dado

it seems with re-establishment of israel, there is an opportunity to document and canonize some of the 2k years of history that has since passed. if nothing else, the notion of Tanakh has part historical record is greatly weakened if it doesn't include such astoundingly profound events as the expulsion from Spain, Shoah and reestablishment.

setting aside discussions of what would actually be in such a book - what a discussion that would be! - anybody know the mechanism for starting such a process?

edit: another reason to add a book is that, for once, we could establish authorship from the start.

Doctor X

Unless the guy claims he was "inspired. . . ."

I doubt this will ever happen. It is hard to intentially create a sacred text unless you have some control over the readership.

--J.D.

DrJim

There are probably multiple reasons to start or reopen a canonizing process, and possibly multiple reasons why a select group of texts would be fixed as a closed canon. Christianity added a selection of its own textual productions to the literature it inherited from the wider Jewish culture: its own religious perspectives had developed so much that new stories moved to the centre of people's beliefs and the inherited texts needed a new interpretational framework. Joseph Smith added to the canon in the early 1800's, claiming a new revelation and if I'm not mistaken, the office of "prophet" is still an institution in the Mormon church.

Judaism has a pretty fixed Tanakh, but look at all the Rabbinic literature: Talmud is not a "canon" that every Jew will own or know, but its status is pretty high: it is also now commonly printed with the commentaries of the great medieval Rabbis: Rashi, and so forth. Even the Torah is sometimes printed with the traditional Targumim (translations) and the medieval commentaries (producing the so-called 'Mikaroth Gedaloth', usually referred to as the Rabbinic Bible in English). I think one would be hard pressed to find an Orthodox rabbi who would not study these texts with their attached commentaries. One could add Mishnah, some of the collections of Midrash, and so forth. Their status as "canon" is different to that of the Bible, but I think they are a bit more foundational to Judaism than simply "classics" of Jewish literature.

I suspect that in the upcoming centuries some holocaust literature: poety, theological reflections etc. may become "classics" handed down from one generation to another and some of these may eventually become very central in Jewish conceptions of identity and spirituality.

A good paper on canonization is PR Davies, Loose Canons. find it in Vol. 1 of the online Journal of Hebrew Scriptures. IT ain't the final word, but its a good starting point.

http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/JHS/jhs-article.html


JRL

dado

oh it's a lot more than orthodox rabbis who get "Torah With Rashi".

sometimes i think Talmud (and the culture around it) is as much a curse as a blessing: it's a fabulous living breathing cultural document, but in the process it's turned Tanakh into a cul de sac.

thanks for the link, some interesting papers there.

ps Mishnah is part of Talmud (mishnah (recorded oral torah) + gemara (commentary on mishnah) = talmud). i realize you probably know that, it just wan't clear from the way you separated them out in your post

DrJim

I won't comment on what Talmud has done to Tanakh, I don't pretend to understand it!

As for the mishnah / Talmud distinction, I understand that the Mishnah still has an independent existence outside the Talmud. As I understand it, about 36 and a half of the Mishnah's tractates are reproduced and commented on in Talmud and some of the tractates are divided a little differently.
Eliezar Segal's website (he is the Jewish studies prof at the U of Calgary) has interactive pages of Mishnah and Talmud and Mikraoth Gedaloth:

http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/

dado

it seems the default C'ian position is to approach scripture as if it were an end point: in J'ism it is a beginning point. rather than thinking of Written Torah as complete and final, think of it as the starting point for never-ending discussion and growth. Talmud is then like a recording of a big part of that conversation.

does that make sense?

alternately Torah/Tanakh can be seen as a tree, and Talmud (and etc) is the water and sunlight and soil that keeps the tree growing. because if it doesn't grow, and change, it will die.

DrJim

I agree with you about scripture as a (presumed) end point for Christians and for Judaism it is an beginning for which no end is in sight.

What I really meant to get across is I don't fully understand the implications of the process of constant dialogue etc. you have seen for the Tanakh. If I misread you, I'm sorry, but you seemed to express some personal reaction to Jewish tradition: (Talmud as much a curse as a blessing, Tanakh as a culdesac) in your second post. I was trying to say that I don't feel qualified to comment on this (not being Jewish or any real expert on Jewish tradition). To my mind, what is going on in Jewish tradition is what happenes in most other religions: constant discussion etc. Its just that Judaism has made recognition of this tradition part of the tradition itself.

It seems to me that some forms of Christianity tend to have forgotten their roots: one fellow I know has a book of early Christian interpretations of Genesis: sorry to mis-appropriate a term, but "Midrash" sure jumped to mind when I looked at it! Some forms of protestantism imposes its own doctrinal reading onto the past and it forgets the richness of its own forebears. They have become so engaged in their fight with secularism and its challenges to the Bible, that it seems to me they have reduced the bible to mere "facts" of natural and social history and imposed this narrow route to interpretaion as the only valid way of looking at the text. They seem little aware of the what the early christians made of the "Old Testmament" even while they are saying that their form of christianity has recovered the original/authentic form of the religion. Ironic, methinks.