HistoricalChristian.Faith

Hilary of Poitiers on the Old Testament Canon

Dates: c. 360 AD (the Old Testament list is in the Instructio Psalmorum §15, the prologue to his Tractatus super Psalmos / Expositions of the Psalms, written c. 360; Hilary c. 310–367) · Wikipedia
Verdict on the deuterocanon: NO. Opening his commentary on the Psalter, Hilary fixes the Old Testament at twenty-two books, the Hebrew-letter count, reciting them book by book: Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and 1–2 Maccabees are all absent from the enumeration. He records that "some add Tobit and Judith to make twenty-four books, according to the number of the Greek letters" — but he reports that as the practice of others, not his own reckoning. As an early Latin witness to the Hebrew-sized canon he anticipates Jerome's Hebraica veritas line a generation later, and carries the Eastern-shaped twenty-two-book count — the pattern of Melito, Cyril, and Athanasius — westward into Gaul.

Claims & evidence

The twenty-two books — "that this corresponds with the number of the [Hebrew] letters"

In the prologue to his exposition of the Psalms, Hilary gives the Old Testament book by book and fixes the count at twenty-two, tying the number to the Hebrew alphabet "according to old tradition":¹

The reason for reckoning twenty-two books of the Old Testament is that this corresponds with the number of the [Hebrew] letters. They are counted thus according to old tradition: the books of Moses are five, Joshua son of Nun the sixth, Judges and Ruth the seventh, first and second Kings the eighth, third and fourth [Kings] the ninth, the two of Chronicles make ten, the words of the days of Ezra the eleventh, the book of Psalms twelfth, of Solomon the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs are thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth, the Twelve Prophets sixteenth, then Isaiah and Jeremiah (with Lamentations and the Epistle) and Daniel and Ezekiel and Job and Esther complete the number of the books at twenty-two. To this some add Tobit and Judith to make twenty-four books, according to the number of the Greek letters, which is the language used among Hebrews and Greeks gathered in Rome.

The deuterocanon is absent from the count

Measured against the disputed books the verdict is plain: no Tobit, no Judith, no Wisdom of Solomon, no Sirach, no Maccabees among Hilary's twenty-two. His list is the protocanonical Hebrew set (Ruth folded into Judges, the paired books of Kings and Chronicles each counted once, Ezra standing for Ezra–Nehemiah), and he frames it as "old tradition," the inherited Jewish reckoning.¹ As with Cyril and Origen, his single Jeremiah is reckoned "with Lamentations and the Epistle" — the one bundled Greek extra (the Epistle of Jeremiah) carried inside a canonical book rather than listed on its own — but the larger deuterocanonical works do not appear.

"To this some add Tobit and Judith" — reported, not endorsed

Hilary does not pass over the wider list in silence. He records that "some add Tobit and Judith to make twenty-four books, according to the number of the Greek letters."¹ The grammar is the telling thing: the enumeration he recites as his own runs to twenty-two; the twenty-four-book count he ascribes to others ("some add"). Even the expanded total he reports stops at twenty-four — Tobit and Judith only, to match the Greek alphabet — and does not reach the full Septuagint complement of Wisdom, Sirach, and Maccabees. So the witness is doubly restrictive: his own number is the Hebrew twenty-two, and even the alternative he names is far short of the deuterocanon entire. (Gary Michuta reads the same passage the other way — that the elastic twenty-two / twenty-four count is alphabet-numerology, not a canon boundary; that reading is weighed on its own argument page, assessment: weak.)

An Eastern count brought West — before Jerome

Hilary spent his exile (c. 356–360) in Phrygia among the Greek-speaking churches of Asia Minor, and returned to Gaul steeped in Eastern theology and Eastern bibliography. The twenty-two-book, Hebrew-letter canon he sets out is exactly the Eastern pattern of Melito, Origen, Cyril, and Athanasius — here appearing in Latin, in the West, decades before Jerome would press the same Hebrew reckoning under the banner of Hebraica veritas.¹ That makes Hilary one of the earliest Latin Fathers on record for the Hebrew-sized canon, and a channel by which the Eastern count crossed into the Western lists.

The usage beside the list — citing the disputed books as "Prophet," "Scripture," and "law"

The list is only half the witness. James White names Hilary among the early Fathers who "rejected" the deuterocanon — and the enumeration above is the warrant for that. But the same Hilary, arguing against the Arians in the De Trinitate, reaches repeatedly for the very books his list leaves out, and quotes them with full scriptural weight — "the Prophet says," "the prophet's voice," under the name of Jeremiah, and "as it is written." The list ranks the canon; the usage shows what he treated as Scripture in the heat of argument. Five cases:

2 Maccabees 7:28 — "as the Prophet says." Proving creation out of nothing against the Arian charge that the Son was made from pre-existing matter, Hilary appeals to the mother of the Maccabean martyrs as the Prophet and binds the citation to "the clear sense of Scripture":²

Such suggestions are inconsistent with the clear sense of Scripture. For all things, as the Prophet says, were made out of nothing; it was no transformation of existing things, but the creation into a perfect form of the non-existent.

