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014 | Canon of Writings | Understanding the Canon
570 Plays5 years ago
In this episode, we discuss the Ketuvim: the third portion of the Hebrew Old Testament. Also known as the Writings or in Greek, the Hagiographa, this group of books is represents an different way of looking at God than do the Prophets or Torah. Writings also contains some of the more hotly debated books in the canon.
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Transcript
Introduction to Verity Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Verity. I'm your host, Felicia Masonheimer, an author, speaker, and Bible teacher. This podcast will help you embrace the history and depth of the Christian faith, ask questions, seek answers, and devote yourself to becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ. You don't have to settle for watered-down Christian teaching. And if you're ready to go deeper, God is just as ready to take you there. This is Verity, where every woman is a theologian.
Focus on the Ketuvim
00:00:30
Speaker
Welcome back to Verity Podcast, everyone. Today, we are talking about the canon of the writings, or in Greek, the Hagiographa, or in Hebrew, the Ketuvim. So this is the third portion of the Old Testament canon, and if you've been following along with our series, then you have a great foundation for what we're talking about today.
00:00:54
Speaker
So this is a little bit of a shorter episode because this is a shorter portion of scripture. Well, I shouldn't say a shorter portion, but it's a less discussed portion as opposed to Torah and the prophets.
00:01:10
Speaker
So in this section of scripture we have some familiar books that you'll recognize. We have Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Ruth, Esther, and Daniel. And so in this episode we're just going to do an overview of how these books are arranged, their general function and use,
00:01:33
Speaker
in a few debates about their canonosity. There were a couple books in the writings that were more debated than any of the other books in the Old Testament and that has made people question should they have ever been in the canon at all and so we'll get into that towards the end of this episode.
Wisdom and Poetry in Ketuvim
00:01:52
Speaker
So, I want to begin with a quote by Dr. Timothy Paul Jones that I thought really summed up kind of the nature of this section of books. It says, The writings weave wisdom and poetry with scrolls that were read during Israel's festivals and texts that told Israel's history from a different perspective than the former and latter prophets.
00:02:15
Speaker
Since the Psalms was the longest book of the writings and they stood near the beginning of the writings, the entirety of this third section of the Jewish Bible was sometimes dubbed Psalms, or even David. So we now have five different names for this section of scripture.
00:02:32
Speaker
But name aside, this is a section of scripture that's fundamentally different in nature than the genre that we see in the prophets and in Torah. You'll notice that when we talked about prophets, we noted that the major prophets, the former prophets, and then the latter prophets were, you know, these massive works, most of them, that were dealing with
00:03:00
Speaker
direct revelation from God and Israel's future. And then of course Torah was mostly the law as well as the narrative about Israel's walk with God in the wilderness and then their coming conquest of Canaan.
00:03:15
Speaker
But in this collection of writings, we have a totally different kind of genre here.
Authority and Canonization of Ketuvim
00:03:22
Speaker
Wisdom literature, hymns of praise, stories about women Ruth and Esther, and then Daniel, which encompasses apocalyptic prophecy, historical narrative, and some poetry. It's really quite a fascinating combination.
00:03:39
Speaker
So this grouping of writings is believed to have one level less authority than prophecy. So it's not the same as prophecy. Now this does not mean that it was less inspired because obviously to be included in the canon, these books had to be deemed inspired works.
00:04:02
Speaker
but that it's a different nature of genre of writing. And so it's not meant to have the kind of authority that the prophets would. The characteristics of the content and the way that it's written indicate that this was a second temple work. Now, obviously the Psalms that were written by David would have been prior to the first temple,
00:04:28
Speaker
But a lot of the other works we're seeing in the compilation and the putting together indicates this was a Second Temple work. And so that's kind of how they're dating the summation, the canonization, the acceptance of these documents as authoritative as a group to the Second Temple era.
00:04:50
Speaker
So another quote that I thought was really interesting before I read it, I want to add a little caveat. What we're saying here about the writings is again, not that this is a lesser grouping of books or that they aren't as important or they don't teach us about God, but they teach us about God in a different way.
