The Council of Jamnia

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.

The Jamnia council is a useful case study in how a historical claim can propagate without evidence, and it is worth setting out the mechanism because the same mechanism operates elsewhere in this atlas. Three ingredients were involved.

The first is a real institution. There was an academy at Yavneh, it was important, and questions about the status of particular books were discussed there. A story attached to something real is much harder to dislodge than an invention from nothing.

The second is a familiar template. The scholars who framed the account knew church councils intimately, and a council that meets, deliberates and issues a canon was the natural shape for the question to take. A model borrowed from one tradition was applied to another that did not work that way, since rabbinic Judaism had no body empowered to issue binding decisions of this kind and did not settle questions by that procedure.

The third is repetition. Once the claim was in the handbooks it was cited from the handbooks rather than from sources, and each citation made the next one easier. By the middle of the twentieth century it was possible to write about Jamnia without ever having asked what text says it happened.

The corrective is unglamorous and always the same: go back and ask which document attests the claim, and read what it actually says. Applied to Jamnia, that question has no satisfactory answer.