17. To Ezra and his coadjutors, the men of the Great Synagogue, the Jews ascribe the completion of the canon of the Old Testament. Their traditions concerning him are embellished with extravagant fictions; yet we cannot reasonably deny that they are underlaid by a basis of truth. All the scriptural notices of Ezra attest both his zeal and his ability as "a scribe of the words of the commandments of the Lord, and of his statutes to Israel," a man who "had prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments." Ezra 7:10, 11. The work in which he and his associates were engaged was the reëstablishment of the Theocracy on its old foundation, the law of Moses, with the ordinances pertaining to the sanctuary-service afterwards added by David; and that too in the vivid consciousness of the fact that disobedience to the divine law had brought upon the nation the calamities of the captivity. In such circumstances their first solicitude must have been that the people might have the inspired oracles given to their fathers, and be thoroughly instructed in them. The work, therefore, which Jewish tradition ascribes to Ezra and the men of the Great Synagogue was altogether appropriate to their situation, nor do we know of any man or body of men afterwards so well qualified for its performance, or upon whom it would so naturally have devolved.
That they arranged the inspired volume in substantially its present form, we have no good reason for doubting. But we should not, perhaps, be warranted in saying that they brought the canon of the Old Testament absolutely and formally to a close. Josephus (against Apion 1. 8) affirms that no book belongs to the sacred writings of his nation "which are justly believed to be divine," that had its origin after the reign of Artaxerxes, Xerxes' son (Artaxerxes Longimanus, under whom Ezra led forth his colony, Ezra, chap. 7); and that on the ground that from this time onward "the exact succession of the prophets" was wanting. This declaration of the Jewish historian is in all essential respects worthy of full credence. We cannot, however, affirm with confidence that all the later historical books were put by Ezra and his contemporaries into the exact form in which we now have them. The book of Nehemiah, for example, contains some genealogical notices (chap. 12:11, 22) which, according to any fair interpretation, are of a later date. We are at liberty to suppose that these were afterwards added officially and in good faith, as matters of public interest; or, as some think, that the book itself is an arrangement by a later hand of writings left by Nehemiah, perhaps also by Ezra; so that while its contents belong, in every essential respect, to them, it received its present form after their death. Respecting the question when the canon of the Old Testament received its finishing stroke, a question which the wisdom of God has left in obscurity, we must speak with diffidence. We know with certainty that our present Hebrew canon is identical with that collection of sacred writings to which our Saviour and his apostles constantly appealed as invested throughout with divine authority, and this is a firm basis for our faith.
The attempt has been made, but without success, to show that a portion of the Psalms belongs to the Maccabean age. The words of the Psalmist (Psa. 74:8) rendered in our version: "They have burned up all the synagogues of God in the land," have no reference to the synagogues of a later age, as is now generally admitted. The Hebrew word denotes places of assembly, and was never applied by the later Jews to their synagogues. The Psalmist wrote, moreover, in immediate connection with the burning of the temple—"they have cast fire into thy sanctuary, they have defiled by casting down the dwelling-place of thy name to the ground"—and this fixes the date of the Psalm to the Chaldean invasion (2 Kings 25:9); for the temple was not burned, but only profaned, in the days of the Maccabees. By "the assemblies of God," we are probably to understand the ancient sacred places, such as Ramah, Bethel, and Gilgal, where the people were accustomed to meet, though in a somewhat irregular way, for the worship of God. But whether this interpretation be correct or not, the words have no reference to the buildings of a later age called synagogues.
Some of the apocryphal writings, as, for example, the book of Wisdom, the book of Ecclesiasticus, the first book of Maccabees, were highly valued by the ancient Jews. But they were never received into the Hebrew canon, because their authors lived after "the exact succession of the prophets," which ended with Malachi. They knew how to make the just distinction between books of human wisdom and books written "by inspiration of God."
18. The earliest notice of the contents of the Hebrew Canon is that contained in the prologue to the Greek translation of Ecclesiasticus, where it is described as "the law, the prophets, and the other national books," "the law, and the prophecies, and the rest of the books," according to the three-fold division already considered. Chap. 18, No. 4. Josephus, in the passage already referred to (against Apion, 1. 8), says: "We have not among us innumerable books discordant and contrary to each other, but only two-and-twenty, containing the history of all time, which are justly believed to be divine. And of these five belong to Moses, which contain the laws and the transmission of human genealogy to the time of his death. This period of time wants but little of three thousand years" (the longer chronology followed by him). "But from the death of Moses to the reign of Artaxerxes, who was king of the Persians after Xerxes, the prophets after Moses wrote the history of their times in thirteen books. The remaining four contain hymns to God and precepts for human life. From Artaxerxes to our time various books have been written; but they have not been esteemed worthy of credence like that given to the books before them, because the exact succession of the prophets has been wanting." In this list the books of the Old Testament are artificially arranged to agree with the number two-and-twenty, that of the Hebrew alphabet. The four that contain "hymns to God and precepts for human life" are, in all probability: Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Canticles; and the thirteen prophetical books (see below) are: (1) Joshua, (2) Judges and Ruth, (3) the two books of Samuel, (4) the two books of Kings, (5) the two books of Chronicles, (6) Ezra and Nehemiah, (7) Esther, (8) Isaiah, (9) Jeremiah and Lamentations, (10) Ezekiel, (11) Daniel, (12) the book of the twelve Minor Prophets, (13) Job. See Oehler in Hertzog's Encyclopædia, Art. Canon of the Old Testament. Origen, as quoted by Eusebius (Hist. Eccl. 6.25), and Jerome (both of whom drew their information concerning the Hebrew Canon immediately from Jewish scholars, and may, therefore, be regarded as in a certain sense the expositors of the above list of Josephus) make mention of the same number, twenty-two. Origen's list unites Ruth with Judges, puts together the first and second of Samuel, the first and second of Kings, the first and second of Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah (under the names of the first and second of Ezra), and Jeremiah and Lamentations (with the addition of the apocryphal Epistle of Jeremiah—an inconsistency, or rather oversight, to be explained from his constant habit of using the Septuagint version). In the present text of Eusebius, the book of the twelve Minor Prophets is wanting. But this is simply an old error of the scribe, since it is necessary to complete the number of twenty-two. Jerome's list (Prologus galeatus) is the same, only that he gives the contents of the Law, the Prophets, and the Hagiographa in accordance with the Hebrew arrangement, placing Daniel in the last class, and adding that whatever is without the number of these must be placed among the Apocryphal writings. Smith's Dict. of the Bible, Art. Canon. The catalogue of these two distinguished Christian scholars—Origen of the Eastern church, and Jerome of the Western, both of whom drew their information immediately from Hebrew scholars—is decisive, and we need add nothing further.
19. The Apocryphal books of the Old Testament were incorporated into the Alexandrine version called the Septuagint; but they were never received by the Jews of Palestine as a part of the sacred volume. Concerning them and their history, see further in the Appendix to this part.
CHAPTER XVI.
ANCIENT VERSIONS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
In the present chapter only those versions of the Old Testament are noticed which were made independently of the New. Versions of the whole Bible, made in the interest of Christianity, are considered in the following part.