00:05:09
Speaker
So in Torah, we're getting direct revelation from God where he's saying, this is my law. This is how you are to behave. This is what you are to do. And then in the prophets, we see when Israel departs from what they are supposed to do, when they depart from their covenant with God, here are the consequences. Come back to me. Here is what relationship can look like again. So it's all operating from that fundamental understanding of Torah.
00:05:34
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And then through the prophets, we see relationship being worked out when they have walked away or when they've come back.
Biblical Themes in Ketuvim
00:05:43
Speaker
And so in the writings,
00:05:46
Speaker
My Jewish Learning, which has a great resource on some of these topics, says, what makes books like Psalms and Job so remarkable is their humanity. The eye who dares to voice questions and doubts about God in the face of danger or suffering. Ultimately, each of the Ketavim affirms a hard-won commitment to God and covenant.
00:06:08
Speaker
Without divine miracles or national glory, there were only the words of Torah and prophets to hold on to, proven reliable by Israel's difficult history and carried forward by people of wisdom.
00:06:22
Speaker
And so we're seeing Torah worked out in the lives of these people in the books of the writings. We're seeing in the Psalms the heart cry of a person in their walk with God, in Proverbs walking out the wisdom of God and the decisions that we're making and social justice according to what we saw in Exodus and Leviticus.
00:06:47
Speaker
In Ecclesiastes we see Solomon questioning, you know, is God's way the best way or am I gonna go follow my own way? And let's compare and contrast what this life looks like. In Song of Songs we see the relationship between God and Israel and the pursuit of a bridegroom and a bride. We see in Ruth the faithfulness of the kinsman-redeemer and of a man who was righteous and loved God and a woman who chose to love God and follow him even though she wasn't one of
00:07:16
Speaker
the Israelites. In Esther, which we'll talk about the debate about this book, there's not actually a whole lot of mention. There's not even God's name mentioned in this book, but it's her faith and her dedication to the truth of God. That is why this book eventually was canonized.
00:07:33
Speaker
And so it's amazing to see that in these books that are in the writings, we see everything that we know from Torah and prophets being summed up in the lives of these people and walked out in a very tangible way. And I just think it's the coolest thing ever that we have a Bible with all these different genres of writing to show us who God is in different ways. It is just the neatest thing to me.
00:08:02
Speaker
Okay, so as far as the book itself or the books themselves, fragments of every one of these books indicate to them except Esther were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls which date as early as the second century BC. So we know that these books were being copied and in use, preserved as early as the second century BC.
00:08:28
Speaker
Now, one of the things that comes up when we're talking about Old Testament canon and deciding when it was authoritative is a theory that is very well established in both scholarly communities and just in general evangelicalism. If you were to do just like a quick surface search of how is Old Testament canonized, people will tell you it was canonized in three stages, kind of like we've talked about the three sections.
00:08:56
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and confirmed at a council called Jamnia, which was, I believe, around 90 AD, or CE, common era.
00:09:08
Speaker
Now, the issue with this is, the Council of Jamnia did not convene to canonize the Old Testament. In fact, they convened simply to discuss if a couple books should, technically, this is what we don't have a lot of information on this council, but should be in the Old Testament canon, and that includes Song of Songs and I believe Esther.
00:09:33
Speaker
The lack of evidence and the lack of documentation of the Council of Geminis has called this theory into question. Now, I chose to divide up the Old Testament canon into three sections and discuss them progressively because that is how the original Hebrew Bible was arranged, and I think it gives us a better understanding of how these works were deemed authoritative.
00:09:56
Speaker
it was not the council of Jamnia that decided that these were authoritative books. They were already authoritative and it was being discussed at the council. It was long before that that these works, these books, these thoughts, these laws were guiding the entire nation, guiding the religious
00:10:18
Speaker
pursuits of the nation of Israel and they were the foundation of everything that the apostles were teaching. As we've said many times on this podcast, it really is impossible to fully understand the New Testament without the Old Testament. Yes, you can grasp the gospel and you can be saved, but to get a truly full-orbed understanding of what was happening through the gospel, you have to understand the Old Testament.
