gentleexit

Not the later books. But its core. Ala Homer. They are both very old.

Well if I did, that wasn't my intent. They were far from arbitrary - their commentaries were many times longer than "his" works. Also it's TEXTS, not text. They had many versions of the poems, all with the "same" stories but wording varied, subplots varied, orders varied.

Hence the call to these men - find the "real" Homer! Remove "mistakes"! As they worked they codified how such work should be done. They let later Homeric commentary focus on the "real" poems, teasing meanings on a firm basis.

Which gets to the question which is not about what books go into some canon. When did Judaism and Christianity fix on the PRECISE WORDS, phrases etc of their books. When could they say "We have it. Not a word out of place." That was what the grammarians did for Homer. In the second century BC. Made him singular. Who did this for the Jewish stories and when did they do it?

Who were the first Jewish "grammarians"? What were they called?

bacht

The Septuagint may have been one of the first delimited canons for the Jews.

Jesus ben Sirach left a list of books that seems fairly close to the Rabbinic consensus in the Roman period.

For the Christians I think Jerome's Vulgate pretty much nailed things down, after Constantine started the process of codifying orthodoxy.

You seem to be leading up to some kind of point about textual inerrancy, which most here wouldn't argue anyway.

gentleexit

What goes into a Canon is like saying ok, of the poems attributed to Homer, we'll accept these (and there continued to be arguments over that). It's "the easy bit". The big picture. Almost dinner conversation.

I'm getting at the nitty gritty. What the grammarians did for Homer - this sentence stays, this edition is best, this can't be the word - he never uses it elsewhere. Only this edition has that incident and it's crude so it's out. That stuff. And in the end, you get "the real" work. Well you get a relatively consistent "best of".

No no. I'm with you there. I don't think the grammarians arrived at a "real Homer", just an elevated and relatively consistent one. I presume something similar happened for the Jewish stories.

We know when Homer got "real". My question is when did Moses get the same treatment? Jerome worked off Hebrew. Was there one agreed Hebrew by his time? If so, fine but that's six centuries after the Homer men. Were those words fixed back then or before then or ...

Who nailed down their "holy book" first and by nailed down, I mean what the grammarians did. Who was first? The Jews or the Greeks? Did the theological poet receive the gift of precision before or after Moses?

bacht

Well, there's the story about Josiah's people "finding" Torah scrolls (7th C), maybe that's when the Judean Pentateuch took its official form. Or maybe Nehemiah or Ezra produced the first official Law scrolls in the 4th C. The other writings may be more difficult to trace.

Others here could answer your questions about Jerome's sources. As I understand it, the Rabbis in Jamnia began the process of canonization of the Hebrew scriptures in the late 1st C AD.

J-D

I suggest that an easy starting point for reading on this subject is the Wikipedia article on the Masoretic text.

gentleexit

Very nice.

So I think the Poet takes the prize.

Roger Pearse

Interesting: are you sure about this? This goes quite a long way beyond what I remember from Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, you see. No doubt there were various versions of the Homeric corpus in circulation; but these claims that there was no text... this seems rather exaggerated to me, although I don't claim to be an expert. I would need to reread R&W.

The text critical work of the Alexandrian scholars like Aristarchus is preserved for us in the scholia in the 10th century manuscript in the Bibliotheca Marcianus in Venice (=Venetus A), and to a lesser extent in other manuscripts of the same kind. This consists of things such as obelizing - marking with a character - lines which they believed to be spurious. Such a practice could hardly be effective if no two texts were remotely the same.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

gentleexit

This is one of those "we mean the same thing" things but load our words differently. Let's use "editions, not edition". The grammarians faced many "city editions", some cruder than others, shorter or longer.

What came before these written Homers? Ala the Jewish tales, we can't know for sure. If you favor folk-poetry, wandering poets tell a new poem every time they open their mouths and variations before writing are large. If you don't, if you think anything complex requires writing then variation, though it's there, is less dramatic. But we aren't talking about that early stage.

We're talking editions, written, as you say somewhat "the same". When the obelizing etc. can come into play - this is interpolation, this word is too recent, this is an old meaning of a word, here are words only used once and so difficult to navigate etc. We're discussing who started obelizing first with a definitive "real", "inerrant" text as their end.

The Jews did this work. The Greeks did this work. It seems that Greek pedantry came first. Homer was honed to "exactness" before Moses. Homer takes the prize for "first definitive edition" :-)

ps: Roger, let me take this chance to thank you for assembling so many texts on your site. Particularly the overlooked like the Calendar from 354 or Porphyry's commentary on the Odyssey's cave. You'd have been a good grammarian yourself.

Anat

Well, if anything along the lines of the Documentary Hypothesis is true, then the early trend in Jewish holy-text-generation was to bring together texts from different sources, representing different political and religious agendae. Sometimes the different sources were incorporated into a single, somewhat different story (as with the flood narrative), sometimes they were added in sequence, causing a repetition of similar events with variations (the three wife/sister stories, two accounts of the expulsion of Hagar) at different times in the storyline. Depending on which version you believe, this could have happened either in the 7th century BCE under Josiah or after the Babylonian exile around 5th century BCE. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out some editing and re-editing happened at each of these, with another revision later, in Helenic times. From what I understand, this editing process was less concerned with figuring out the most accurate rendition of some sacred perfect text but with forming a text that answered the interests of the various groups. For example if the Josiah editing happened, then its goals were to incorporate the refugees from Samaria as part of the growing Judean nation by incorporating their traditions and the stories about their sacred sites, to set the Jerusalem temple as the only legitimate place of worship from that moment on and the Davidian line as the only legitimate line of kingship, while giving sacred sites outside Jerusalem - whether in Israel or Judea equal status as places that were legitimate for worship in the past. However, this all relies on reconstruction from much later sources.

Then there are the differences between the Masoretic, Septuagint and Samarian texts, variations in DSS. Do the variations serve as evidence for 'grammarian' activity, with each version having its 'true believers' or does this reflect lack of a finalized set version at that time?

Once we get to the Talmud we have records of debates about how the text is supposed to be read and what the Halakhic implications are as well as mystical meanings that rely on specific readings etc, and that would be the period starting with Hillel, Shamai and their respective students, 1st century BCE and 1st century CE.

gentleexit

which is akin to making an edition, albeit with a very definite political objective (the Athenians had one too. Their Homer featured Athens which didn't rise until he was long gone).

And differences between versions of THE Septuagint (we use the definite article pretty freely, hate plurals). Origen compared different Greek translations.

Which is later than the grammarians.

One kink for Judaism was that they cherished oral as well as written history (Moses received both oral and written laws) which meant less onus on writing and exact wordings. The Rabbi's wrote down their oral lore for the first time and from then on all Judaism was written. From then on, focus on the written word was all. From then on, developing mechanisms for accents and editing, mattered. This is the second century AD onwards, long after the grammarians.