The
Council of Jamnia or
Council of Yavne is a hypothetical 1st century council at which it is postulated the
canon of the Hebrew Bible was defined.
Some time before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai relocated to the city of Yavne/Jamnia, where he received permission from the Romans to found a school of Halakha (Jewish law).[1] His school became a major source for the later Mishna, which records the Tannaim, and a wellspring of Rabbinic Judaism.
In 1871 Heinrich Graetz, drawing on Mishnaic and Talmudic sources, concluded that there must have been a late 1st century Council of Jamnia which had decided the Jewish canon. This became the prevailing scholarly consensus for much of the 20th century, but from the 1960s onwards it came increasingly into question. In particular, later scholars noted that none of Graetz's sources actually mentioned books that had been withdrawn from a canon, and questioned the whole premise that the discussions of the rabbis were about canonicity at all.
Today, there is no scholarly consensus as to when the Jewish canon was set. Nevertheless, the outcomes attributed to the Council of Jamnia did occur whether gradually or in a definitive, authoritative council. Several concerns of the remaining Jewish communities in Israel would have been the loss of the national language, the growing problem of conversions to Christianity, based in part on Christian promises of life after death. What emerged from this era was twofold
