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Canon Formation I

CIT building (the CS department is on the 4th and 5th floors)


My recent reading includes HOW THE BIBLE BECAME HOLY by Michael L. Satlow.


Satlow is a professor at Brown University (portrayed above) and according to a Guggenheim Fellowship awarded him in 2007 his work focuses on "Jewish piety in late antiquity."


In his introduction to this book he says that he first tried to read the bible (or what Christians would call the Old Testament) when he was 13, soon after receiving a 2-volume translation for his bar mitzvah. He had trouble getting very far beyond the early account of creation, sin, sex, and murder. Beyond that, there are lists of who begat whom, detailed descriptions of buildings, and the repetition of stories with odd variations. It can all become "boring and weird."
Yet it did get the young Satlow's mind started on the issue of canon formation: how did these books become "the bible," included as parts in one divinely inspired whole.
Much in his account turns on the struggle between Pharisees and Sadducees in the Hasmonean period. He refers to Pharisees and Sadducees as "competing political parties," and sees the development of a normative canon as a weapon that the latter wielded against the former.
Later, in post-dispersion Judaism, the rabbis, "the heirs and successors to both" of those parties developed a "compromise position that paradoxically elevated scripture to a cherished, normatively authoritative position while at the same time marginalizing that authority."   
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