The closing of the third canon cannot be assigned, with Bloch, to the great synagogue. If the college ceased with or before Simon, _i.e._, about 200-192, and the work of Daniel did not appear till about 170 B.C., twenty years at least intervened between the extinction of the great synagogue and Daniel’s book. This holds good, whether we assume, with Krochmal, the synagogue’s _redaction_ of the work,—more correctly the putting together of the independent parts of which _it is said_ to be composed; or equally so, if the taking of it into the canon as a book already completed, be attributed to the same body. But we are unable to see that Krochmal’s reasoning about the synagogue putting Daniel’s work together and one of the members writing the book of Esther is probable. In like manner, Maccabean psalms are adverse to the hypothesis that the great synagogue completed the third canon. In consequence of these late productions, it is impossible to assert that the men of the synagogue were the redactors of the Psalter as it is. It is true that the collection was made before the Chronicles and many other books of the hagiographical canon; but the _complete_ Psalter did not appear till the Maccabean period. The canon, however, was not considered to be finally closed in the first century before and the next after Christ. There were doubts about some portions. The book of Ezekiel gave offence, because some of its statements seemed to contradict the law. Doubts about others were of a more serious nature; about Ecclesiastes, the Canticles, Esther, and the Proverbs. The first was impugned because it had contradictory passages and a heretical tendency; the second, because of its worldly and sensual tone; Esther for its want of religiousness; and Proverbs on account of inconsistencies. This scepticism went far to procure the exclusion of the suspected works from the canon, and their relegation to the class of the _genuzim_.(60) But it did not prevail. Hananiah, son of Hezekiah, son of Garon, about 32 B.C., is said to have reconciled the contradictions and quieted the doubts.(61) But these traces of resistance to the fixity of the canon were not the last. They reappeared about A.D. 65, as we learn from the Talmud,(62) when the controversy turned mainly upon the canonicity of Ecclesiastes, which the school of Shammai, who had the majority, opposed; so that the book was probably excluded.(63) The question emerged again at a later synod at Jabneh or Jamnia, when R. Eleasar ben Asaria was chosen patriarch, and Gamaliel the second, deposed. Here it was decided, not unanimously however, but by a majority of Hillelites, that Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs “pollute the hands,” _i.e._, belong properly to the Hagiographa.(64) This was about 90 A.D.(65) Thus the question of the canonicity of certain books was discussed at two synods.