The Dead Sea Scrolls reminds us that the Bible contains only a sampling of the texts that were in circulation at the time. Considering these “other” texts helps us to better understand our Bible. There were likely many other books that were to some quite influential, but that, in the long run, didn’t make it into the Bible. They were lost to time, not copied or preserved, and then they were forgotten only to be rediscovered later. The Dead Sea Scrolls preserve some of these. Today, hundreds of Dead Sea Scroll documents, consisting of 1000s of fragments, are available to the public in high resolution images through the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls and the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library.

In this lecture, I talk about the fluidity of the canon. In short, different communities had different understandings of which texts were authoritative. We should not imagine that there was a standardized biblical canon anywhere at this point in time. For one, the term “canon” never shows up in the Bible itself or indeed in any Jewish writing of the period. It is a Greek term that developed in the 1st century of the common era in reference to Christian writings and that is more appropriate when talking of Christian literature. And in a very real sense, it could be argued that that same process of deciding what texts are authoritative continues into the modern day; even though our Bibles are committed to print, different communities lift up certain texts as central, creating a canon within a canon.

The time period that a book purports to have would seem to be an important factor in the canonical process. The writings that described the exilic era and the pre-exilic era had special status. We can see this principle at work, too, among the writing at Qumran, in which books are written in the names of more ancient figures, like Enoch, who is not simply pre-exilic but antediluvian! This way of writing flourished not only at Qumran but throughout the Jewish diaspora and among early Christians, too, from around the third century B.C.E. for over half a millennium. These are called, uncharitably, “pseudepigrapha”—that is, writings that falsely claim an author that is not their actual author, almost always attributed it to an esteemed figure of the past. In some ways, the book of Deuteronomy, which is staged as Moses’s deathbed speech, might be considered a forerunner to this genre, meaning that this way of writing would have roots in some of our oldest books.