Hebrew Canon

Most of the Jewish Bible, or Tanakh, was written in Hebrew, except for a few pages, which were written in Aramaic. The 'Hebrew canon' is the list (or canon) of inspired Hebrew Biblical books as definitively established for Judaism in the 2nd century AD, by the consensus of a group of learned rabbis who had managed to escape the siege of Jerusalem in the year 70 and who had founded a school in Yamnia. These books are known as protocanonical or Tanaj, and they are classified as:

1. The Torah (Law).
2. Nevi'im (The prophets).
3. Ketuvim (The writings that begin with the book of Psalms).

This canon meant the rejection of some books, which came to be known as deuterocanonical, that a group of Jewish teachers (Alexandrians, that is, Egyptians) had included in the Canon of Alexandria or Septuagint in the 2nd century BC C.. The "deuterocanonical" means "second canon" in contrast to the term "protocanonical" What does first canon mean? Today it is known that the first canon, in chronological order, was that of Alexandria, so these two terms have fallen into disuse.

Hebrew is only written with consonants. The reader adds the vowels according to the context in which the word read is found. In the seventh century, some Jewish teachers, called masoretes, added the vowels with a system of points placed below or above the consonants. This text has received the name of Masoretic text.

Emergence of this Theory

The existence of the Council of Jamnia, in which 7 books were supposedly deleted from the Old Testament canon, was first proposed by Heinrich Graetz in 1871, and his theory enjoyed popularity for much of the 20th century. Currently it is not considered a proven fact that said assembly has existed, at least as Graetz proposed it, and even less if there is no literary or archaeological evidence.