Old Testament Canon

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Old Testament Canon

Canon
(greek κανώνlit. the straight pole is any measure that determines the direct direction: spirit level, ruler, square)
A set of requirements for books to be included in Bible. The books themselves are called canonical.

To date, Bible is completed, the canon is finally adopted, books can not be added.

Genizah
(heb. גְּנִיזָה‏‎‏ - gniza storage from ganaz - hide)
The place where sacred texts and their fragments that have fallen into disrepair are stored: Torah scrolls, publications of the Tanakh, Talmud, prayer books.
The destruction of texts that have sacred meaning and contain the names and epithets of God, as well as ritual objects, is considered sacrilege and is prohibited by Jewish religious norms.

The Greatest Schism

The Great Schism of the Church is known - into the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church.
Few speak of a greater schism.

Where do the legs grow from.
If you read the book of Acts, the missionary movement was started by the Apostle Paul at the call of God.
Very soon a strategy, somewhat strange at first glance, emerged.
The result was only a couple or three Jews who accepted Christ.
Then he went to the Gentiles, with the result that crowds turned to Christ and no one beat him.

But the question arose, with whom to leave the Gentiles of yesterday?

And when they had appointed elders to each church, they prayed with fasting and delivered them up to the Lord, in whom they believed. (Acts 14:23)

An elder is an elder, that is, the most experienced. And who is the most experienced of the crowd of Gentiles who turned to Christ yesterday? - The Jews.
They had been instructed in the Word and were waiting for the Messiah, and now they had received Him.

Thus, the church is made up mostly of Gentiles. who are led by a handful of Jews.
In fact, that's why there was no early persecution of the church. It was simply a Jewish sect.

This is where the conflict was born. The Jews were dragging their traditions into the Church, which no one but them understood and were not useful.
Among the Gentiles, their Bible teachers and leaders rose up. And decided to filter out the unnecessary.
So it was customary to celebrate the Passover so that it would not coincide with the Judean Passover (i.e., the real Passover), and it too was calculated according to the Jewish lunar-solar calendar.
Day off was moved from the seventh to the first day of the week (from Saturday to Sunday), etc.
Actually, the Church gave rise to anti-Semitism, a dislike of Jews.

Now there is separate Judaism and separate Christianity - but the basis of the same doctrine - the Old Testament, which the Jews call the TaNaKh.

Differences in the Canon of the Old Testament and the TaNaKh

There are essentially no differences.
Christianity has adopted the Old Testament Scriptures as they were to the Jews without adding anything to them.

The books order

The difference in the order of books and the number of books is due to the fact that there were no stapled books then, but scrolls.
The scrolls had no clear order, they just lay together. In the book, however, everything is arranged in order.
And when books appeared, Christians immediately accepted the format, but Jews didn't accept it for a long time. In fact, synagogues still use scrolls to this day.

The Christians, having assembled the Bible into a single book, determined the order, but the Jews did not follow it and made their own order, which is different.
But the books are the same and the content is the same.

Number of books

The content is the same, arranged differently.
The reason is the same scrolls.
The scroll could not be infinite, and neither could the books. That's why some books are broken up into volumes.

If we pay attention, the big books of the Old Testament are about the same size.
This is the size of the scroll.

Originally, the entire Bible consisted only of the Torah. It was 5 scrolls, not 5 books.
However, you had to navigate through them somehow, so they were called by their first word.
It's like with us the poems to which the author didn't give a name are called by the first line. Since these kinds of names don't speak, in the Christian Bible the names of the first 5 books are taken from the Septuagint.
Actually this first translation of the Old Testament was used for a long time because Greek was international and many people knew it.

Thus, the first five scrolls became the five books.
Then there were other books in the Old Testament, there were some that didn't fit in one scroll, so they were in 2 scrolls, such as Samuel, Kings, Chronicles.
On the same principle as with the Pentateuch, the Christian Bible divided them into 2 books: 1st and 2nd Samuel, 1st and 2nd Kings, and 1st and 2nd Chronicles.

However, the book of Psalms consists of 5 scrolls and no one divided it.
For the same reason, the Jews did not divide the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles.

The 12 minor prophets with the Jews went in one scroll because they fit very well.
The books of Ezra and Nehemiah were also connected.

However, it's not all that important. The average person reads one book at a time and it doesn't matter where it is or what it is called, what matters is the content, and it is all the same.