00:10:46
Speaker
because it is the Old Testament, the Old Covenant, that is the foundation for everything that happened in the New. And so you might have heard of a movement called Red Letter Christians. They pretty much only pay attention to the words that Jesus said. This is terrible exegesis. This is a terrible way of understanding Scripture because Jesus himself based all his words off of the legacy of
00:11:15
Speaker
old covenant. Everything he was doing was working from the old covenant. He was prophesied to come. He was coming from this understanding and fleshing out these teachings and showing you, look, this is a new covenant in my blood.
00:11:30
Speaker
Well, the newness of that has no meaning if there was not first and old. So we need to understand the old to understand the new. And so this red letter idea that we can just parse the Bible and be like, well, I just listened to what Jesus said. Well, Jesus wouldn't even want you. You should only listen to what Jesus said. He wants you to understand the whole picture. Because without that, you can't understand what Jesus said. OK, I will get off my soapbox for a moment.
00:12:00
Speaker
So we know that these books were being used as authority being used and referenced by the Jewish community as early as second century BC based on the Dead Sea Scrolls that we found.
Division and Cultural Significance of Ketuvim
00:12:13
Speaker
How are they being used? Well actually it's really interesting how this section of scripture was used in Jewish culture. Each of the books
00:12:23
Speaker
Here we have a little little section that I'm going to redo. I believe these books were in the Hamesh megaloth. So these are the five small scrolls and that is a sub category.
00:12:39
Speaker
of the K2M, so of the writing. So you've got picture with me, big letters, the writings. Under that, there are three sections. The first section is the book of truth. This contains Psalms, Proverbs, and Job.
00:12:55
Speaker
The second section is the Hamesh Magilloth. This is Five Small Squirrels. This contains Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther. And then they had a section for other writings. Daniel Ezra Nehemiah, which was one book.
00:13:10
Speaker
and Chronicles. So if you remember from the earlier episodes, we talked about how the Bible that Jesus had and was working from would have started in Genesis and ended in Chronicles. And since the writings would have been the final scroll in the series, Chronicles was at the end. So these are all the writings. So it's like, you know, three sections, and then the third section was divided into another grouping of three.
00:13:36
Speaker
And each group of three had its own set of scrolls. What I just gave you was the Talmudic canon. And one of the interesting things about this is how they use these books. So each book has a section, at least in the five small scrolls,
00:13:57
Speaker
the megaloth. They had five small scrolls that were used during specific feasts. They were quoted. Ecclesiastes was quoted at the Feast of Booths. Esther quoted at the Feast of Purim. Song of Songs quoted at Passover. Ruth quoted at Pentecost. And Limitations quoted at Tisha Baff.
00:14:24
Speaker
So isn't it interesting that these books, which may not carry the authority of the prophets because they're a different genre, a different way of approaching scripture and talking about God, are honored by being read at these significant events for Israel as a nation?
00:14:46
Speaker
Now, I want to move into some of the questions of canonosity.
Debates on Canonicity of Proverbs and Esther
00:14:52
Speaker
So, of all of the books in the Old Testament, I would say most of the books that were questioned, so their authority was questioned, are from the writings.
00:15:07
Speaker
There are a few we're going to discuss. The first is proverbs. Proverbs was debated because it was deemed contradictory. And I'll give you an example. You've probably read, if you ever did like a proverb a day for a month, Proverbs 26.
00:15:25
Speaker
In verses four and five, it says, do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself. And the very next verse says, answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes. What is going on here? That's confusing. But the Babylonian Talmud explains why the book of Proverbs was not withdrawn. It says this,
00:15:51
Speaker
Why did they not hide it? They said, did we not examine the book of Ecclesiastes and find a reconciliation? So here, too, let us make search. And how will its statement self-contradictory? It is written, answer not a fool according to this folly. Yet it is also written, answer a fool according to his folly. There is no difficulty. The one refers to matters of learning and the other to general matters. So they're making a distinction here.
00:16:17
Speaker
And Paul Wegener says, it's more likely that the verses here imply that wisdom is a matter of discernment, and it's best to respond with silence since the fool will not listen anyway. But other times, a wise answer will catch a fool in his tracks and teach him his mistake. So Proverbs, there was discussion about it, but it was still deemed authoritative and was reconciled.
