The Reception of the Writings and Their Place in the Biblical Canon

Abstract

This chapter explores the origin and order of the Writings along with their emergence from the larger corpus of prophets included in the Hebrew Bible. It focuses also on the somewhat mixed reception of some of those texts in Judaism and early Christianity as well as the tripartite structure of the Hebrew Bible compared with the quadripartite structure of the Christian Old Testament, as well as the question of whether the latter was a Christian innovation or derived from an element of Judaism in the first century ce before Christians separated from Judaism. The recent questions about the significance of the order of the Christian Old Testament canon will also be examined below.