36 A History of Judaism
But it is not clear that he had a notion which specific writings by ‘the
others that followed them’ shared the status of the Law and the Proph-
ets, and since Ecclesiasticus itself was included by Greek- speaking Jews
in the Septuagint, it is evident that Jews in his time had no agreed list of
canonical books to which to refer. The Hebrew Ben Sira was not in the
end to be included in the Hebrew Bible, even though the text (of which
ancient fragments have been found at Masada and Qumran) was known
and admired by the tannaitic rabbis. The reasons why the rabbis
excluded Ben Sira and other writings accepted by the Greek tradition,
such as Tobit and Judith, are obscure. As late as the second century ce
the tannaim discussed whether the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes defile
the hands, and according to the Babylonian Talmud there were rabbinic
debates even in the third century ce about the status of the books of
Ruth and Esther.^15
By the fourth century ce, rabbinic Jews were agreed on the special
status of the twenty- four books comprising the Hebrew Bible as used
today. They categorized as Neviim (‘Prophets’) both the books contain-
ing the speeches of the prophets whose names they bear and the
historical accounts (Joshua to Kings) which provide the background to
their prophetic careers. The rest of the Bible was defined as Ketuvim
(‘Writings’). The acronym Tanakh (Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim ) was used
to refer to the Bible as a whole.
The discrepancy between these twenty- four books included in the
Hebrew Bible and the larger corpus of the Greek Bible was known at
the end of the fourth century to the Christian scholar Jerome, who took
the Hebrew to be more authentic despite the fact that Christians had
relied on the Greek since the first century ce. Jerome placed the anomal-
ous books found in the Greek but not the Hebrew (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom
of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, the books of Maccabees and a few others)
into a separate category (‘apocrypha’ or ‘ deutero- canonical’) to be con-
sidered valuable but not divinely inspired. Jerome’s anxiety to distinguish
the authentic biblical works from other books reflects a specifically
Christian concern to define a canon of scripture in the sense of a fixed list
of authoritative books of both the Old and New Testaments. This con-
cern was linked to the need for self- definition for Christian communities
in the early centuries of the Church and was not shared by Jews, although
the eventual choice by the rabbis of the twenty- four books may have
been in reaction to the lists which the Christians had adopted.^16
The limits of what constituted the Bible thus long remained fluid for
Jews, but the principle that some books had greater authority than