Wisdom 13:5 — "from the prophet's voice." Tracing the soul's ascent to God through creation, Hilary credits the insight to the prophet and quotes the Wisdom of Solomon as that prophet's word:³

Then, while the devout soul was baffled and astray through its own feebleness, it caught from the prophet's voice this scale of comparison for God, admirably expressed, "By the greatness of His works and the beauty of the things that He has made the Creator of worlds is rightly discerned."

Baruch 3:35–37 — quoted as Jeremiah, alongside Moses and Isaiah. Hilary chains the prophets to prove God seen on earth, and cites Baruch under the prophet Jeremiah's own name, ranking it with the Law and Isaiah and setting it against John 1:18:⁴

As you have listened already to Moses and Isaiah, so listen now to Jeremiah inculcating the same truth as they:— "This is our God, and there shall be none other likened unto Him, Who has found out all the way of knowledge, and has given it unto Jacob His servant and to Israel His beloved. Afterward did He show Himself upon earth and dwelt among men."

Susanna (Daniel 13:42) — "as the blessed Susanna says." Listing the divine attributes from Scripture, Hilary strings Susanna's prayer between Matthew and Isaiah as one scriptural testimony among the rest:⁵

They say that the Father has prescience of all things, as the blessed Susanna says, "O eternal God, that know secrets, and know all things before they be"; that He is incomprehensible, as it is written, "The heaven is My throne…"

Judith 16:3 — sung "from the law." In his exposition of Psalm 125, Hilary catalogues what the converted soul sings and confesses from the four sources of revelation — law, prophets, Gospel, apostle — and slots Judith's hymn under the law (ex lege), beside Isaiah, John, and Colossians. The passage survives only in Latin:⁶

…et cantantes ex lege: Dominus conterens bella, Dominus nomen est illi (Judith. XVI, 3); cognoscentes a propheta: Ego sum qui feci coelum et terram ex nihilo…

— "…and singing from the law: 'The Lord that crushes wars, the Lord is His name' (Judith 16:3); learning from the prophet: 'I am he that made heaven and earth out of nothing'…" Hilary does not merely allude to Judith; he files her song under lex and sets it on the same footing as Isaiah, the Gospel of John, and Paul.

This is the list-vs-usage tension in its sharpest form. Hilary's enumeration is genuinely Hebrew-sized — the ground on which he is counted a "rejecter" — yet in practice he cites 2 Maccabees and Wisdom as "the Prophet," Baruch as Jeremiah, Susanna as Scripture, and Judith as "law." Ranking a book below the twenty-two and quoting it as a prophet are, for Hilary, not contradictory acts: the list orders the canon by the Hebrew letters; the citation reflects the wider Greek Bible he actually read and preached from. That a single witness can be marshalled on both sides is exactly why the claim that the early Church “rejected” the deuterocanon is contested rather than settled.

Notes

• The list is Hebrew-sized; the usage is not abstemious. A restrictive enumeration is not the same as treating the extra books as worthless. In his De Trinitate Hilary draws freely on the Wisdom tradition — including the Wisdom of Solomon — in his Trinitarian arguments against the Arians, weaving such material into scriptural reasoning rather than dismissing it.⁷ The concrete citations — 2 Maccabees and Wisdom as "the Prophet," Baruch as Jeremiah, Susanna as Scripture, Judith as "law" — are gathered above under the usage beside the list. The tension is the standard fourth-century posture seen across this timeline: ranking the canon by the Hebrew list while still reading and citing the wider Greek Bible.
• §15 of the prologue, not "book 22." The list sits in the Instructio Psalmorum, the twenty-four-chapter introduction to the Tractatus super Psalmos, at section 15. (The "vol. 22" attached to the standard Vienna critical edition — CSEL 22 — is the series volume number, not a chapter; the canon passage is §15 of the prologue.)
• The bundled Epistle of Jeremiah. Like Cyril and Origen, Hilary's single Jeremiah is reckoned "with Lamentations and the Epistle," so even his Hebrew-sized count carries one short deuterocanonical text lodged inside a protocanonical book. It is the same inherited Greek-manuscript habit, not a separate listing of the book.
• Earliest Latin alongside, not after, Jerome. Hilary is regularly cited as among the first Latin witnesses to the twenty-two-book canon, writing c. 360 — a full generation before Jerome's prefaces (the Prologus Galeatus and the Vulgate prologues of the 390s) made the Hebrew reckoning a Western cause. His exile in the Greek East is the natural conduit for the Eastern shape of the count.

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