Malachi151

Somewhat useful, but this still doesn't answer why or how each work was selected or became revered.

Perhaps this is just a mystery and no one knows.

sy2502

Dude if people here have taken the time to answer your question and you are just going to say "no I don't like this answer, does anybody have anything better?" then that's your problem. I mean short of actually asking the people in question why they chose one writing over another (and let me know if you have some brilliant idea on how to do that) there isn't much more we can do here. I posted for you a quotation from St. Augustine, who was a key figure in the creation of the canon, where he gives his guidelines, and your answer was "any better answers out there?" What more do you want, exactly, a link to a YouTube video of Augustine's interview? :huh:

Malachi151

St. Augustine has nothing to do with anything. These works were selected some 500-600 years prior to St. Augustine. The question has not been answered by anyone here.

mens_sana

"Canonization, broadly construed as the process through which the Bible became the Bible, is only vaguely understood. We do not know exactly how various books were chosen to be part of the Bible to the exclusion of others, how these books were put into a particular order, and how their text was established. Since there are no contemporaneous documents that describe this process, it needs to be reconstructed from indirect evidence, namely, from the variety of biblical texts from different periods and places that have survived, and from later traditions in rabbinic and other sources that discuss canonization. Thus, the reconstruction suggested below should be viewed as tentative." — opening paragraph of "The Canonization of the Bible" by Marc Zvi Brettler in The Jewish Study Bible, (or via: amazon.co.uk) pp.2072-2077 (OUP,2004).

J-D

Although a complete answer of the kind you're looking for is not available, you could probably find out more on the subject by reading more widely. Both those Wikipedia articles have references which could be a starting point. (There's probably a bit more on the Web if you search for it, too. You could try searching for particular books, for example.)

Malachi151

Thanks for this. As I suspects its a mystery.

However, isn't it interesting the different works that made it into the Hebrew Bible?

What is so strange is that so many of the works take a decidedly anti-Jewish tact and many are clearly against the establishment and ruling authorities, yet other works are clearly pro-establishment and pro priesthood.

Some of the works are effectively anti-religious , at least anti-organized religion, yet other place much importance on traditions and organized religious worship. Its just such a strange mix of widely divergent works I can't really fathom how these works were ever collected together.

mountainman

The question "Why were the books of the OT selected as canon?" was not clear whether the issue was the canon of the hebrew texts, the LXX or the republication of these books to be associated with the canon of the NT. I see now that the issue is targetting the BCE "canon" of the former, not the latter.