234 Job Y. Jindo
understands the process of biblical canonization to be a gradual one, start-
ing with King Josiah’s religious reform and centralization of worship in
622 – 621 BCE (2 Kings 22 – 23) — a historical event inspired by a “book of
the Torah” found in the Jerusalem temple, which modern biblical schol-
ars agree was Deuteronomy or an earlier version of it. Accordingly, for
Kaufmann, Deuteronomy is the fi rst canonized book of the Torah that was
accepted “as binding divine law,”13 and the age of Josiah marks the “Archi-
medean point” in the history of the Pentateuchal literature — “the begin-
ning of the emergence of the Torah book out of the Torah literature.”14
Kaufmann maintains that the whole Torah was canonized as the peo-
ple’s “book of life” in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah in the fi ft h century
BCE.15 As the primary impetus behind this canonization, he sees the col-
lective urge to restore the relationship to God. At that time, the Babylo-
nian exile (ca. 586 – 538 BCE) was conceived as a result of Israel’s failure
to fulfi ll its sacred duties, and the only way for the people of Israel to end
this period of “divine rage” and to restore their life in the promised land
was to live solely according to the will of God. To do so, fi rst they must
know the divine will. Th us, the Torah was compiled by an authorized in-
stitution from independent sources hitherto circulating in diff erent groups
and consecrated as the “living word of God.”16 Next, the literature of the
Prophets was collected and organized as supplementary to this canon, as
was, in turn, the Writings a few centuries later. Th e Bible thus came to have
its present shape as “Scripture” and the people of Israel as the “people of
the Book.”
Kaufmann insists that we recognize as real the presence of both stylis-
tic and substantive discrepancies within and among biblical texts. He also
points out a considerable number of unfulfi lled prophecies in biblical lit-
erature.17 Th e very presence of such “fl aws” indicates for Kaufmann that
contrary to the dominant scholarly view of an age of canonization, it was
rather an “age of compilation, not of edition and revision, let alone of inno-
vation,”18 for had revisions occurred at this stage, such glaring fl aws would
have been corrected or edited out. To be sure, he admits, “there have been
technical errors, and the order of chapters has been confused, owing to the
fact that the book was compiled from several collections over a period of
time. A few marginal remarks may also have entered the text.”19 But by and
large, the later codifi ers and compilers of biblical literature did not seek to
“clean up” the text, whether stylistically or substantively, and this, he ar-
gues, is because each source had long been preserved and circulated in a
given form.