is diflicult to follow Beckwith in regarding 2 Macc 2.1315 as historically reliable; moreover, it is not clear that this passage, whether or not it is historical, alludes to canonical labors on the part ofNehemiah and Judas Maccabeus. Second, he has made a good case that almost all of the books in the Hebrew Bible were recognized as scriptural by the second century BCE, but he has not demonstrated that the canon was also closed at that time. The vague names that the sources give for the third division (the others, the rest of the books, psalms, etc.) already suggest that it was not sharply defined in the period in question. But, more importantly, some sources indicate quite clearly that their authors or the groups which they represented or to which they referred placed more books than those of the current Hebrew Bible in their canons. 4 Ezra 14 is the most obvious case, and Philo seems to suggest the same for the Therapeutae in de vita contemplativa 25. In addition, the value attached to 1 Enoch and Jubilees (and perhaps other compositions) at Qumran indicates that the members of this group accepted the claims of these books that they were divinely revealed. Beckwith misconstrues these cases; also, in his treatment of Judes use of 1 Enoch 1.9, he must work exceptionally hard to dismiss this pseudepigraphical book from the early Christian canon of the Old Testament. Finally, there is no evidence before the 90s CE (Josephus and 4 Ezra) for the numbers 22 or 24 for the biblical books. Beckwiths attempt to find the number 22 in Jubilees collapses under the weight of the. fact that no text of Jubilees places this number in 2.23. Some much later authors (e.g. the Byzantine chronographer Syncellus) claimed they had found it there, but they were obviously mistaken about this, as they were at times about other
statements

regarding their sources. James C. VanderKam,

North Carolina State

University