Canon of the Old Testament

The OT canon refers to the authoritative list of books recognized as Scripture within Judaism and the Christian tradition. The Hebrew Bible contains 39 books in Protestant counting (or 24 in the traditional Jewish enumeration, which combines books like Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, and the twelve minor prophets). Josephus (c. AD 90) describes a closed collection of 22 books given supreme authority (Against Apion 1.8). The 'Law, Prophets, and Writings' tripartite division is implied in the prologue to Sirach (c. 130 BC) and explicitly in Luke 24:44 ('the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms'). The canonical process involved community recognition over time rather than a single authoritative decision.

The primary differences between Jewish/Protestant and Catholic/Orthodox canons concern the Apocrypha (or Deuterocanon) — a collection of Jewish writings from the intertestamental period (Tobit, Judith, 1-2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, additions to Daniel and Esther) included in the Greek Septuagint (LXX) but not in the Hebrew Bible. The Council of Trent (1546) formally declared these canonical for Roman Catholicism; Protestantism followed Luther in limiting the OT canon to the Hebrew Scriptures. The NT's citations from Scripture quote from the canonical Hebrew books (though often via the LXX); no NT passage explicitly cites an apocryphal book as Scripture, though allusions occur. The canon question intersects issues of prophetic authority, apostolic attestation, community reception, and doctrinal consistency across both Testaments.