00:16:41
Speaker
Another book that was called in the question is Esther. So the question about the canonosity of Esther kind of had to do with whether or not it required a mantle to read it, whether or not it was inspired. So this was questioned on many different grounds. A couple of things that Dr. Wegner brought up was it does not claim to be inspired. So nowhere does it say this is the word of the Lord or the word of the Lord came and said.
00:17:10
Speaker
It mostly covers a secular history, like it's talking about what's happening with Esther and the Persian government, and nowhere is the name of God mentioned.
00:17:21
Speaker
So there was some question whether this book should even be in the Old Testament at all. But rabbis finally agreed to include Esther in the canon because God's presence was evident in the book and Esther exercised faith in God to deliver the people. And so they ended up including it as an example of that faith and God's deliverance of Israel.
Controversies Over Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes
00:17:47
Speaker
Okay, now there are two other books that were called in the question, and these were debated on the grounds of something very interesting, causing hands to be unclean. Yes, you heard right. Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs were debated, and many of the comments discussing these debates are found in the Mishnah yidayim.
00:18:14
Speaker
This Mishnah discusses rabbinic purity and especially discusses what to do concerning clean hands. So there was an argument among Judaic scholars regarding songs and ecclesiastes.
00:18:31
Speaker
The questions surrounding these books actually arose because they were most likely already canonical. The questions that were being debated here weren't deciding whether or not the books should be in the canon, but how they should be read, how they affected the reader. And so these debates about the uncleanness of
00:18:53
Speaker
Reading Ecclesiastes or Song of Songs, there's a couple things we should consider. Books could be deemed unclean if they had less than 85 words, or based on the spacing of the words and the letters. Blank spaces where ribbons were placed, the format of the scrolls, this was all discussed by Judaic scholars whether or not it caused uncleanness of the hands.
00:19:15
Speaker
I want to make a note here that remember, uncleanness is not dirtiness. It just means common, not holy, needs to be purified. You should keep that in mind when you're studying Leviticus. Unclean is not bad. It's just not holy. It's not purified.
00:19:37
Speaker
This is something that they had to consider given, you know, their career. Another convincing point comes from Albert Baumgarten. He says that books only made hands unclean when they were outside of the temple context, so read in community. And that's what the rabbis were discussing.
00:19:55
Speaker
Either way, we know that Ecclesiastes was eventually canonical, and there were several schools of thought on it, but tradition says that there was a vote taken at the Council of Jamnia to determine which school of thought would be favored. Roger Beckwith, who was a leading scholar, conservative scholar on the canon, that
00:20:19
Speaker
The decision even then wasn't binding because there were still contrary opinions being expressed into the second century. So we know that there was just debate about Ecclesiastes. And to be honest, Ecclesiastes, it's one of the toughest books for me to read. And so I honestly, I'm like, well, I feel a little bit better because if I'm confused sometimes, and there was debate about this back then,
00:20:45
Speaker
I guess I feel a little bit comforted. But we do know that based on what was written about the nature of God and what was written about man and the ultimate conclusion that was drawn, the book was decided to be included in the Jewish canon. There was discussion about it after it was included, but it was
Promoting Deeper Spiritual Exploration
00:21:04
Speaker
included.
00:21:04
Speaker
I think all of us have been at a women's conference where we were told, you are a beautiful daughter of the Most High King. And it's true, but it's not the whole truth. The beauty of being God's daughter has some backstory and it's left out in a lot of messages preached to women.
00:21:23
Speaker
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00:21:41
Speaker
I'm going to talk about pursuing the truths of who God is and who we are in relationship to Him, how to study scripture, how legalism, shallow theology, and false teaching keep us from living boldly as a woman of the Word. I'm so excited to put this book in your hands. You can grab your copy on Amazon, or for more information, head to my website FeliciaMasonheimer.com and click the book tab.
00:22:06
Speaker
And then lastly, Song of Songs. Same kind of situation. This is one of the books where they discussed whether or not it made one unclean. It had some questions because of the explicit nature of sexual love.
00:22:20
Speaker
origin of the church fathers says that jewish custom forbade anyone to read it before reaching maturity and i think that's really interesting also very wise because i think there are certain times when reading song of songs might not be the wisest thing for somebody
00:22:39
Speaker
I have a lot of young women in our sexual freedom Facebook group who choose not to read it or listen to sermons on it because it's not something that they can handle right now. And I thought it's very interesting that Jewish tradition would expect someone to have a certain maturity level before they could approach this book.
