30 A History of Judaism
scrolls, fragments of the Pentateuch, especially Deuteronomy, predom-
inate. The figure of Moses, as author of the Pentateuch, was already
exceptional in the eyes of Jews from his depiction in the Pentateuch
itself, where God is portrayed as specifically distinguishing him from
other prophets, to whom the Lord makes himself known in visions and
dreams: ‘Not so with my servant Moses ... With him I speak face to
face – clearly, not in riddles; and he beholds the form of the Lord,’^ so
that ‘never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom
the Lord knew face to face.’ Such rhetoric is all the more striking because
the Pentateuch itself portrays Moses as a flawed leader, barred from
entering the promised land for his lack of faith when faced by a popular
uprising at Meribah. There are remarkably few references to Moses at
all in the biblical prophetic books or in the Psalms, even though much
of the contents of the Pentateuch is presented as the divine word medi-
ated to the people through Moses: ‘The Lord spoke to Moses,
saying .. .’^6
None of the other books of the Bible presents divine revelation in such
a consistently direct fashion, but those other books were nevertheless
seen by the time of Josephus as sharing the same aura of divine inspir-
ation as the Pentateuch. Josephus is the earliest witness to something like
a canon of scripture, noting that, among Jews, unlike other peoples,
it is not open to anyone to write of their own accord ... but the prophets
alone learned, by inspiration from God, what had happened in the distant
and most ancient past ... Among us there are ... only twenty- two books,
containing the record of all time, which are rightly trusted. Five of them
are the books of Moses, which contain both the laws and the tradition
from the birth of humanity up to his death ... From the death of Moses
until Artaxerxes, king of the Persians after Xerxes, the prophets after
Moses wrote the history of what took place in their own times in thirteen
books; the remaining four books contain hymns to God and instructions
for people on life.^7It seems clear that Josephus had in mind in this passage something close
to the specific shape of the Bible as it was later conceived by the rabbis
and by Christians. Although his purpose in referring to these books in
this passage was to insist on the veracity of Jewish traditions about their
history, it was impossible to omit from his list the last four books (pre-
sumably at least Psalms and Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, although which
other book came into this category is less certain), even though these
did not contain history at all.^8