People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority

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Summary: How the Bible, the Mishnah and the Talmud Shaped Judaism
Review: Moshe Halbertal, professor of Jewish thought and philosophy at Hebrew University, relates the following tale about heaven and hell in his Introduction to "People of the Book: Canon, Meaning and Authority": "Don't think that hell is where people are consumed by fire for their sins or that heaven is where they are rewarded with pleasures for their piety. What really happens is that God gathers everybody in one large hall. Then He gives them the Talmud and commands them to start studying. For the wicked, studying Talmud is hell. For the pious, it's heaven."

Halbertal's tale amusingly illustrates the importance that sacred texts play in Judaism and provides a fitting entrée into this short, but fascinating, exploration of the development and importance of the Bible, the Mishnah and the Talmud as canonical works of the Jewish community.

Halbertal begins with a short introduction adumbrating the meaning of a "canonical" text and its various guises. The adjective, of course, refers to a text's special status in a community. The special status of a canon can be "normative" (it is obeyed and followed as the law of a community), "formative" (it is a curriculum that is taught, read, transmitted, and interpreted) or "exemplary" (it is a paradigm for aesthetic value and achievement). For example, the Talmud is both a normative and a formative canon of the traditional Jewish community; normative in the sense that it establishes appropriate behavior in many aspects of life, formative in the sense that it is a fundamental text that is the object of endless interpretation and debate and, in some cases, the intellectual sine qua non of membership in the community.

From this brief introduction, "People of the Book" then explores, in successive chapters (which mirror the chronological development of each successive text), the canonization of the Bible, the Mishnah, and the Talmud and what the ascendancy of each of these texts meant for the formation of authority and meaning in the Jewish community. He also explores the challenges that philosophy and Kabbalah posed to the Talmudic canon in the Middle Ages and closes with a short appendix discussing how Hobbes and Spinoza appropriated and interpreted the canonical text of the Hebrew Bible in their political philosophy.

In less than one hundred fifty pages (excluding the extensive footnotes), Moshe Halbertal has written a challenging and thoughtful exploration of the development of the canonical works of Judaism and how those canonical works shaped authority and meaning in the community and between the community and the non-Jewish world. "People of the Book" is a concise, but intellectually rich, exegesis of the key texts of Judaism and how those texts shaped Jewish thought through the ages.