For most of the twentieth century, textbooks stated that a council of rabbis met at Jamnia, or Yavneh, around the year 90, and there closed the canon of the Hebrew Bible, excluding books such as Ben Sira and expelling the followers of Jesus from the synagogue. It is a clean story and it appears in reference works, sermons and popular histories to this day. The evidence for it is very thin.
What the rabbinic sources record is different in kind. They preserve discussions about whether particular books make the hands unclean, a technical marker of sacred status, with disagreement recorded about the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes and the matter reported as settled on a particular occasion. They record an academy at Yavneh where scholars gathered after the destruction of Jerusalem, and considerable institutional reorganisation. They do not describe an assembly convened to determine a canon, and they show discussion of the disputed books continuing for generations afterwards.
The account of a canon-fixing council appears to have been constructed by nineteenth-century scholarship, on the model of the church councils its authors knew, and then repeated until it acquired the appearance of a source. Jack P. Lewis set out the case against it in 1964, and the specialist literature has largely abandoned the council since. The atlas holds the entry because the phantom is still cited, and a reader who meets it deserves to be told what is actually attested.