the formation of the bible 37
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others was universally accepted much earlier. It is also probable that by
the end of the second century bce both the Torah and the Prophets
constituted closed corpora which it would be sacrilege to change, so
that continuing uncertainty lingered only about what should be included
in the Writings, the third part of the Bible. It is worth asking why Jews
felt impelled to give such authority to particular writings in the third
and second centuries bce.
It is unlikely that the explanation lies in an attempt by individuals or
groups to impose a specific ideology upon the Jewish community, not
least because there is no evidence of any attempt to create consistency
across the corpus. We have already seen the variety of tone and purpose
of the different biblical books, but different theological emphases also
cohabit within the corpus, with (for example) ethics based in much of
the Torah on Israel’s contract with God but based in the wisdom litera-
ture on universal standards of justice. There are different attempts to
understand the justice of God in the face of the sufferings of humanity
in the extended expressions of grief at the destruction of the First
Temple in Lamentations and the contrasting views of Kings and Chron-
icles on whether God brings retribution for sin immediately (as in
Chronicles) or only after many generations (as in Kings). The contrast
between the books of Chronicles and the material, from Genesis through
to the books of Kings, from which the author derived his historical
account points up the degree of duplication and discrepancy allowed to
coexist within the biblical corpus. The stories are essentially the same
but the chronicler’s reworking of his sources contains so many minor
alterations that it constitutes biblical exegesis within the Bible.
In the end, the best explanation of the adoption by Jews of the notion
of a specially authoritative body of texts on which they could rely for
their history and laws comes back to the statement by Josephus with
which we began. In claiming that ‘it is not open to anyone to write of
their own accord’ and that ‘the prophets alone learned, by inspiration
from God, what had happened in the distant and most ancient past,’
Josephus set up the literary traditions of the Jews in direct contrast to
the myriad contradictory histories, customs and legal systems to be
found among the Greeks. It was in the Greek world that Jews found
their traditions at odds with the new cultural horizons which Helleniz-
ation opened up, and they responded by affirming the absolute authority
of the main religious texts they had inherited from previous generations
(see Chapter 5).