The prophets and Deuteronomy

The prophet Isaiah, active in Jerusalem about a century before Josiah in the eighth century BCE, made no mention of the Exodus, covenants with God, or disobedience to God’s laws.  In contrast, Isaiah’s contemporary Hosea, active in the northern kingdom of Israel, made frequent references to the Exodus, the wilderness wanderings, a covenant, the danger of foreign gods and the need to worship Yahweh alone.  This discrepancy has led scholars to conclude that these traditions behind Deuteronomy have a northern origin.  Whether the Deuteronomic Code was written in Josiah’s time (late seventh century BCE) or earlier is subject to debate, but many of the individual laws are older than the collection itself.  The two poems at chapters 32–33, the Song of Moses, and the Blessing of Moses, were probably originally independent.  Deuteronomy occupies a puzzling position in the Bible, linking the story of the Israelites’ wanderings in the wilderness to the story of their history in Canaan without quite belonging totally to either.  The wilderness story could end quite easily with Numbers, and the story of Joshua’s conquests could exist without it.  However, there would be a thematic or theological element missing.  Scholars have given various answers to the problem.  The Deuteronomistic history theory is currently the most popular.  Deuteronomy was originally just the law code and covenant, written to cement the religious reforms of Josiah, and later expanded to stand as the introduction to the full history.  However, there is an older theory which sees Deuteronomy as belonging to Numbers, and Joshua as a sort of supplement to it. Deuteronomy, after becoming the introduction to the history, was later detached from it, and included with Genesis–Exodus–Leviticus–Numbers because it already had Moses as its central character.  According to this hypothesis, the death of Moses was originally the ending of Numbers, and was simply moved from there to the end of Deuteronomy. What do you know about Moses?