Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures.

• Author: SETERS, JOHN VAN
• Position: Review

Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures. By PHILIP R. DAVIES. Library of Ancient Israel. Louisville, Ky.: WESTMINSTER/JOHN KNOX PRESS, 1998. Pp. xi + 219. $24.

The subject of canon as it relates to the Hebrew Scriptures has been hotly debated for several years now and one looks in a handbook such as this for some sober discussion and clarity, but in this book the search will be in vain. The argument of the book rests upon Davies' discussion of the definition of "canon" in chapter 1. He rightly points out that canon is a Greek word that means, among other things, a "standard" or "rule" and that it could be used of artistic works such as music, poetry, or sculpture that served as models. Davies then makes the leap to the book as a work of art to which the term canon may be applied. He states: "Canons in the classical world could thus be individual works, though collections of such works could also become canonical." Particular works, such as Homer, Herodotus, and Thucydides could have been treated in the Hellenistic era "as exemplars of their art" and the Christian idea of canon was derived from this.

The only problem with this definition of canon is that the term canon was not applied to individual books before the Medieval period, and it was not used of a collection of books until the mid-fifth century AD., when the Christian Scriptures were described as a canon, in the sense of a complete rule of faith and practice. This means that the term is anachronistic in any application to the biblical books before late antiquity. It also means that the application of the term "canon" by Davies to individual books or to multiple collections of books is without the foundation in Greek usage that he claims, and his use of the concept of a "canonizing process" throughout his book is completely misleading.

Davies equates the scribal activity of preserving, transmitting, and standardizing of "classic" texts in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece with the "canonizing process." Individual classics and large library collections are both canons "in a very loose sense." Davies sees a particularly close association between Jewish "canonizing" and the activity of Hellenistic scholars in creating lists of selected authors of poetry, history, philosophy, etc., as the "classics" of each field. Callimachus of Alexandria created a major reference work, "Tables of those who have distinguished themselves in every form of culture and what they wrote,"...