The Birth of the Canon - The BAS Library
Login
Home > Magazines > Bible Review > February 2002

The Birth of the Canon

The Hebrew Bible was born out of suffering and loss

By Ronald S. Hendel

“These fragments have I shored against my ruins.” With this plaintive line, T.S. Eliot brings his great poem, The Waste Land, toward its conclusion. Published in 1922, The Waste Land is a strange, tragic and moving poem, a monument of Modernist poetry in its heyday between the World Wars. Europe’s optimism had been shattered in the trenches of World War I, and new articulate voices arose in its wake to proclaim the sad truths of human finitude, moral fragmentation and death. Although some people now say that we are in the Postmodern period, I think that our literature, art […]

You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.

Join the BAS Library!

Already a library member? Log in here.

Endnotes

1.

Einstein’s theory of General Relativity was published in 1916 and became widely known after it was experimentally confirmed in November 1919, shortly after World War I. Einsteinian relativity—and the development of quantum mechanics—are very much Modernist theories in their implications, even though scientifically true.

2.

Robert Alter, Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (New Haven/London: Yale Univ. Press, 2000).