There is no evidence in non-Pharisaic Jewish circles before 70 C.E. of a fixed canon or a fixed text. The Essenes at Qumran exhibit no knowledge of a fixed text or canon. The same is true in the Hellenistic Jewish community in Alexandria and in the early Christian communities. Until recently there has been a scholarly consensus that the acts of inclusion and exclusion that fixed the canon were completed at the “Council of Jamnia (Yabneh)” about the end of the first century of the Common Era. But after sifting the rabbinic evidence, scholars have now concluded that the rabbis did not fix the canon in the proceedings of the academy of Yabneh. At most, they discussed marginal books, notably Ecclesiastes (Qohelet) and the Song of Songs, and declared that both Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs “defile the hands,” i.e., are holy book and should be included in the canon. This decision ratified the dicta of the house of Hillel in the case of Ecclesiastes, and probably in the case of the Song of Songs as well. Moreover, it must be insisted that the proceedings at Yabneh should not be called a “council,” certainly not in the late ecclesiastical sense of the word.
Whatever decisions were taken at Yabneh, they were based on early opinions and they did not settle the dispute over marginal books—Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes and Esther of the “included” several books, Ben Sira among the “excluded” or apocryphal books.
In any case, it is clear that Josephus in Rome did not take his cue from contemporary or later proceedings at Yabneh. Nor did he manufacture a theory of canon from whole cloth. Thinly concealed behind Josephus’ Greek apologetics it is clear and coherent theological doctrine of canon that came, we believe, from the canonical doctrine of Hillel and his school. (Frank Moore Cross, “The Text Behind the Text of the Hebrew Bible,” BAR [Summer 1985], repr. Approaches to the Bible: The Best of Bible Review, ed. Harvey Minkoff [Washington, D.C. Biblical Archaeology Society, 1994], 1:159-60)
We cannot date the fixation of the Pharisaic canon earlier than the time of Hillel, as occasional scholars have attempted to do. Our evidence from the so-called Kaige recension (See note 16). At the end of the first century B.C.E., the Greek Bible was revised to bring it into line with the proto-rabbinic text, not with the later fixed rabbinic recension. The revised Greek text was recension extended to the Book of Baruch and the longer edition of Daniel, works that were excluded from the rabbinic recension. The effort to “Update” Baruch and the longer edition of Daniel would be difficult to explain if, at the time the Kaige recension was prepared, the Book of Baruch and the additions to Daniel had already been excluded from the Pharisaic canon. Since the Kaige recension can be dated to about the turn of the Common Era, and its Pharisaic bias is clear, it follows that as late as the end of the first century B.C.E., even in Pharisaic circles, there was no authoritative, canonical list, at least not in final form. (Frank Moore Cross, “The Text Behind the Text of the Hebrew Bible,” BAR [Summer 1985], repr. Approaches to the Bible: The Best of Bible Review, ed. Harvey Minkoff [Washington, D.C. Biblical Archaeology Society, 1994], 1:160)
The first evidence of the proto-rabbinic text in Samuel is found in the recension of the Theodotionic School, the so-called Kaige recension. This systematic Greek recension from the end of the first century B.C.E. is inspired by principles similar to those that emerged in the era of Hillel and, no doubt, may be assigned to scholars of the same party that published the rabbinic recension. The Hebrew text used as the basis of this revision is Pharisaic rabbinic, to be sure, not identical with the fully-fixed Pharisaic Bible. The revison of the Kaige recension by Aquila brought the Greek text fully in line with the rabbinic recension. (Ibid., 335 n. 16)
