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Book Reviews : To Honour Anthony Gelston

Perennial questions about the Jewish scriptures concern the date of the establishing of the Hebrew canon and the extent of the Old Testament deutero-canonical writings in the LXX and in the Latin Vulgate. Andrew E. Steinmann in The Oracles of God: The Old Testament Canon (Concordia Academic Press, 1999, $19.95, pp.221, ISBN 0-570-04282-8) takes an historical view, by showing which books writers in the period from the second century BCE to 400 CE seemed to accept as authoritative and thus defacto as canonical. Three main chapters are ’The BC Canon’ , investigating the evidence of the Qumran writings, Philo, 1-2 and 4 Maccabees, and Ben Sira; ’The AD Canon: The First Century’, including the New Testament and Josephus; and ’The AD Canon: After the First Century’, discussing Talmudic and Christian Patristic testimony. The evidence collected makes this a useful reference book, showing who said what and when, with this information helpfully summarized at the end of each chapter, and also displayed in tables. A correction is required in Table 8: Codex Sinaiticus contains I and 4 (not I and 2) Maccabees. The book’s own thesis is that the Hebrew Bible was in