There was an emphasis on the greatness of Yahweh and his divine choice of Israel in Deuteronomy. Yahweh was all powerful. Love of Yahweh was the essence of the law. Following the commandments of Yahweh was an act of love, not a legalistic action. Thus, the Israelites had to remain faithful to Yahweh which made them a separate people, chosen by Yahweh with a divine favor. There were trials in the desert. However, there would be more temptations to come in the Promise Land. Victory belonged to Yahweh, not to the Israelites. The Israelites had to circumcise their hearts. There were both promises and warnings as they prepared to enter the new land. Aaron died at Mount Hor, while Eleazar, his son, took over as the new high priest. The Deuteronomic code determined that there would be one place to worship without explicitly mentioning Jerusalem. This new place of worship would be “the place where Yahweh chooses.” This work talked continuously about this “place where Yahweh will choose to glorify his name.” Since all this takes place before the Israelites came into Canaan, they could not say Jerusalem. However, the hints were very clear. All the sacrifices had to be very precise. Nevertheless, they had to fight against the seduction of the Canaanite cult and idolatry in general. They were reminded about the clean and unclean animals. There was a difference between the annual tithing and the third-year local tithing. There were details about the Sabbatical year. They were told how they were to deal with their fellow Hebrew slaves. They had to dedicate the first-born of their animals and the first fruits of their crops to Yahweh. The feast days were to be all celebrated in the place that Yahweh will choose. The great feast days were Passover, the Unleavened Bread, Weeks, and Booths. The judges were to act with justice and not accept bribes. There should be no deviations in how worship was conducted. The decisions of the Levite judges were to be followed under pain of death. A king in the new land would be okay. The Levite priests could go the place to be named later. They had to learn the difference between true and false prophets. The laws of retaliation were clear, an eye for an eye, no more and no less. They had to accept their neighbor’s boundaries. No one could be convicted with one witness alone since it had to be two or three. There was a lot about the family and marriage. They could marry a captured woman after a month of mourning for her family. Even if they had two wives, the oldest son got the double birth right. Certain people were excluded from the community for a few generations even if they married into it. They had to help their neighbor with his animals. They could not charge interest to fellow Israelites, but interest to strangers was fine. If someone was hanged, they had to be buried the same day. They had to keep their seeds, animals, and clothing separate. They had to keep accurate weights and measures and not cheat people. They had to give the first fruits of their field, vine, and herd to Yahweh. Moses gave a series of curses and blessings as he reminded them of the struggles to come, which might be a hint at the later exiles and the need for conversion. As Moses finally finished his sermons, he once again reminded them of the Exodus and the covenant for future generations. Moses handed things over to Joshua. He wanted them to have a ritual reading of the law. Then the law was placed before the Ark of the Covenant. The law was the source of life. What do you think about the law?
Sources of Deuteronomy
The Ten Commandments
The Ten Commandments were part of the larger Deuteronomic Code, but they are not from Mount Sinai as in Exodus, but from Mount Horeb. Throughout this work, Mount Sinai was usually referred to as Mount Horeb. The Ten Commandment stone tablets were placed within the Ark of the Covenant. The Israelites wanted Moses to be their intercessor with Yahweh since they were afraid that they would die if they had to speak with Yahweh face to face. Moses then became their intercessor and interpreter with Yahweh. The Ten Commandments עֲשֶׂרֶת הַדְּבָרִים, asereṯ hadeḇarim, literary means “The Ten Words,” “The Ten Sayings,” “The Ten Utterances,” or the “Decalogue,” from the Latin decalogus, and the Greek δεκάλογος, dekalogos. They are a set of biblical principles relating to ethics and worship that play a fundamental role in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They set the tone for relationships with God and other humans. The text of the Ten Commandments appears twice in the Bible, in Exodus, chapter 20:2–17, and here in Deuteronomy, chapter 5:6–21. According to the Book of Exodus, the Ten Commandments were revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai, and inscribed by the finger of God on two tablets of stone. Scholars disagree about when the Ten Commandments were written and by whom, with some modern scholars suggesting that they were likely modeled on Hittite and Mesopotamian laws and treaties. In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the ten commandments were translated as δεκάλογος, dekalogos or “ten words.” Thus, the ten commandments have become part of Judeo-Christian belief systems on morality. What do you think about the ten commandments?
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?
