ReViews: How the Hebrew Bible Was Created

The Formation of the Jewish Canon

Timothy H. Lim The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 304 pp., $45 (hardcover)

A canon is a list of books considered an authority by a group of people, a list to which no more books may be added and from which none may be subtracted. The list is fixed. The most famous canon is the list of books that make up the Bible. In the case of the Jewish Bible, the canon contains 22 books. The task Timothy Lim sets for himself in The Formation of the Jewish Canon is to examine how that Jewish canon came about.