Endnote 17 – I: The Text Behind the Text of the Hebrew Bible

Josephus is not alone in his testimony. We are now able to reconstruct an old canonical list, the common source of the so-called Bryennios List and the canon of Epiphanius, which must be dated to the end of the first century or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era. It is a list of biblical works “according to the Hebrews,” and reflects the same 22-book canon we find in Josephus, echoed in the independent canonical lists of Origen and Jerome. The 24-book canon mentioned in Fourth Ezra (c. 100 A.D.) and in the Rabbinic sources is doubtless identical in content but reckons Ruth and Lamentations separately. The writing of Ruth with Judges, Lamentations with Jeremiah is quite old, to judge from its survival in the Septuagint, and the explicit testimony of Origen to the Hebrew ordering.