00:23:00
Speaker
All that said, this book generally was interpreted as an allegory between God and Israel. Many early Christians also saw as an allegory of Christ's love for the church. There's also some evidence that this is a literal love story between Solomon and his first love. There's a lot of debate about it, but either way, there's things we can learn for
00:23:23
Speaker
real-life relationships and things that we can learn about God and his love for Israel and those grafted into Israel's promise. So even though the questions were brought up specifically at the Council of Jamnea, they really didn't have the authority to modify the canon. These books were already in the canon. So remember,
00:23:46
Speaker
back up to 200 years before Jesus is even born, these books were being copied and treated as scripture and are found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. So this tells us that they were important documents to Israel, they were being used, they were being circulated, and then the questions about them just carried on into years after Jesus ascended.
Reflecting on Biblical Understanding
00:24:13
Speaker
So
00:24:14
Speaker
This gives us kind of an overview of the function of these works, gives us an idea of what their purpose was, and the fact that though people debated some of their content, ultimately they were kept because what was the core message that was being presented? Was it consistent with everything that was being taught in the previously canonized portions of Scripture?
00:24:42
Speaker
Now, I wanted to kind of end on a big picture view to kind of back up again as we're looking at this Old Testament, old covenant works that tell us this is who God is. He creates a perfect world, right? Perfect world. He gives man the ability to choose. Walk with me or choose to reject me. Man chooses to reject God. And from there, God initiates this redemption plan.
00:25:10
Speaker
And you know, that brings up all sorts of questions. One guy just, you know, kill Adam and even just start over. Do we know? No. But there's grace and mercy in that, that he chose to bear with man. Because honestly, what would have happened? He could have recreated the world, right? With new people. Would those people have chosen to obey him?
00:25:30
Speaker
We don't know, but probably unlikely, right? Its choice in that free will that he granted man is so, such a beautiful evidence of his sovereignty and his grace. And through their sin, he initiates this plan of redemption. He chooses to use certain people, chooses to use the righteous man, Abraham, his descendants, to bring a redeemer who was rooted in history, who's rooted in a specific nation,
00:26:00
Speaker
so that all could come and see and all nations would be blessed that they could be grafted into that promise not because they were better or because they had done something special but so that he had a nation in which he could usher a real human being who was also holy God who in the historicity of that national legacy in
00:26:26
Speaker
A human body with a lineage. He could come and redeem the world. And all of the Old Testament is the first half of that epic. And all of the New Testament is the second half. And we're still living the second half.
00:26:42
Speaker
This is why, you guys, I started studying the canon and how scripture was compiled because I felt like I had this domino effect of questions. I felt like I asked, why does the sexual ethic matter? Why does God care who I'm sleeping with, right? And that went back to
00:27:04
Speaker
Well, who is God? How does he operate? What did he say about sexuality? And then it went back to, well, how can I trust what is said or written about sexuality? Who wrote it? How do I know this document is real? And that is what brought me all the way back to, now I know this is where these words came from. This is what this book is about. This is why I can trust it.
00:27:27
Speaker
And the more I studied it, the more I trust that God used real people to write an epic story that involves all of us, that blesses all of us, that blesses an entire world. Is it complicated sometimes? Yes. Is it sometimes hard to understand? Yes.
00:27:52
Speaker
But for someone who's following God, that just makes you press in more to want to know him on a deeper level, to dig harder, to ask more questions, to work through the doubts, to find the answers.
00:28:06
Speaker
And that is one of the most powerful things to me about studying the canon, about studying the Bible, is the more I dig into it, the more I find. And the closer I draw to the word of God, the more I know the person of God. The doctrine leads me to devotion. And that, my friends, is a powerful thing.
Connecting with Felicia Online
00:28:29
Speaker
Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Verity. You can connect with fellow listeners by following me on Instagram at Felicia Masonheimer or on our Facebook page by the same name. Also visit FeliciaMasonheimer.com for links to each episode and the show notes.