HistoricalChristian.Faith

Josephus on the Old Testament Canon

Dates: c. AD 93 · Wikipedia
Summary: The Jewish historian gives, in Against Apion 1.8, the earliest explicit enumeration of a closed Hebrew canon: twenty-two divinely-credited books and no more — five of Moses, thirteen of the prophets, four of hymns and precepts — with the record of authoritative prophecy running only "from the death of Moses till the reign of Artaxerxes." Everything written after Artaxerxes he reckons of lesser authority, "because there hath not been an exact succession of prophets since that time." Because his bound at Artaxerxes leaves no room for the Greek-only books (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1–2 Maccabees), Protestant canon arguments lean on him heavily as the single most-cited Jewish witness for a settled, deuterocanon-excluding Hebrew Bible already in the first century — though, as a Greek-writing Jew who elsewhere drew on the Septuagint and who names no titles, he leaves more open than the bare count suggests.

Claims & evidence

Twenty-two books, "justly believed to be divine" — and no more

"For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from and contradicting one another, [as the Greeks have,] but only twenty-two books, which contain the records of all the past times; which are justly believed to be divine; and of them five belong to Moses, which contain his laws and the traditions of the origin of mankind till his death. This interval of time was little short of three thousand years; but as to the time from the death of Moses till the reign of Artaxerxes king of Persia, who reigned after Xerxes, the prophets, who were after Moses, wrote down what was done in their times in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God, and precepts for the conduct of human life."

— Against Apion, I.8 (§§37–40), Whiston translation, source. This is the earliest surviving statement that fixes the Jewish Scriptures at a definite, bounded number. The three-part division — five (the Law), thirteen ("the prophets"), four (hymns and precepts) — is Josephus's own grouping, broader than the later rabbinic Law–Prophets–Writings, and he gives no list of titles, so exactly which books fill the thirteen and the four must be inferred.

The cutoff at Artaxerxes: prophecy in "exact succession" failed

"It is true, our history hath been written since Artaxerxes very particularly, but hath not been esteemed of the like authority with the former by our forefathers, because there hath not been an exact succession of prophets since that time;"

— Against Apion, I.8 (§41), Whiston translation, source. The reign of Artaxerxes I (mid-fifth century BC, the age of Ezra and Nehemiah) is the boundary: books written after it — the very window in which the deuterocanonical histories and wisdom books fall — are admitted to exist and to have been "written very particularly," but are denied "the like authority" because the line of prophets had not continued unbroken. Note the precise claim: it is the exact succession of prophets that he says lapsed, not prophecy as such — a distinction that matters when the passage is enlisted to prove that prophecy (and so canon-formation) wholly ceased.

The books are inviolable, and the Jews will die for them

"…no one has been so bold as either to add any thing to them, to take any thing from them, or to make any change in them; but it is become natural to all Jews immediately, and from their very birth, to esteem these books to contain Divine doctrines, and to persist in them, and, if occasion be willingly to die for them."

— Against Apion, I.8 (§42), Whiston translation, source. The reverence Josephus describes — a settled, inherited, inviolable body of writings worth dying for — is the rhetorical heart of the passage and the reason it is so often quoted: he portrays the canon not as an open question of his own day but as a fixed inheritance.

Notes

• "Twenty-two" vs. the rabbinic "twenty-four." The Babylonian Talmud (Bava Batra 14b) and 4 Ezra count twenty-four books. The standard reconciliation is that the two enumerate the same collection counted differently: Josephus (with Origen, Jerome, and the Greek-patristic tradition) folds Ruth into Judges and Lamentations into Jeremiah, very likely to match the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. A minority view holds that the first-century list may have been genuinely smaller (some disputed Writings, e.g. Song of Songs or Ecclesiastes, not yet settled). John Barton's caution stands either way: "it is impossible to know exactly which books [Josephus] included, or how he counted them." (Development of the Hebrew Bible canon, with the 22/24 reconciliation and Barton's caveat.)
• How far to trust Josephus — the Vespasian oracle. He was a tendentious, pro-Roman writer: a Jewish general who surrendered at Jotapata, won Vespasian's favour by hailing him as the world-ruler foretold in scripture, and composed his histories under Flavian patronage. His best-known act of scriptural reading is exactly such a bending — the "ambiguous oracle… in their sacred [writings]" that "one from their country should become governor of the habitable earth" he refers not to a Jewish Messiah but to Vespasian, "appointed emperor in Judea" (Jewish War VI.5.4, source). On that ground Catholic apologists (Trent Horn) urge that his sweeping apologetic flourishes in Against Apion — no disagreement among the books, nothing ever added or removed, every Jew ready to die for them — read better as patriotic overstatement ("exaggerating, not lying") than as a sober census. The caveat is fair but cuts only so far: a writer can be tendentious in interpreting an oracle yet reliable on a plain bibliographic fact — how many books his tradition reverenced — so the Vespasian episode tempers the rhetoric without falsifying the twenty-two-count. Weighed on the argument page, "Does Josephus's twenty-two-book count… prove a closed… Hebrew canon?"
• A Greek-writing Jew who still used the Septuagint. Josephus wrote in Greek for a Greco-Roman readership and drew on the Septuagint for the Greek form of the biblical history (he even uses 1 Esdras and the Greek additions to Esther in retelling the narrative). His twenty-two-book statement is therefore a claim about the reverenced, prophetic books, not a statement that he never touched a Greek-only book — a tension the argument pages weigh.
• The bearing of this testimony on the canon question — whether it proves a closed, Hebrew-only, deuterocanon-excluding first-century canon, and whether the Artaxerxes line entails a cessation of prophecy that shut the canon — is weighed adversarially on the dedicated argument page, "Does Josephus's twenty-two-book count (Against Apion 1.8) prove a closed, deuterocanon-excluding Hebrew canon?" (assessment: contested) — with the broader umbrella, "Did the Jews reject the deuterocanon?" (weak), and the "Council of Jamnia" page, his near neighbour in date.
• Josephus appears on this wiki also as a witness on the Origin of the Septuagint and Nephilim timelines.