The writing of Deuteronomy
Today, most contemporary biblical scholars date this book between 700 and 400 BCE, which would mean that it was written about 800 to 1,000 years after the death of Moses. Virtually all modern secular scholars now reject the Mosaic authorship of the Book of Deuteronomy. Its authors were probably the Levite caste, collectively referred to as the Deuteronomist, whose economic needs and social status the book reflects. In the late eighth century BCE, both Judah and Israel were vassals of Assyria. Israel rebelled and was destroyed around 722 BCE. Refugees fleeing from Israel to Judah brought with them some traditions that were new to Judah. One of these was that Yahweh, already known and worshiped in Judah, was not merely the most important of the gods, but the only god who should be served. This outlook influenced the Judahite landowning ruling class, which became extremely powerful in court circles, after placing the eight-year-old Josiah on the throne following the murder of his father, Amon of Judah. By the eighteenth year of Josiah’s reign, Assyrian power was in rapid decline, and a pro-independence movement was gathering strength in the Kingdom of Judah. One manifestation of this movement was a state theology of loyalty to Yahweh as the sole God of the Kingdom of Judah. According to 2 Kings 22:1–23:30, at this time Hilkiah, the High Priest and father of the prophet Jeremiah, discovered the “Book of the Law” in the temple. Many scholars believe this book to be the Deuteronomic Code of Laws in chapters 12–26 of this book. Josiah subsequently launched a full-scale reform of worship based on this “Book of the Law.” Thus, there was a covenant between Judah and Yahweh that replaced the decades-old vassal treaty between King Esarhaddon of Assyria and King Manasseh of Judah. The next stage in the development of the Torah took place during the Babylonian captivity. The destruction of the Kingdom of Judah by Babylon in 586 BCE and the end of kingship was the occasion of much reflection and theological speculation among the Deuteronomistic elite, now in exile in the city of Babylon. The disaster was supposedly Yahweh’s punishment for their failure to follow the law, and so they created a history of Israel that became the books of Joshua and Kings to illustrate this failure of the Israelites. At the end of the Exile, when the Persians agreed that the Jews could return and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, chapters 1–4 and 29–30 were added to Deuteronomy, as it was made into the introductory book to this Israelite history. Thus, a story about a people about to enter the Promised Land became the story about a people about to return to their land. The legal sections of chapters 19–25 was expanded to meet new situations that had arisen, and chapters 31–34 were added as a new conclusion. Chapters 12–26, contained the Deuteronomic Code. Thus, they were the earliest section. Since 1805, most scholars have accepted that this portion of the book was composed in Jerusalem in the seventh century BCE in the context of religious reforms advanced by King Hezekiah (716–687 BCE). Others have argued for other dates, such as during the reign of his successor Manasseh (687–643 BCE) or even during the exilic or postexilic periods (597–332 BCE). The second prologue of chapters 5–11 was the next section to be composed, and then the first prologue of chapters 1-4. The chapters following chapter 26 were similarly layered in. How historical are the books of the Bible?
Structure of Deuteronomy
The Book of Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Torah or the last book of the Pentateuch. The Hebrew Bible calls it Devarim (דְּבָרִים, deḇarim). The English title comes from the Greek Deuteronomion, Δευτερονόμιον, that literally means “second law.” This book purports to be the last words of Moses in three sermons. At the same time, it talked about a book that Moses was writing. Thus, this was the origin of the idea that Moses wrote the whole Torah or at least this Book of Deuteronomy. Mosaic authorship of the Torah was the common belief of Jewish and Jewish Christians. God had dictated the first five books of the Bible to Moses on Mount Sinai. The Middle-Aged Jewish scholar Maimonides (1135–1204) claimed that his was the 8th of the 13 Jewish principles of faith. Deuteronomy presented Moses giving these three long sermons before his death. Parts of this work had Moses speaking in the first-person singular, ‘I,’ which has beautiful moving descriptions of how Moses felt as he led the Israelites from Egypt up to eastern banks of the Jordan River. This personal touch was lost in the later parts of this book where there was a switch to the third-person singular, describing Moses and his actions with a return to the more prosaic “Moses says.” Deuteronomy is somewhat of a duplication of the stories in the other books of the Torah. Like at the end of Numbers, Moses was there on the plains of Moab, on the east side of the Jordan River, as they planned to take the land on the west side, Canaan, the Promise Land, the land flowing with milk and honey. The first thirty chapters had these three sermons of Moses. Thus, the first sermon recounted the forty years of wilderness wanderings which had led to this moment and ended with an exhortation to observe the law. Moses was telling his people what had happened to them, the Israelites, since they left Egypt. He continually reminded them about their unbelief, especially at Kadesh and at Peor. He also related the conquests on the east side of the Jordan, against King Sihon and Og. The second sermon reminded the Israelites of the need to follow Yahweh and the laws or teachings that he had given them. The third sermon offered the comfort that, even should the nation of Israel prove unfaithful and so lose the land, if they repented, all could be restored. The final four chapters contain the Song of Moses, the Blessing of Moses, and the narratives recounting the passing of the mantle of leadership from Moses to Joshua and, finally, the death of Moses on Mount Nebo. There may be other structures to this work, when compared to Hittite treaties. This treaty was between Israel and Yahweh. Have you ever made a treaty with God?
Eugene Finnegan Bible Project 